can you see me now?
Single Channel Video Festival
March 27 & April 21, 2026
Just one look, that's all it took*
can you see me now? centers perception and the “the gaze”, with works that consider seeing from points poetic to political and their intersections.
In Walid Ra’ad’s Miraculous Beginnings part two, (one part of his three part video, Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs), the operator of a government surveillance camera (#18) is assigned to monitor human activities on the seaside promenade in Beirut; every day he turns his camera away from the designated targets towards the setting sun.
With the introduction in the 18th century of the panoramic picture to the West, a totalizing image of the natural and built world became a reality. Although “an all encompassing view” remains a physical impossibility for the human eye, the possibility of being all seeing and all knowing is at our fingertips with drones and a smartphone - surveillance as entertainment.
What are the destructive / captivating powers of looking? Ask Lot’s wife, Eurydice, or James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Is the power of looking and being looked at equal? Behold! It’s in the word isn’t it? To hold is to cradle, secure, possess, overtake - claim and control. Power is unequal. And yet, is there pleasure in looking and being looked at - difficulty and pleasure at once? One look.
“There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.”
- Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley.
*Just one look, music and lyrics by Doris Troy and Gregory Carroll - recorded by Doris Troy in 1963.
See Curatorial Essay here