Introduction
American artist Julia Scher first began to explore private and public surveillance in the late 1980s — that is, even before the advent of television formats including Big Brother or films like The Truman Show. In doing so, she almost prophetically anticipated developments that would come to dominate 21st century society, where constant tracking of personal data has become the norm. One important reference for the artist has been the work of Gary T. Marx (b. 1938), the American sociologist who coined the term “maximum security society.” Scher’s multimedia practice, which was influenced by the California art scene of the 1970s and 80s and held a key place in 1990s new media- and culture-critical art discourse, spans camera- and spatial installations, internet projects, video and films, sculptural works, assemblages, photographs, and multiples.
Scher has been creating supposed security environments since the late 1980s. Operating under the pseudo-brand Security by Julia, her surveillance camera- and monitor-based installations interrogate processes of control in private and public places and, in a strategy that has come to be described as immersive — i.e. involving the audience — almost absurdly heighten and distort that audience’s perception of both space and reality.
Museum Abteiberg presents an essay-like overview of Julia Scher’s extensive oeuvre. The exhibition at Museum Abteiberg brings together large-scale installations such as Surveillance Beds and Wonderland; loans from the collection of Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann, among others; as well as works from the artist’s early career that have never been shown before. Selected works are drawn from each of the artist’s creative phases and repeatedly refer to security-related aspects of the museum as an institution. The latter is also taken up in a new, site-specific version of her camera-and-monitor-based installation Predictive Engineering (1993—present), a piece Scher first realized for a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1993. Julia Scher: Maximum Security Society is being realized in cooperation with Kunsthalle Zürich (Julia Scher: Maximum Security Society, Oct 8, 2022—Jan 15, 2023). The presentation at Museum Abteiberg is a larger, retrospective survey of her works.
A comprehensive publication on the work of Julia Scher, initiated by Kunsthalle Gießen and DISTANZ Verlag, realized in collaboration with Museum Abteiberg, MAMCO Geneva and Kunsthalle Zürich, is scheduled for release in June 2023.