If technology is the closest thing to god, I fear I’m a prophet in the making
filmed by Christina Daly & Arete Xu
edited by Zaryah Qareeb & Arete Xu
Installation View
Film
The work asks viewers to consider the ties between surveillance technologies in museums and the sacred, the irony of divine all-seeing entities monitored by God-like technology. A few months prior to the creation of this piece, amendments to NAGPRA required cultural and sacred objects to obtain permission for display. But museums are hyper-surveilled institutions, often serving as an extension of colonialism. Is there a moment where these pieces can escape it’s gaze? And as audiences, forced to perform respectability, does this take away from our devotion or connection? We follow ghostly traces, burdened by the grief of not being able to form deeper intimacies with these pieces, with these beings.