The Dr. Eva Kahan Foundation is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition “Total View: Sensing Sinicization”, at the Kahan Art Space Vienna on September 10th, 2024 at 5pm.

“Sinicization” is a term used to describe policies aimed at erasing cultural differences and historical traditions of various ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities in the People’s Republic of China. Impacts of these assimilation measures can be found in alterations of urban architecture as well as in adaptations of culturally significant buildings.

By utilising pattern recognition algorithms, the project “Total View” is tracking these changes in publicly available panoramic street-view imagery, thereby automatically sensing sinicizations and documenting effects of enforced assimilation on a country wide scale.

The project “Total View” was founded by artists working primarily with digital tools in order to develop new investigative approaches in collaboration with researchers and journalists focusing on assimilation measures and state censorship.

“Total View: Sensing Sinicization” is the first in a series of exhibitions that explore the potential of technologies and data collection methods used to control public space as artistic tools to monitor changes of urban landscape, architecture, typography and the use of symbols in China’s ongoing Sinicization process.

The exhibition is curated by Dr. Katharina Gsöllpointner, a trained communication, media, and art theorist with a special focus on the crossover of media aesthetics, digital technologies and cybernetics of art. Since 2019 she is head of the department International Programmes in Sustainable Developments at the University of Applied Arts Vienna which aims to explore and define new forms of future-oriented university education, and which develops and implements inter- and transdisciplinary master’s programmes in close cooperation with European and non-European universities and institutions.