Bird’s Eye View: A Screening and Talk on Colonialism and Infrastructurecurated by Sena Basoz
From the expansion of imperial telegraph and wireless networks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the contemporary use of drones and satellites, imperial powers have long relied on airborne communication and surveillance infrastructures to assert control. The sky—once vast and open—has become a charged and contested space: an assemblage of aerial technologies, military optics, racial ideologies, and the labour that sustains them.
This aerial assemblage—comprising airplanes, wireless systems, and photography—was central to the British mandate system of the 1920s and continues to shape contemporary regimes of surveillance and violence today.
Bird’s Eye View brings together works by Jananne Al-Ani, Heba Y. Amin, Mircea Cantor, Harun Farocki, Christopher Stewart and Hakan Topal that explore the territorialization and weaponization of the air. Through poetic and critical engagements with aerial vision, these artists interrogate how landscapes are framed, surveilled, and targeted.
Following the screening, Professor Burçe Çelik, Dr. Sebastian James Rose and Sena Basoz will discuss five archival images on coloniality, communications, and the use of air power as a means of control.
This event is part of Coloniality and Communications: British Telecommunications in Mesopotamia in the Early 20th Century, an AHRC-funded research project led by Prof. Burçe Çelik and Dr. Sebastian James Rose at Loughborough University, and artist Sena Basoz.
Sena Basoz was in residence at Delfina Foundation during our spring 2022 programme.
