Simon Denny at The 56th Venice Biennale, 2015

Please join us in supporting Simon Denny's participation in The 56th Venice Biennale, 9 May - 22 November 2015.

Michael Lett is thrilled to congratulate Simon Denny on his selection to represent New Zealand at next years Venice Biennale.

Denny’s project will address access to information in a post-Snowden world, focusing on relationships between geography, knowledge, and power. The exhibition will in part consider the cultural impact of state intelligence, referring to New Zealand’s role in the international intelligence community.

In alignment with this project Denny has created a small limited edition work. It depicts a 2013 page work commissioned by the respected German newspaper Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, for which Denny redesigned two of the first NSA Prism Powerpoint slides that whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked to selected press.

These slides have come to represent a programme of international surveillance; they are the only public images of the wholesale collection of telecommunications metadata—a major challenge to individual privacy.

The slides are aesthetically complex. While they represent a project involving massive investment and state-of-the-art technology, they have an amateurish, clip-art aesthetic. Clearly, they were not developed for the world to see, but as in-house documents. Given their new public visibility, Denny redesigned the slides to make them more attractive and efficient, upgrading them to match the radically flat visual language of then new Apple iPhone interface iOS7.

This limited edition work is now available to purchase from the gallery. All proceeds from the sale of this work will go directly towards the realisation of the Venice project.

If you are interested in finding out more about supporting the project by becoming a patron please contactLeigh Melville.

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