“Art in the Age of Anxiety”: The Varieties of Addled Consciousness

Remember when we were merely anxious? Concerned about an incipient cataclysm that would throw our world into a gyre of mass death and financial ruin but still going about our lives? Status update: a lot has changed since 2019. The Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF)’s currently dormant exhibition, “Art in the Age of Anxiety,” curated by SAF director of collections and senior curator, Omar Kholeif, surveys the work of 30 international artists who address how the integration of technology into our daily lives has altered our collective consciousness and primed us for the waves of panic, misinformation, and bigotry that are rippling through societies during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“Age of Anxiety” centers around contemporary art produced in the 2010s, though several key internet-based projects by artists from Asia—notably Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries’ web-based text animations using Flash and Cao Fei’s RMB City (2008–11)—were first activated online in the previous decade and subsequently updated for display in international exhibitions. Siebren Versteeg’s Daily Times (Performer: The National) (2020) is also an adaptation of his 2012 concept. Displayed on a vertical monitor, Daily Times takes the front page of Dubai’s English-language daily The National, and using acustom-designed algorithmic software, digitally transforms it into a messy abstraction of existential chaos, day after day.

Lest you yearn for the recent past, “Age of Anxiety” is a reminder of the pressing human-rights and privacy issues that are the legacy of the post-2001 “wars on terror.” Created in response to the British government’s practice of stripping individuals of citizenship over alleged connections to extremist groups, James Bridle’s Homo Sacer (2014) features a holographic virtual assistant who reads phrases from British and international law about the concept of citizenship. Other artists allude to the creeping invasion of privacy facilitated by new forms of technology. Douglas Coupland’s  Delaware (2016), created when Facebook began using facial recognition software, portrays a face camouflaged by painted abstract forms. Expressing similar concerns about artificial intelligence, Trevor Paglen’s They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead . . . (2019) features early 20th century portraits from the American National Standards Institute that were, a century later, used to train facial recognition algorithms.