Natascha Sadr Haghighian: onco-mickey-catch

Natascha Sadr Haghighian creates works that manifest themselves in large-scale installations, video and audio works, but also in performative interventions in public space or through texts, and thus make it possible to experience alternative forms of knowledge, political scopes and boundaries of action as well as social limitations. The investigation of both socio- and techno-culturally conditioned viewing patterns and conventions as well as of the militarization of civil structures thereby are recurring motifs.

With her exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Natascha Sadr Haghighian carries forward these interests by choosing a new application for image correction as her central subject of investigation. Whereas applications such as Skype entail the phenomenon of a parallax, in which gazes are missing each other, the application CatchEye detects faces within a video and aligns the eyes so that people seem to look directly into the camera. Developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), CatchEye is based on technologies that were developed in close connection with military research and have found their way into commercial use. In the laboratory-like exhibition space, the software operates on computer monitors that are implanted into a sculptural spinal taxidermy. Resembling the anatomy of an oversized mouse, the technomorphic form is evocative of genetically modified creatures such as the Vacanti mouse or the OncoMouse™. The OncoMouse™ (cancer mouse) gained notoriety as the first transgenic, patent-protected mammal. In this sense, “onco-mickey-catch” also embodies the dissolution of boundaries between the body and technology and, in a new way, puts up forms of human self-understanding and notions of social relations for discussion.