TAMARA KAMETANI

2 channel video, sound, 8:10 min, 2021
Music: Jonatán Pastirčák

The first in a trilogy of works imagining possible future trajectories, Part One details an unlikely refuge from omnipresent surveillance in the form of an island that has so far existed only in digital space as a virtual garbage dump for corrupted data. Null Island, as this place is called due to its geographical coordinates 0,0, becomes the embodiment of the possibility of a better, freer, and fairer world.

Oscillating between utopia and dystopia, Part One narrates the story of a grassroots religious resistance navigating the world of few remaining liberties.

My Google Maps, May 2020

Since the COVID-19 outbreak governments around the world have been quick to implement measures intended to slow down the spread of the virus, and many have turned to digital tracking methods to monitor the movements of their populations. From location tracking within the contact tracing apps, productivity monitoring software often secretly deployed for remotely working employees, to facial recognition, the response by governments and private companies has been overwhelmingly swift.

This work, created during what we now understand to be the early stages of the pandemic, tracks some of these measures, to better understand how and what type of data is being collected by who and what this might mean for our privacy moving forward, once we emerge from this crisis.

The work was created during an artist residency at Off Site Project.

See the full project here

experience enabled by multiplayer AR app, 2019

Walls 2.0: Augmenting border reality is an experience enabled by a multiplayer AR app that explores the notion of borders, separation, and freedom of movement. Designed to be experienced in groups, participants use an augmented reality app that creates a temporary virtual wall between them, simulating the separation in real life. Rather than designed for individual use alone, the app is intended for multiple users all interacting with the same wall, questioning whether an experience shared amongst the group and its inherent dynamics is any different from experiencing the wall alone.
In the era of the growing desire to build more and more walls around nation-states in order to secure borders, the app enables these barriers to be experienced, albeit in the most artificial way possible.

App development by Natalia Wojtowicz from Animorph Coop

Shrine, 2022, exhibition view

Shrine is a follow-up to the first part of a series of works titled The End in Three Parts, in which an unlikely vision of freedom and escape from the omnipresent surveillance is born in the form of an island that has so far existed only in digital space as a virtual garbage dump for corrupted data.

Entering the Shrine at an undefined point in time, it is unclear what fate has befallen the dream island, yet its presence is evident at every turn. Perseverance, determination, and a sliver of hope run throughout the building, faith in the dream island merges with an uncertain spirituality and the effort to secure the most basic of life's necessities. Shrine is a refuge, a place of survival and hope, where adaptability, a vision, and faith in a better life are virtues worthy of thanksgiving, remembering, and honoring.

Google Street View, 2019

Born out of the inability to avoid surveillance Harvest is Every Day is an intervention in both the physical and the digital space to assert some form of control over my own virtual depiction inside one of the most surveilled cities in the world. Inspired by a serendipitous encounter with a Google Street View car a few years earlier, the work combines the elements of digital nostalgia, surveillance and resistance. Using the body as a disruptive tool and devising a game of deception with Google, the work is essentially a “hack” of the Street View, carried out in one of the most analogue ways possibleby physical human interference.

Installation, mixed media, 2017

Google Earth is a computer program that renders a simulacrum of the Earth by superimposing images obtained through satellite footage, aerial photographs, and geographic information system. Although the imagery is frequently updated, the program also offers a ‘real-time’ viewing, wherein the sunlight changes across the landscape relative to the current time of day.

The presented footage shows an area of international waters in the Mediterranean Sea between the coast of Libya and the Italian island of Lampedusa– the closest European landmass to North Africa. Despite the apparent ‘authenticity’ of the program to represent the Earth, it fails to map the seas and only charts the landmass. A computer generated animation is inserted in place of all seas and oceans away from shorelines. Here the sea is always calm, waves infinitely moving in a soft breeze, devoid of any landmarks or maritime traffic, a simulacrum based on projection rather than veracity. 

The bench is made of wood retrieved from the boats used by migrants and refugees who crossed the Mediterranean Sea and arrived in Lampedusa. Installed together in one space, the two components demonstrate two very different versions of the sea and question the hierarchies of digital and physical experience while confronting the correlation between spectatorship and participation. By transforming the sea into a serene image, Google Earth does not only aestheticize it, but it in fact depoliticizes it; in this way, the Mediterranean Sea is just a water mass, not an area with national jurisdiction, and in fact the European border. 

30 x 50 x 2 cm, marble, 2019

Set in Stone looks at the issues of surveillance, privacy, and in particular the controversial right to be forgotten. Part of the GDPR law in the EU since May 2018, the right gives individuals the ability to control what information regarding them is listed by search engines. The right has been welcomed by privacy advocates while being criticized for impeding freedom of speech and namely, the public’s right to know.

Juxtaposing the age-old technique of marble etching with contemporary digital concerns, the work comments on the complexities and repercussions of our growing digital paper trail and the relationship between forgetting and the desire to be remembered.

Total Security Life presents the commercial trade fair stand of Total Security Life, a private company that sells walls of all sorts, so long as they keep unwanted people out: from fences for gated residential communities to government-backed border walls.

On the stand, visitors are surrounded by crass logos and vinyl roller banners. A monitor shows an infographic product shot. On another, a video render depicts a wall surrounded by a shimmering seaport town, with a bald eagle, the symbol of freedom but also the ultimate prey, flying overhead accompanied by the sound of a voiceover recording written by the artist. The voiceover's tone is laced with cynicism and the emotional appeal hardly hides its transactional nature. “Keeping you and your family safe is a priority not only for you, but for all of us at Total Security Life, and we are here to help you make that all-important decision.”

Total Security Life, in fact, is a fictional company dreamt up by the artist as a wry comment on our mushrooming desire, as people and nations, for stoking fear and hoisting up “walls” between us: such as trade wars between the US and China, troop build-ups in the Balkans, and nuclear proliferation across the world.

Adopting the sales strategies and marketing bumph of international gun show exhibitors and manufacturers, Total Security Life's mission is to stoke fear by preying on our anxieties while offering us a Faustian-like deal: freedom, but through surveillance and isolation. The walls are sold as if they will make the buyer safe, but the process only leads to the need for more and a breakdown in trust.

In the era of celebrity politicians and fake news, the apparent absurdity of Kametani's Total Security Life company is no longer enough for us to dismiss it, or assume it isn't real. The more walls we build between us, whether of concrete or through a hostile immigration policy, the more suspicious we become of our fellow citizens and the more prone we are to ignite our fear and anger into a chain reaction. 

Technical support and CGI by Natalia Wojtowicz from Animorph Coop

Text by Tyler Woolcott

Engraved Limestone, March 2019
51°08'15.1"N 1°22'06.3"E

5-day durational work on Snapchat, May 2019

Taking ideas surrounding the construction of histories and the place of collective nostalgia within society as a starting point, this commissioned work is an experimental look into how world news and Snapchat can coexist together. Happening in real-time over the course of 5 days, the work combined daily breaking news with Snapchat’s native tools and aesthetics including face filters and text boxes. Designed to be pointed at oneself using the front camera of smartphones, the camera here, however, is pointed at the other along with the cute accompanying filter in an effort to create an archive of the history of 5 days in May 2019.

If social media is a distraction from the real world, then what will be? is an attempt to bring that world back to where we feel most comfortable and see if anyone cares to notice the comeback.

For the Time Being is an experimental programme of photo-performance, curated by six postgraduate students seeking to explore the shifting responsibilities of institutions in this networked age, as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2019 at Royal College of Art, London. The exhibition was produced in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery. The project invited 5 international contemporary artists - to reflect on the role of image sharing networks in their personal lives.  Through a series of on and offline events and performances, the artists will interrogate the way in which popular apps like Snapchat, Whatsapp, and Instagram have affected an understanding of intimacy, digital connectedness, and notions of personal and collective memory.

Video with sound, 02:04 min, 2021

Failed monuments looks at the aftermath of the Project Champion, a secretive surveillance operation that took place in Birmingham in 2010. 216 CCTV and ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) cameras were installed in the areas of the city with a large Muslim population, under the guise of improving public safety, while being financed by the Home Office Counter-Terrorism fund. The project however never became operational, its concealed intent was quickly discovered, and a public outcry followed. The surveillance hardware was at first covered up, later dismantled, and eventually destroyed.

While being the central theme of the work, failure here is approached as an opportunity for a reflection and even reimagined as a victory. The work thus ponders the complexities of how narratives are constructed, history is formed, and remembered.

Original commission created during (In)Security project- a collaboration between academics from Birmingham University, artists, and Eastside Projects, Birmingham.

Using Birmingham as a case study for broader developments and issues in urban planning, counter-terrorism and security this project considers how research can both inform and benefit from artistic exploration and seeks to encourage critical conversations about counter-terrorism measures by exposing and challenging prevailing assumptions about what – if anything – can make us feel more secure in urban spaces.

404- Resistance in the Digital Age
12-channel video installation with sound, 2019

RAGE is an artist collective tackling issues surrounding politics with a fluid approach to membership. The collective was established in 2016 by a group of international artists who met while studying at the Royal College of Art under the guidance of UK artist and tutor Peter Kennard.

404: Resistance in the Digital Age is a newly commisioned work for Centre for Contemporary Art that explores how digital technologies changed the way in which people express their discontent with their governments, organise and share information. Paying particular attention to some of the key events of the past decade such as the Occupy movement, Arab Spring, Ukrainian revolution and the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, the exhibition looks at the ways in which internet, social media, and smartphones now play a crucial role in resistance movements. In light of the global growing surveillance online, the exhibition maps the ways in which governments and large data-collecting companies play the game of cat and mouse with civilians.

Stack of A4 sheets of paper connected on one side, 2017

Installation images from Odious Smell of Truth by RAGE Collective, Hockney Gallery, RCA, London, April 2017

The stack of A4 size sheets of paper of the legal document, glued together on one side resembles a press release often found in museums and galleries and invites the visitors to rip away a page just as they would with any exhibition text. The EU law, which determines which member state is responsible for granting the apllicant’s asylum has, in effect, led to a network of unsafe illegal travel routes and encourages people smuggling throughout Europe by forcing asylum seekers to remain in the first member state they enter. The document thus not only affects the asylum seekers, but also the countries responsible for granting the asylums, primarily along the Mediterranean Sea such as Italy and Greece, as far away from Dublin as possible.

Fading cyanotype print on paper, 2017

On October 3rd, 2013 a boat carrying over 500 migrants and refugees from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa capsized ½ mile from its destination. 368 people died in the tragedy that sparked global outrage and led to the launch of a year-long search and rescue operation Mare Nostrum. In order to retrieve the bodies of those who drowned, Italian navy sent in divers to assess the scale of the operation who recorded a video footage of the scene underwater. The cyanotype is an image from this footage. Unfixed, it continues to fade, similarly to the memory of the event itself. 

GIF, 2016

Jungle 2013-2016 comprises of aerial satellite footage of the refugee camp known as the “Jungle” in Calais, France over the period of 3 years. The camp saw a massive influx of migrants and refugees who traveled there in hopes of crossing the Channel into Britain. The lack of humanitarian aid along with its appalling living conditions is what earned the camp its sinister title- Jungle by its own residents. Threatened with closure multiple times, the camp was eventually destroyed and its residents evicted at the end of October 2016.

24 archival inkjet prints in continuous 4x6 grid, 2016

24 Hours at Aegean centers on the sea crossing in the Aegean Sea, between the coast of Turkey and the Greek island of Lesbos. After the outbreak of Syrian civil war, the sea crossing became the most frequented route for migrants and refugees attempting to reach Europe until the introduction of the EU-Turkey deal that led to a halt of most crossings. Obtained through Google Earth imaging software and formed by 24 individual photographs, the work depicts one day at the sea. 

Performance in collaboration with Kominek Gallery during Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France 2016

The performance is a virtual journey from the coast of Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea using Google Earth’s real time imaging feature. Sheets of photographic paper were exposed throughout the journey and were then printed in the traditional darkroom method using water from the Mediterranean Sea as a substitute for all water traditionally used in the process. 

Single channel video projection on glass panel & Found photograph from Flickr (taken and uploaded on September 9, 2011), 2015

9/11 Compensation Fund is a work reflecting on the mechanisms of the monetary value of human life. The installation is informed by the report of September 11th Victim Compensation Fund that was set up to provide compensation for any individual who was physically injured or killed as a result of the attacks. While there were many factors determining the final sum, the most crucial one was the individual's income. The final amounts that were then awarded (2880 in total for individuals killed) ranged from $250,000 to over $7,000,000. 

Archival inkjet print triptych, 2015

Two Weeks in August is a body of work inspired by the events that took place during the first two weeks of August 2014 in the USA, when 7 unarmed men across the United States died at the hands of the police.

IPG Project is an artist collaborative established in 2010 by artists Tamara and Yoshi Kametani. To find out more, visit ipgproject.com