All Along the Watchtower

Site-specific installation

Berlin, DE Damman, SA Ithaca, NY Brussels, BE
2012

Excerpt from Lorenzo Fusi, “Marginalia on Flying Carpets, No and All Along the Watchtower,” in Nadia Kaabi-Linke: Matter Matters, edited by Timo Kaabi-Linke, (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2016), 341.

 

A few years later, Kaabi-Linke revisited some of these themes with All Along the Watchtower, a large-scale site-specific drawing “casting” the long shadow of a not-physically-present watchtower (more exactly, a hunting stand) onto the exhibition space.

When I first saw the piece, the day prior to Kaabi-Linke’s opening at the Mosaic Rooms in London, I was myself fooled by the accuracy and effectiveness of the rendering of the painted shadow. Since I thought the drawing was still in the making during our visit, I was looking for a source of light (a video projector, I supposed, or a slide projector) to throw onto the floor and walls of the gallery the “image” of the watchtower’s shadow from an exact perspective.

This was, however, already painted so as to trick the viewer’s eye, suggesting the bodily presence of the watchtower whilst highlighting its immanent absence and immateriality.

Similarly to Flying Carpets, the work crystallizes in the exhibition space the form of a “something” that is dissolving into thin air: a vision, an intuition, a story, a ghost. That “something”—the street vendors and their goods in the case of Flying Carpets and the hunting stand in this installation—resonates in the space notwithstanding their lack of presence, or, maybe, precisely because they are not there.

In All Along the Watchtower, the idea of seeing and not being seen is almost structural to the artwork, in that it largely contributes to the way the audience feels and experiences its emotions inside the installation.

The work induces in the viewer the fear or anxiety of being watched, hunted, or spied upon. However, Kaabi-Linke understands that, in order to achieve such an effect on the audience, one does not actually need to position a real hunting stand in the gallery space; alluding to its presence suffices. The uneasiness and discomfort of being watched without being able to reciprocate the gaze can be easily evoked in the viewer by building on our pre-existing surveillance-related psychosis.

At a time when we feel continuously violated in our privacy, our lives relentlessly monitored by Big Brother, it is not hard to empathize. The debate around these themes is particularly heated and even more urgent following the Snowden leaks case.

To quote Bob Dylan in the song that gives this work its title, one is left wondering whether “there is some way out of here…” or if we are instead stuck in this prison that we built for ourselves in the ultimate attempt to resist and oppose the Other: any Other.

Because, as Albert Einstein notoriously stated, “It is easier to split an atom than a prejudice.”

Lorenzo Fusi is a contemporary art curator and art historian.

Painted shadow of a watchtower, stretching over the floor and up the corner of the wall, All along the Watchtower, 2012, Nadia Kaabi-Linke

Installation view at the group exhibition Seeing Perceiving,
Ithra Museum, Damman, 2021

© Photo: Ihtra Museum, 2021

Painted shadow of a watchtower, stretching over the floor and up the corner of the wall, All along the Watchtower, 2012, Nadia Kaabi-Linke

Detail

© Photo: Timo Kaabi-Linke, 2019.

Painted shadow of a watchtower, stretching over the floor and up the corner of the wall, All along the Watchtower, 2012, Nadia Kaabi-Linke

“All Along the Watchtower”, 2012
Site-specific installation with airbrush, dimensions variable at the Mosaic Rooms, London, 2014.
Courtesy of the artist and ARTER, Vehbi Koç Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul, Turkey.

Painted shadow of a watchtower, stretching over the floor and up the corner of the wall, All along the Watchtower, 2012, Nadia Kaabi-Linke

Excerpt from “All Along the Watchtower” (2012), Nadia Kaabi-Linke: Matter Matters, site-specific installation with airbrush, dimensions variable, at the Mosaic Rooms, London, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and ARTER, Vehbi Koç Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, Istanbul, Turkey.

 

A shadow is present through the absence of light; it emerges here and now from a source of light and an object absorbing this light. Why a shadow without an object? What would that be—a contradiction? Some people say that art has to provide unusual aesthetic experiences. A shadow lacking its object is an unusual aesthetic experience, and an object that perfectly expresses this contradiction is the system of surveillance.

Monitoring systems aim to see without being seen. The surveying eye is hidden; what remains is the feeling of being observed. But who is observing and who is observed? I became interested in the contradiction of present absence, expressed by a shadow without either a source of light or a physical object.

I chose a hunting stand as the object, for the hunting stand is used for the observation of wild animals who are most probably not aware of being observed. This parallels the structure of mass human surveillance, before methods of signal intelligence became publicly known. The hunting stand is the place of the unobserved observer, who can be present only because he is meant to be absent.

More than the observer, it is first of all the place of the hunter, who has the power to make the difference between life or death. It is the place of judgment, that can hit someone out of nowhere—like a drone killing a suspect individual from the sky.

How does surveillance work? The word “Big Data” is quite current these days. It indicates a new kind of surveillance that seems to be very different from older forms of control.

For thousands of years, people were used to seeing their guards. A watchtower, for example, had a double function. It was built high to see better and to be better seen from afar. It worked well because it reminded everyone of being watched. New systems of mass surveillance prefer to remain invisible.

Signal intelligence operates like a spy; connected to access points and transfer cables, it monitors all sorts of traffic and data, sniffing packets (emails, images, videos, web pages, etc.), following our IPs, and recording our voices. This invisible power is restlessly gathering information without giving any information back.

It is collecting, holding, interfering, and analyzing our habits, desires, interests, and occupations… It already controls our lives like a guard on the watchtower.

The moment we learned about the existence and work of those systems of control was also the moment when we—consciously or not—changed our behavior. Today, we are aware that we are observed and know very well what our observer is looking for. Thus, we avoid actions that could alert the intelligence services and conform to fit their acceptable profiles.

We are haunted by this power, always present through its absence, real but invisible. Of course, this is not haunting in terms of what Avery Gordon calls “ghostly matters” (Gordon 2008), but we do know that it brings the horror of Kafka’s The Trial into our everyday life.