COOL HUNTING

/ culture show nav

Hasan Elahi: Tracking Transience

Hasan Elahi exhibits his project Tracking Transience at the Sante Fe art space SITE

by Jacob Resneck in Culture on 18 February 2010

Hasan Elahi exhibits his project Tracking Transience at the Sante Fe art space SITE

hasan-1.jpg

After new media professor Hasan Elahi was falsely accused by a neighbor of being a 9/11 terrorist accomplice in 2002, the Bangladesh-born American underwent six months of scrutiny from the FBI. Turning the tables, he personally documented the minutiae of his everyday occurrences now on view in a project called Tracking Transience at the Santa Fe art space SITE.

hasan-2.jpg

Elahi photographs his meals before he eats them, toilets before he uses them, and a GPS tracker (updated several times a day) shows his precise location. Elahi's montages made from the snapshots of the banal details of everyday life create a statement about erosion of privacy in our daily lives. The project has attracted a flurry of media attention from CBS News to Wired.

hasan-5.jpg hasan-3.jpg

”I've decded that if the government wants to monitor me that's fine. But I could do a much better job monitoring myself than anyone else.”

hasan-4.jpg

Part of a larger five-person show, husband-and-wife team McCallum & Tarry, Kaari Upson and Terry Allen will also show. The show runs through 9 May 2010 at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Related