Exhibition: Background Listening Post

Inverting Surveillance

Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Goethe Pop Up Kansas City presents a modified version of the location-based photographic and sound installation Background Listening Post from American artist Steve Rowell.

While living in Berlin in 2009 during the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Steve Rowell visited a small building in a barley field on a research trip to the countryside. What he found inside opened the perceptual door to a secret history of East Germany’s shadowy past.

Rowell’s photographic and field recording installation Background Listening Post focuses on an abandoned Stasi telephone listening post and the surrounding landscape of an overlooked hinterland in Saxony-Anhalt Germany. The Stasi, the repressive intelligence and secret police agency of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) surveilled, infiltrated, and controlled the daily lives of German citizens not only in cities like East Berlin but across the entirety of the eastern half of a divided nation.

This version of Rowell’s project, exhibited on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall at Goethe Pop Up Kansas City, was originally shown at the 2010 Werkleitz festival Fear Has Big Eyes (Angst hat große Augen) Festival, curated by the art / urban research collective KUNSTrePUBLIK.

Steve Rowell is an artist who works with photography, moving image, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts to produce complex multicomponent works. His practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, ecologies, and technology in the landscape. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist. From 2001-2013 he was Program Manager at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles.

Born in Houston, Steve has been based in Los Angeles, Oxford, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and Chicago over the past twenty years. Currently, he lives in Minnesota and is Assistant Professor of Photography at the Kansas City Art Institute. In Spring 2019, Steve was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

Opening on Nov 8th, this exhibition will remain on display until Wed, Nov 27th during our normal opening hours, Tue-Sat, 12pm-6pm.

Image © Steve Rowell