SARAH

E.K.

SMITH

Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control

Museum diplomacy has come to new prominence in the contemporary moment. Museums have increasingly global agendas, advancing diverse international partnerships across the world. Moreover, they hold the potential to advance cross-cultural education and foster mutual understanding at a moment when we are beset by global challenges.

The edited collection Museum Diplomacy: How Cultural Institutions Shape Global Engagement recognizes the pivotal contributions of museums’ global work, while also grappling with the significant issues, questions and possibilities that these activities raise. The collection features examinations of museum diplomacy by fifteen leading scholars and museum practitioners. These texts address global case studies that speak to museum practices related to objects, collections, and people, and charting foundational concepts and ideas. 

Through these wide-ranging contributions, Museum Diplomacy calls on the sector to rethink their perceptions of cultural diplomacy and embrace an expansive understanding of the diplomatic practitioner.

Contributors: Lee Davidson & Leticia Pérez Castellanos, Anthony Alan Shelton, Henry McGhie, Patricia M. Goff, Da Kong, Simona Bodo & Anna Chiara Cimoli, Linda Grussani, Karen Exell, Melissa Chiu, Liz Tunick Cedar, Chen Shen, Anaïs Aguerre, and Simge Erdogan-O’Connor.

Published in 2023 by the American Alliance of Museums and Rowman & Littlefield.

Sorting Daemons: Art, Surveillance Regimes and Social Control

Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2010
Art Gallery of Mississauga, 2011
Co-curated with Jan Allen

Information-gathering systems increasingly affect our lives, tracking our movement and consumer preferences. Such “sorting daemons” reinforce existing streams of influence and quietly create new ones. The artists in this exhibition take measure of our relationship to surveillance by addressing its social, political and aesthetic dimensions. Sorting Daemons features works in a range of media –including painting, photography, video, installation and responsive electronic art – by artists Brenda Goldstein, Antonia Hirsch, Dave Kemp, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Germaine Koh and Ian Verchere, Arnold Koroshegyi, Ruthann Lee, Michael Lewis, Jill Magid, Walid Ra’ad, Kathleen Ritter, David Rokeby, Tom Sherman, Cheryl Sourkes, and John Watt. Setting a context for current concerns, the video program draws on artists’ tapes produced over the past two decades. This exhibition extends off-site with presentation of Kathleen Ritter’s Hidden Camera at the Union Gallery in Queen’s University’s Stauffer Library.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated multi-authored publication with critical essays on artists and the culture of surveillance, social sorting and data-aesthetics by Jan Allen, Kirsty Robertson and Sarah E.K. Smith. The publication is available here.

Press coverage in the Queen’s Journal and on Mississaugua.com.

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Image credits: Sorting Daemons, installation views, Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Photos by Paul Litherland.

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