This could be a media kit...

If democracy is to be a machine of hope, it must retain one strange characteristic –its wheels and cogs will need to be lubricated not with oil but with sand. ~Krzysztof Wodiczko

Rina Liddle is a visual artist, researcher and educator. At the core of her practice is the belief that art making is a polyvocal practice. Her work often takes the form of installations and interventions that deal with ideas regarding public space, and include digital media, photography, sculptural elements and collaborations. The material forms that she chooses are, for her, a means to renegotiate and make visible the conditions of the social body. Or something like that. Do you know what I mean? Subtle traces of the absurd in sociological methodologies are discernable in her work.

Part of the Bright Light program, We Are Watching is a participatory video exhibition that continues her trajectory of working with ideas focused on public space, surveillance, public art policy and representational power. There are two components: a large-scale projection in public space, and an interior projection within the gallery fed by a live surveillance camera. By using participants’ video clips documenting the Vancouver 2010 Olympic, Paralympic and related events, viewers are asked to consider the ways in which the City of Vancouver is represented officially, and the alternative views that are largely dismissed, or written over, by the spectacle machine, which serves to homogenize the Canadian subjectivity. Issues explored are surveillance versus sousveillance, the ways in which we watch events, the ways in which we watch each other and the ways in which we are being watched.

There is a two-part archival book project that accompanies the work. The first part has been printed and includes texts by Kristina Lee Podesva and Danna Vajda images of the Torch Relay. The second part of the book will be available after the show closes. It will function as an archive of the event as it unfolds over the time of the Olympic and Paralympic games. This book project will not only document the work, it will also function as a vehicle for the dissemination of the representations collected that provide an alternate view of the “official” versions sanctioned and circulated by VANOC and the City of Vancouver. Multiple subjectivities will add complexity to this overarching image of Vancouver. The book will be donated to select public libraries.

Liddle has a BFA from Emily Carr University and a MA from Goldsmiths College University of London. She has shown internationally in London, Los Angeles, Posnan (Poland) and Jyvaskyla (Finland) and currently resides in Vancouver.