Kim Dotcom’s villa in Coatesville, 30 km northwest of Auckland, is raided by the New Zealand police in January 2012.© Photo The New Zealand Herald
New Zealand-born, Berlin-based Simon Denny is having his moment. He is participating in Massimiliano Gioni’s “The Encyclopedic Palace” at the 55th Venice Biennale, is nominated for the National Gallery Young Art Prize, Berlin, and was the winner of the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel Statements in 2012.
Denny is interested in the development and contradictions of our thoroughly Media-tised society. His installations, objects, and projects focus on the connections between changes in media, commerce, aesthetics, and politics – with their ever repeated and always rapidly obsolete promise of the new. His current solo show, mounted at Vienna’s mumok, follows his artistic focus on the collision of old and new technology, triangulated with current affairs and contemporary design: Here, he explores the legal and cultural implications of the closing down of Kim Dotcom’s file-sharing site Megaupload.
Once one of the most popular platforms for data exchange on the internet, Megaupload has had unprecedented consequences for international data exchange, international law, and the local media landscape in New Zealand. Following investigations by the FBI and a suit by a US court, Megaupload and Megavideo were closed down in January 2012, according to the indictment “to stop a globally operating criminal organization, whose members were perpetrating large-scale copyright infringements and laundering vast sums of money, with a total damage of more than 500 million US dollars.”
When the New Zealand police raided German-born Dotcom’s Coatsville mansion, they seized a number of objects including US$175 million dollars in cash, 60 Dell servers, 22 luxury cars, numerous screens, and works of art. The legitimacy of this police operation was later questioned (Dotcom recently received several of his servers back from the FBI), also sparking a debate about the ownership and transfer of data. Denny assembles a series of objects in a sculptural visualisation of this list. Images, files and company data, from a life-sized Predator statue to three cubic meters of cash, from a luxury “work-bed” to examples of artwork collected by Dotcom approximate all 110 items on the list. The result is a large installation that Denny describes as a “collection of copies, rip-offs and imitations of the ‘real’ contraband.” This “will form a tangible focus point for what could be seen as one of the most important legal discussions of the moment – entangled as it is with borders, law, entertainment and what it means to steal, be supervised, and who owns what.”
Simon Denny The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom Museum moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna July 5 until October 13, 2013
www.mumok.at