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.