media, information, the contemporary
Event

Startup States | 2-9 February 2019 – Exhibition and Events

Startup States

Sarai
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110054, India

Opening Saturday 2nd of February, 2019

Open 11am – 6pm
2nd – 9th February

Startup States investigates post-colonial legacies inherent in contemporary forms of power exercised through data-driven governance. Through art, artefacts, and archival material, the exhibition explores the colonial origins of systems of biometric identification, registration, and control developed in India and Australia, and their relationship to the technics of state governance today.

Startup States forms part of an ongoing research project examining the intersection of the informational bio-politics and power of the state and its strategies for shaping and representing ‘a people’, with market-driven bio-powers whose digital platforms and social media focus and form new labour practices, new publics, new constituencies, and new political movements.

Within this framework, Startup States looks at ways in which the economy of cognitive capitalism generates a form of data-driven governance as it codifies, financialises, and regulates daily life, and how the efficiency of such networked governance is being mimicked by nation states through citizen profiling schemes.

Featuring work by Abhishek Hazra, Alana Hunt, Ayesha Hameed, Birender Yadav, Ele Carpenter with Raqs Media Collective, Jason Wing, Karthik KG, Moonis Ahmad Shah, and Somnath Bhatt.

Curated by Laura McLean.

Public program

Saturday 2nd of February:

2pm – Screening of Ayesha Hameed’s short film A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints), followed by a forum with Karthik KG, Abhishek Hazra, Birender Yadav and researchers addressing key concerns of Startup States.

4pm – Workshop introducing and producing the Embroidered Digital Commons. Initiated by Ele Carpenter in 2008, the project is a collective close-reading and close-stitching of a text written by Raqs Media Collective called A Concise Lexicon of / for the Digital Commons. Materials will be provided.

Saturday 9th of February:

2pm – Curator’s floor talk and exhibition tour.

3pm – Part two of Embroidered Digital Commons workshop.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts.