Hasan Elahi - Roundtable Presenter

Hasan Elahi is a Bangladeshi-American artist originally from Brooklyn and now based in the DC area, who makes use of engineering, visualization, and surveillance technologies in his work. Building on Foucauldian rhetorics of vision and power, in Hito Steyerl’s terminology, Elahi’s work invokes “the poor image”: the democratically liberated effigy of the formerly commoditized image that was, but is no longer, subject to social control. Initially monitoring his own trajectories and actions as a Muslim-identified, brown-skinned target of FBI monitoring in the post-9/11 surveillance landscape, Elahi has recently been creating architectural-scale digital collages using borders and other liminal surveilled spaces as material. His work, which presents an overload of information as a screen that in fact reveals nothing, is emblematic of the in-between condition of the global South Asian American, whose smooth passage as a US citizen is as conditional as his inclusion in white-coded spaces.