Refuge

Specially for the exhibition at Garage, Thomas Demand developed a story around the American IT specialist Edward Joseph Snowden, who released secret documents belonging to the American National Security Agency (NSA) that dealt with the total surveillance of correspondence and telephone conversations of other countries’ citizens by the American secret services. On June 14, 2013, the USA charged Snowden in absentia with espionage and theft of state property. Soon afterwards he fled from the United States, first to Hong Kong and then to Russia, where he spent more than a month in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo airport. Demand’s photographs show the place where Snowden is assumed to have lived at Sheremetyevo. A dead space without windows, each element is reduced to a sign: a table, a bed, a lamp, and so on. This signifying or modeling seems to involve implicit danger. Knowing Snowden’s story, we automatically endow these items, deprived of any individual traits, with the properties of ominous objects that suddenly begin to resemble instruments of tracking and detection. One of the photographs creates an extreme from the situation of lying on a bed in a tiny room and staring at the ceiling: it flattens, morphs into a prototype of an elementary playing field (or a modernist grid) and seems to accurately convey the sense of the onset of a new time for a certain person, in which things are as comprehensible as in the first minutes of a new video game.