Putin’s Prison
2022
Unsecured security cameras hijacked by activists, revealing a surveillance state turned against itself.
Putin’s Prison presents a series of screen captures taken from unsecured security cameras across Russia between 3–4 April 2022, on the 40th day of the invasion of Ukraine. The hacking of these banal feeds exposes the porousness of the digital state and the fragility of its apparatus of control. Systems built to monitor and discipline can be inverted, revealing not only their technical vulnerabilities but also the human impulse to resist. In a single subversive action, the cold language of surveillance is transformed into a field of dissent.
I began collecting these images after learning that hackers had breached Russia’s network of unsecured CCTV cameras and were replacing their data readouts with anti-war messages. The feeds were ordinary—car parks, apartment building foyers, shop floors—but suddenly the machinery of surveillance was speaking in another voice.
Putin’s Prison emerged from my fascination with this moment when a system designed for control began transmitting its own subversion. However fleeting these interventions were, they revealed both the vulnerability of the network and the ingenuity of those trying to reclaim it—proof that even within the most oppressive architectures of vision, another kind of resistance is still possible.
Putin’s Prison emerged from my fascination with this moment when a system designed for control began transmitting its own subversion. However fleeting these interventions were, they revealed both the vulnerability of the network and the ingenuity of those trying to reclaim it—proof that even within the most oppressive architectures of vision, another kind of resistance is still possible.
Digitally printed saddle-stitched booklet
16 images with four inserts and a text by the artist. Inserts include three protest stickers and folded print. 48 x 105mm, 32 pages. Printed April 2022.
