Surveillance frontierism: art and the colonial project of surveillance

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I analyse Shaheer Tarar’s artwork Jack Pine (2019) to question how settler colonialism is produced and reproduced through surveillant visualisations of the land. Specifically, I explore how Tarar’s representations of surveillant images of the land critically engages with historical and ongoing narratives of white settlement in the Canadian territory. As such, I ask: what knowledges are produced through looking at the land with a surveillant lens? And how does art reveal, trouble, challenge, and resist these knowledges? The underlying premise of my discussion is that surveillance and colonialism are twin logics, that they work in reciprocity to define ownership, extraction, and histories of the land that naturalise white settlement. In centralising Tarar’s art installation as producing new ways of understanding this context, I explore how surveillance art here can reveal the relationship between settler colonial histories and surveillant viewing through how they imagine and represent the land.