Project Details
Putin's Nose began with an everyday moment: looking into a shopping bag full of groceries and noticing a beetroot that, for a moment, looked like the artist's Russian grandmother's nose. Later, at home whilst slicing beetroots to make soup and studying a random online recipe under the watchful gaze of a laptop's webcam, questions arose about whether computer vision software might also detect something Russian in facial features, or the nose of someone long lost in one of the beetroots.
From the cover of the newspaper that the greengrocer wrapped the beets in, Russian President Vladimir Putin looked up, his face now covered in beetroot juice splatter. The headline read "The Inscrutable Face of Russia." This sparked reflections on how much difference there actually is between the paranoid gaze of computer surveillance technologies and that of human beings.
The exhibition consisted of stencils painted with beetroot juice, 3D-printed noses and beetroots, inkjet prints, a webcam and screens of various sizes with nose recognition, texts and animation. Together, the elements formed a series of overlapping linguistic and visual displacements. Social media platforms like Facebook transform faces into points in coordinate systems, and from these coordinates people are classified as terrorists, defined as specific consumer types, or deemed irrelevant.
In Putin's Nose, a pattern recognition program cast a paranoid-critical gaze upon the exhibition's visitors. Rather than recognising faces, it was trained exclusively to see noses or beetroot-like patterns. When the system recognised something, it took a picture and shared it in the exhibition space's digital context, together with a sentence taken from the previous day's news where noses appeared as political metaphors or in fixed expressions.
The work featured four noses hanging on the wall as masks: a reconstruction of Putin's nose using 3D-scanning software, the artist's Russian grandmother's nose reconstructed from the only photograph he had of her, a model of his own nose based on all the images of him on social media, and finally a model of a beetroot that looked like the one seen in the bicycle basket.
Additional elements included a video installation where visitors had Putin's face projected over them, making them momentarily become Putin speaking about Russian male superiority and Western decadence. One room was painted bright pink with beetroot juice, smelling earthily of childhood beetroot soup, and featured a Russian rap sung by a life-sized copy of Putin's nose.
Putin's Nose was a multi-year project that sought to turn surveillance systems' simplified identity categories and tools against themselves. In this way, Ørum reconsidered the relationship between national identity, food, body and surveillance, hoping to open up an identity model where it is possible to be foreign, Danish, body and digital representation at the same time. The first part of the project was held at Galleri Image in Aarhus in 2017.
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Project Videos
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