• Mari Bastashevski

    http://maribastashevski.com

    My work is spread across investigative research, journalism, and art and deliberately blurs these boundaries among them in an attempt to challenge existing information delivery modes and bridge between these practices.

    My ongoing project “State Business”focuses on the international conflict participants, defence and cyber surveillance industries, and layers of state secrecy under which they operate.

    In addition, I’m working on “It’s Nothing Personal” an ongoing project about the contrast between the corporate branding of western surveillance firms and what the testimonies of those affected by these products disclose.

    In 2014 I worked in Ukraine on “Empty, with a whiff of blood and fumes” addressing the nexus of money, power, and organised crime in Ukraine in build up to the 2014 hybrid war.

    And between 2007 and 2010, in the Russian North Caucasus on “File-126,” a project about the abductions of civilians under the guise of Russian counterterrorism regime.

    Video of Mari speaking in the context of the Prix Elysée she received in 2014:

    https://vimeo.com/118032488


    Mari interviewing #Hacking_Team for Motherboard:

    http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacking-team-we-dont-do-business-with-north-korea

    Aricle in Wired:

    http://www.wired.com/2013/11/mari-bastashevski

    #Mari_Bastashevski
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    Keyword food:

    State Business

    State Business is a project that sorts through the mundane routine of international conflict and state security commerce and the information vacuum preserved around it. In a series of specific case studies, it maps the sale of services or commodities from their point of origins to their final destinations. The installation consists of photographs, texts, and documents.

    The photography is used to define the extent of access to those who form the supply-and-demand chain. Each photograph represents a concrete governmental entity, a broker, or a business. Each is made with the awareness of someone in position of power to grant or forbid access. When permission is summarily denied, usually due to security reasons, I continue the dialogue by asking to narrow down the distance from which the photograph cannot be made, allowing those involved to draw their own perimeter of power, be it assumed or defined by law.

    The goal of this project is not only to identify the process by which conflict commerce is put in motion, but how information about the industry itself – be it in the form of shared testimonies, or permitted photographs – becomes a commodity in the hands of its sources, each with a political, economical, or personal agenda.

    It’s Nothing Personal

    The installation, It’s Nothing Personal, set in the space between what global surveillance firms promote in their self-representation, and what the testimonies of those directly affected by these technologies disclose.

    In the past decade, the industry that satisfies governments’ demand for surveillance of mass communications has skyrocketed, and it is one of today’s most rapidly burgeoning markets.Five years from now, the lawful interception industry will earn five times the U.S. 1.5 million profit it generated in 2014. Most surveillance technologies will be produced by American, European, and Israeli companies and pitched to law enforcement or intelligence agencies across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, often to entities that don’t require an additional permit to intercept, and are answerable to no one.

    A variety of products sold includes ready-to-use monitoring centers that are able to silently access, process, and store years of electronic communications of entire countries. Forged SSL certificates and HTTP aggregators allow state agents to stand between the server and the user, and collect user names, passwords, and trace movements across cyber space. And governments and companies can seamlessly and remotely insert eavesdropping viruses into mobile phones and computers.

    While most of these products are undetectable by design, those who sell them have developed a strong corporate image. Branding concepts applied in promotional materials—brochures, videos, and websites—emphasize protection against vague but potent threats, technical capacities, and an ease of application. Access to intimate details of correspondence is presented as impersonal data, petabytes stored and packets inspected. This image further incorporated within the open to view, physical spaces in which the industry exists.

    The detached technical jargon and sanitized clip-art aesthetic work to obscure a deep-rooted partiality. Communication surveillance is a fundamental part of law enforcement operations meant to benefit those it vows to protect, in as much as it is a weapon for preserving power by infringing on the privacy of those who oppose it.

    The exhibition consists of photographs of the companies HQs and distribution venues, a cache of promotional material and documentation obtained through collaborating with the community of privacy advocates and technologists and a record of the correspondence between the companies and state entities that ensued during the making of this project.