States of Observance: Contemporary Art and Surveillance Logic in Canada (McGill-Queen's/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History)

In the wake of the attacks of 11 September 2001, and amid the expansion of US-led security policy, surveillance quickly insinuated itself into the fabric of everyday life in Canada.Practices once confined to military and intelligence operations now shape civilian spaces, where observation feels routine and scrutiny increasingly normalized as the cost of national and global security.Yet this apparent shift masks a deeper continuity: surveillance has long operated as a tool of settler-colonial control.Contemporary surveillance practices - often justified by the rhetoric of security and the War on Terror - extend earlier systems of classifying, managing, and extracting from populations under colonial and imperial rule. States of Observance examines this history through the lens of contemporary art, focussing on creative projects produced and exhibited from 2001 to 2021.Treating artworks and exhibitions as generative case studies, Susan Cahill argues that surveillance is not only a technol