APT9 Exhibition Report

Above: Installation view of Qiu Zhijie’s Map of Technological Ethics 2018 in GOMA’s Long Gallery / Photograph: Chloë Callistemon Opposite: Elizabeth Watsi Saman, preparing tsinsu, during the Women’s Wealth workshop, Nazareth Rehabilitation Centre, Chabai, Autonomous Region of Bougainville / Photograph: Ruth McDougall QIU ZHIJIE Map of Technological Ethics 2018 was an enormous work created by Beijing-based artist Qiu Zhijie for APT9, painted directly onto the wall of GOMA’s central gallery over a five-day period. With stylistic origins in Chinese ink painting and calligraphy, and informed by Qiu’s wide-ranging research and inquiry, the work was a map not of actual places but rather of ideas. As its title suggested, it depicted an archipelago of scientific moral quandaries, with landmarks named for activists and political lobbies, contentious issues in medicine and biology, and looming fears of technocracy and anthropogenic climate change. It also touched on the implications of artificial intelligence and computer technologies, from the impact of automation on labour to the use of facial recognition software in drone warfare. Assigning imagined geographies to a range of causes of ethical anxiety throughout history and across cultures, Qiu suggested expanded possibilities for categories of knowledge. In the interdisciplinary character of his map, he offered a graphical account of the potential for technology and its conundrums to pervade every aspect of human life. Map of Technological Ethics was an expression of Qiu’s trans-historical approach to art making, teasing open the social, moral and legal implications of scientific development in an engaging, encompassing way. 16 EXHIBITION