For your eyes only

"The incident happened at 5:15 p.m. ...the camera recorded it...you have to be aware...anything could happen...you have to watch...precisely at 11:45 p.m....

Surveillance of any kind is inherently ambiguous. By nature it implies a certain stealth and underhandedness. From the banal level of the Linda Tripp-Monica Lewinsky scenario, to the more sophisticated political-economical manipulations and reconnaissances, watchfulness is something culture and everyday life foist on us. Niels Bonde’s work lodges itself in the often annoyingly nebulous interstices between privacy and the intrusion of various forms of surveillance. It evokes an uncomfortable moment between vigilance and angst, when our fear can not be precisely located, and when we don’t know where the clear and present danger is, although we are prey to latent apprehensions."

"Surveillance in Bonde’s work, as in contemporary life, becomes a more unsettling, less clear cut presence. Is it around security and protection, like the ubiquitous technology we are all used to in subways, public buildings, corporate offices, private elevators and intercoms, even on street corners observing potential traffic violators? Does it represent some aberrant form of cyber voyeurism or cyber narcissism, someone spying on private moments, playing God or enacting some other form of self-gratification? Does it provide live veracity based entertainment for a Real Life MTV generation used to 92 channels of opportunity? Who are the players, are they willing or unknowing participants? Is someone directing our lives, are we complicit players in the pursuit of our wants, needs, obsessions, and imaginings? Who is behind the watchful eye, a profit-minded corporation, a cautious health insurer who wants to know what’s in our DNA or cautious parents monitoring the babysitter. Is it some high-tech peeping Tom obsessed with someone else’s daily life, or perhaps, an exhibitionist obsessed with their own (one of the most frequented web sites, mylifeonline., belongs to a Seattle Washington woman who enacts a kind of voluntary Truman Story scenario by recording all her daily activities on seventeen cameras strategically places throughout her house, thus, making what is usually considered private excruciatingly public)."

"Bonde doesn’t placate the dilemmas. Surveillance, he suggests, is a messy business. Whether as an instrument to access and gather information, to assist or protect, to gratify or entertain, it casts a looming shadow. What are we to believe? This problematic question is posed directly in another piece, Die Freundliche Seele. A door is pierced with fifteen seemingly ordinary peep holes, the kind customarily found in apartments, except in this case, some looking ”in” and some looking ”out”, giving the viewer the opportunity to have multiple points of view, from ”inside” looking out and from the ”outside” looking in. Bonde suggests that the eye of the surveillance is everywhere, watching and being watched, ricocheting the gaze, as if asking who is zooming whom?" ..

"Bonde’s representation of surveillance explores the obsession of watching. It makes us pay attention, but doesn’t attempt to reconcile the many contradictions, suggesting, rather, that surveillance - watching - is a reciprocal relation, that implies to be under watch and to watch, but also to be watchful and to be watched. Under the right circumstances, we can all feel seduced by the surreptitious glimpses offered by surveillance; the seeming promise of a certain tempting proximity, by striping the other - the surveilled, making them transparent, accessible, seemingly closer. To stealthily enter into another person’s life without their knowledge, is seductive. It is empowering. In its darker recesses, it is also violent. Niels Bonde’s work brings us to a deeply contradictory revelation of desire and power that implicates both the watcher and the watched as prisoners of an image, trapped in the charisma of a surface that conceals as it reveals."


Maia Damianovic.