Judy Radul — the king, the door, the thief, the window, the stranger, the camera

Media technologies such as CCTV, automation, and screens of all sorts have become the culturally and politically charged frames and filters through which we see reality, oftentimes obscuring or even replacing reality itself.

With the king, the door, the thief, the window, the stranger, the camera, Judy Radul transforms Witte de With’s exhibition spaces into a dynamic set for live image production. Radul sets out to explore the poetic and social agency of doors, windows, entrances, and exits by means of her multi-camera, live-feed “present system” – the backbone of the exhibition. Cameras become agents that steer the visitor’s behavior; architecture is performed through multiple points of view. the king, the door, the thief, the window, the stranger, the camera creates an architecture of the lens where the portals and vistas, the apertures of Witte de With’s exhibition floor, are brought to the fore as reality-producing media.

At the heart of the exhibition lies a publication edited and designed by Radul, in which she compiles visual references and other source material including art historical imagery, architectural sketches, and selected texts from poets and philosophers such as Francis Ponge and Georg Simmel. This book is presented on a custom automated page turner with a camera installed above it, panning and zooming, “reading” through the images and text, while playing back the live footage on screens in separate rooms. As such, both the content of the book and the exhibition as a whole unfold through lens-based representations and spacializations.