Laura Poitras: spies, lies and videotape | Intelligent Life magazine
▻https://www.intelligentlifemagazine.com/culture/the-daily/laura-poitras-spies-lies-and-videotape
An art museum is traditionally a place you go to look at things. An immersive and unsettling new show at the Whitney Museum in New York flips this concept on its head. This time the artworks are looking at you.
Occupying the museum’s entire eighth floor is the work of Laura Poitras, the only person to have won an Oscar, a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “Genius” Award and a career retrospective at a major American museum. A documentary film-maker, she became well known in 2013 for her role disseminating the top-secret documents uncovered by the whistleblower Edward Snowden (her documentary on him, “Citizenfour”, won the Oscar). However, Poitras had been documenting the evolving geopolitical situation since 9/11, her camera tracking an increasingly paranoid American political juggernaut and the human lives that were unlucky enough to get in its way. Poitras herself is one of these victims; since 2006 she has been detained and interrogated more than 50 times.