Surveillance frontierism: art and the colonial project of surveillance

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I analyse Shaheer Tarar’s artwork Jack Pine (2019) to question how settler colonialism is produced and reproduced through surveillant visualisations of the land. Specifically, I explore how Tarar’s representations of surveillant images of the land critically engages with historical and ongoing narratives of white settlement in the Canadian territory. As such, I ask: what knowledges are produced through looking at the land with a surveillant lens? And how does art reveal, trouble, challenge, and resist these knowledges? The underlying premise of my discussion is that surveillance and colonialism are twin logics, that they work in reciprocity to define ownership, extraction, and histories of the land that naturalise white settlement. In centralising Tarar’s art installation as producing new ways of understanding this context, I explore how surveillance art here can reveal the relationship between settler colonial histories and surveillant viewing through how they imagine and represent the land.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• surveillance
• colonialism
• Canada

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am aware of and acknowledge the ethical issues aroundAndrea Smith and her work, specifically the critiques made by Indigenous scholars over Smith’s claims to Cherokee identity. While Smith’s paper makes important points about settler colonialism and surveillance, I use her work here tentatively to acknowledge the influence it has had on my thinking, but also to acknowledge the issues of my using it as I work through the ethical practices of citation and accountability I am striving toward in my work. For further context, see Barker et al. (2018), and Viren (2021).

2 The title of this section is taken from Sarah Polley’s documentary (2012) of the same name, which explores the history of her own family, and the ways how myth and memory are interconnected. Likewise, in this discussion, I’m trying to explore the complexities of myth and memory in writing the stories of the land and white settlement, questioning why and how certain stories are told, and who and what is silenced in the process.

3 The official website for the Ktunaxa nation offers a more detailed and specific map that charts its traditional territory (https://www.ktunaxa.org/wp-content/uploads/Traditional_Territory_Av2_02.png).

4 This point is made more so by the addition of the golf course’s label to the recent screen capture I took of the golf course’s surveillance camera, in comparison to Tarar’s image of the camera from his work in February 2021, which does not have the club’s watermark in the top left corner. In the time period of just over a year, this image has become explicitly marked as proprietary.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Cahill

Susan Cahill (she/her) is a white settler scholar who lives and works in Moh’kinsstis | Calgary on the traditional territories of the peoples of the Treaty 7 region. She is an independent filmmaker, curator, and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Calgary. She is the Principal Investigator of ‘The Art & Surveillance Project,’ a database dedicated to contemporary Canadian artistic engagements with the surveillance state.