Since the 1980s, Julia Scher has been exposing the mechanisms of control and the seductive power of media in society through interactive installations. By using modified surveillance cameras, monitors, guards, cages, or barriers, she dismantles the illusion of protection provided by surveillance systems and exposes the erosion of freedom stemming from a culture of fear. Behaviour plays a crucial role in her work, in which recordings and data flow interlace with public participation to create subjective connections and an aesthetic language that disrupts the closed circuits. In this way, Scher’s artworks intervene in the technologies that seek to determine our reality, which often reflect Big Brother-esque insatiable fantasies of surveillance and suppression of dissent. Scher’s installation, Danger Dirty Data, Tell Your Story (2025), is a reimagining of her 1991 piece of the same name, which uses repurposed surveillance cameras to engage visitors, in this iteration, at the entrance to Global Fascisms. While the cameras record the public, a CCTV setup invites them to interact by typing on a keyboard, incorporating their own image and data-narrative. A play of mirrors, cameras, and the ‘Danger Dirty Data’ sign on the wall reflect the viewer, as if it were impossible to resist the seductive position of being both watching and watched.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), produced by Julia Scher and Esther Schipper in collaboration with HKW, 2025 

Work in the exhibition: Danger Dirty Data, Tell Your Story (2025), mixed-media installation. Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul