Surveillance and Deliberation, 2010. Installation.

The urban landscape in Johannesburg is dominated by security concerns. Inhabitants have a deeply cultural constructed relationship with their environment; this can be seen in everyday sites like shopping malls, universities or gated communities. These places are dismissed as neutral, but security is enforced and contested daily.

The Kreepy Krauly and the surveillance camera housing unit are juxtaposed in the installation as symbols of cultural markers of relatively elite South Africans. These objects coexist in residential spaces and could seem to be an odd combination; one is a commodity of leisure, associated with fun, and, the other a technology of defence, denotative of protection and control. Their union sends out mixed messages to inhabitants because of their carried significations which contradict one another. The functionality of these objects is reconfigured in the installation, transforming their original purpose, materials, dimensions, form and meanings, playing on their suggestive physiological, sociological and cultural associations.