Artist
Yujie Zhou
Zhou is based in Helsinki, Finland, where they completed their Master’s degree in Arts with a major in Photography and a minor in Textiles-Materials and Structures at Aalto University in 2023. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Photographic Centre Peri, Photographic Gallery Hippolyte(Finland), BFoto Festival (Spain), FORMAT Photography Festival (UK), and alpha nova & galerie futura (Germany) as part of Berlin Art Week 2023.
Panoptic Segmentation
Panoptic Segmentation refers to an image segmentation method in computer vision that allows machines to separate objects into segments. From a socio-political perspective, this method draws a parallel with the panopticon, a disciplinary mechanism based on continuous surveillance. Both systems operate similarly by breaking down objects into segmented components.
From a self-reflective critical stance, my practice seeks to identify, unravel and decode the mechanics behind power structures in order to tackle the invisible. I am eager to question the relationship between a collective political identity and our experiences as individuals. All with the purpose of deconstructing the notion of language so as to tear apart signifiers and reconstruct meaning.
Artworks from the series Panoptic Segmentation, 2022-2023, Medium: Mixed - Photography, video, performance, textile, printmaking, and publishing.
Artist duo Bela:Hagren has extensively explored traditional photography in its multi-layered past, from the technologization of the medium for the sake of science to its more creative uses. Bela:Hagren often address the complexity of storytelling of photographic history, which can’t be reduced only to images, because it is embedded in the cultural context, circulation, and economic infrastructure of the given time. More recently, they have been working on a project about the monopoly of manufacturing paper in the Eastern bloc and the toxic residue left behind by photographic production.
Joel Karppanen is a self-taught artist working with experimental photography to address class and labor issues and explore the deviousness of a hierarchical economy with issues of privilege, provenance, and access. In his most known work, Beyond Pitkäsilta (Metropolis) (2021–2023), he has worked with “donating” time, which is about putting himself to service or replace someone and giving them time so that they could have the same access or opportunities as himself for a limited period. In that specific work, he addresses how art is still for the few.
Nayara Leite is an artist and an advocator for the LBGTQI+ community across both Norway and Brazil. In her project In Search of Rainbows (2022) Leite explores the different flags displayed in the north of Brazil. While a growing number of Brazilian flags favored under the then-president Jair Messias Bolsonaro led to notions of nationalism, persecution, and homophobia, the number of pride flags on display had almost vanished, symbolizing growing discrimination for non-normalized individuals.
Sheung Yiu is a visual artist and a researcher focusing on how image sensitivity is increasing the complexity of algorithms but also bringing back old tropes of eugenics and phrenology, reactivating traumas of a colonial past based on provenance of geographies, genders, and other made-up exclusionary politics. (Inter)Faces of Predictions, or How To Read a Face (2023 - ongoing), is one such work where Yiu plays with these AI machines and their “learnings” to visualize their discriminative and presumptive politics.
Yujie Zhou is an artist who works with expanded photography, publishing, textiles, and performativity to contest censorship. They have worked on legibility and illegibility as forms of protest through language. Panoptic Segmentation (2021-ongoing) parallels the 18th-century disciplinary system, the panopticon, invented to make bodies more docile in prison surveillance system, and a similar system adopted in computation to break down objects into stratified readable components.