Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art | An exhibition that gives shivers down your spine

Temporarily moved to Place Ville Marie due to its transformation project, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) is doing strong this fall with Contagion of terror, an exhibition by the London organization Forensic Architecture with the collaboration of the American journalist Laura Poitras. This exhibition, which begins on the 1st^er December – explores the consequences of Israeli spyware Pegasus, secretly installed on the phones of famous people. An exhibition that gives shivers down your spine …

Eric Clement
Press

There has never been more talk than these days about spyware Pegasus, which the Israeli cyber-weapon company NSO has sold to around 40 states so that they can monitor people’s actions through their cell phone. This technology decried by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, and politicians leads to chain lawsuits against NSO. After those of WhatsApp and Facebook in 2019, and Microsoft, Cisco, Dell and Google in 2020, Apple on Tuesday announced a lawsuit against the firm for having “monitored and targeted” iPhone owners in the United States.

Officially sold to combat terrorism, Pegasus software allows anyone who unlawfully introduces it into a third party’s smartphone to retrieve messages, photos, contacts, passwords and listen to calls from his owner. According to a consortium of 17 international media, including The world, The Guardian and The Washington Post, 50,000 people have been monitored since 2016 by Pegasus worldwide, including 180 journalists, 600 politicians, 85 human rights activists, 65 business leaders and lawyers.

Among these people, famous personalities such as the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, the King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, the prime ministers of Lebanon, Belgium, Rwanda, Egypt or Pakistan, the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, or the Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto, killed after being targeted by Pegasus.

In three steps

Organized by John Zeppetelli, director general and chief curator of the MAC, with curators Lesley Johnstone, Geneviève Senécal and Denis Labelle, the exhibition is presented in three parts. In the first room, we screen a film by Laura Poitras, this investigative journalist renowned for her Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, released in 2014, on Edward Snowden and the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) systematic global espionage scandal.

The film Terror Contagion, which gives the exhibition its title, is an introduction to the activities of Forensic Architecture (FA), a London-based research group that uses architectural techniques to investigate state violence and human rights violations. An organization headed by the Israeli architect and humanist Eyal Weizman, defender of the Palestinian cause.

Watch a lecture by Eyal Weizman at the MAC in 2019

Lasting 18 minutes, the film evokes Pegasus which contaminates phones, like a virus, and which has resulted, according to FA, to lead to arrests, assassinations and physical surveillance, as in the case of Laura. Poitras.

“She gets intercepted every time she returns to the United States,” said John Zeppetelli, during our visit. Sometimes she can spend eight hours at customs. They take away his computer. She goes home, she sees that her door is ajar. And recently, senior CIA leaders wanted to declare her as an agent of an outside power, to give themselves the possibility of prosecuting her. ”

In the second large room, the visitor, with headphones on, will be able to watch six short films on FA’s investigation of Pegasus. The narration of these Tales of Pegasus is made by none other than Edward Snowden. Logical choice since the American whistleblower was the first to report on the American and British programs of generalized surveillance of the citizens.

“With Pegasus, you go from state surveillance to corporate surveillance across the state, because NSO cannot sell a license to another government without the approval of the Israeli Defense Ministry,” says John Zeppetelli. Which is very bizarre when you consider that NSO sold the software a few years ago to Saudi Arabia, a very repressive country, when the two countries did not even have diplomatic relations. Jamal Khashoggi’s friends were targeted and it is very likely that it was through this surveillance that he was followed to the Istanbul consulate where they did what they did. ”

A video illustrates the multinational dimension of NSO, its funding also coming from outside Israel. “Particularly from England and the United States,” says John Zeppetelli. Another video shows testimonials from people targeted by Pegasus. And on the floor, Forensic Architecture has installed a vinyl carpet whose graphic is a map of the contagion of Pegasus in the world, country by country and year by year, since 2010. An achievement made thanks to the Toronto activist group and Citizen Lab research, able to demonstrate the origin of any digital infection with Pegasus.

Disturbing videos

In the third space, two videos are shown on the same screen. The first relates to the alleged massacre of 43 Mexican students. In 2014, they were traveling by bus to a demonstration in Mexico City, but were intercepted by local police and turned over to a cartel. FA investigated this matter with Mexican partners who were targeted by Pegasus. We see in the film everything that happened on the day of their disappearance in Iguala.

The second video, The extrajudicial execution of Ahmad Erekat, stems from an FA investigation into the death of a young Palestinian who was shot dead in 2020 by an Israeli soldier near a control booth under nebulous circumstances. “The youngster was left without medical assistance for two hours because ambulances were not allowed to approach him,” says John Zeppetelli. A video that rigorously and scientifically analyzes these circumstances. ”

1^er December, at the Gesù, an inaugural conference of the exhibition is organized by the MAC with the presence of Laura Poitras, Eyal Weizman and Shourideh C. Molavi, director of the research project of Forensic Architecture Digital Violence: How the NSO Group Enables State Terror. It is John Zeppetelli who will host this conference with the three protagonists of this exhibition-event located at the frontiers of art, activism, social justice, architecture, investigative journalism and digital technologies.

Visit the exhibition website