The exhibition can be described in Jenni Lauwrens terms as a ‘feast for the senses’: there are things to see, to listen to, to touch, but most importantly to take part in.  The process of entering the exhibition in itself is quite oppressing: I had to go through two different control desks, one for my Visa and ID and one for my bag. Controls are now quite common in Paris so I was not disturbed by that. However, when I went out to take a break, one security guard asked me to show him my ID and visa again and I probably looked annoyed by it, because he felt the need to justify himself: « I’m really sorry miss, it is not my fault, it is part of the prerequisites for the exhibit, I mean, it is part of the act ». That confirmed what I was guessing: that the employees of the exhibition were not only there to ensure security and to welcome visitors, but were also part of the exhibition. What I experienced there, with the numerous checks of my ID and visa, increases the feeling of entering a different world, where the rules are different, a closed world and furthermore recalled the difficulty, in the USSR,  to travel outside the Soviet Union. Surveillance under the Soviet Union, especially the one of Stalin was an everyday life practice. As C. Hooper explains, surveillance was not something made especially by the police but something that was rooted in everyday life (in Kiaer, Naiman 2006).  In DAU exhibition, there were no real Police of the party but that feeling ongoing surveillance was still present I remember a camera in the toilets, one that was added for the exhibition which I know from experience but also thanks to the arrow pointing toward it, glued there to indicate the existence of the camera. The overall atmosphere of the exhibition gives a sentiment of entanglement in a parallel universe in which nothing truly makes sense and in which one is always on the frontier of violating an unknown rule. 

 

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