Hasan Elahi

Hasan Elahi is an interdisciplinary media artist whose work challenges the notions of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. Elahi’s exploration of these issues began in 2002, when he was detained in Detroit, suspected of hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit. Though the artist, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, was subsequently cleared, his frequent international travels subjected him to months of questioning by the FBI. Turning the onerous duty of constantly updating them of his whereabouts into an irreverent social commentary, Elahi began to make every single detail of his personal life available to the public through his still-ongoing project Tracking Transience, available from www.trackingtransience.net. A live GPS tracker updates Elahi’s location on the site’s Google map. More recently, Elahi has extended his practice to projects that push the limits of surveillance, using looped, manipulated, and aesthetically pleasant footage to simulate surveillance, and force viewers to confront the tediousness of the construct.
Hasan Elahi lives and works in College Park, Maryland, roughly equidistant from the headquarters of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
1993 B.A. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
1996 M.F.A., Cranbrook
Free

About Artists on Art

Contemporary artists lead informal, topical talks within the museum’s galleries on select Friday nights at 6:15 p.m.
In conversation withAssistant Curator Beth Citron, speakers from New York and international contemporary art scenes interact with and informally discuss the rich artistic traditions of the Himalayas and surrounding regions in relation to their own practices and processes.
Please meet at the base of the Spiral Staircase at 6:15 for all tours.
Admission to the museum’s galleries is free every Friday from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.