Niya Ahmed Abdullahi
“is privacy dead?”, 2024
Technology got smart, and we’re in an age of rapid, unstoppable expansion. Technology has swooped in and transformed the way we live our daily lives. Some still wonder: was it forced? If you didn’t catch up, you were left behind; this is how it feels today. The world we once knew is not the same at all.
“is privacy dead?” seeks to answer the golden question of our era. Set in our current times, this visual essay follows the day of an unnamed individual, and explores the world they are living in from their point of view. By capturing their realization of being constantly monitored––through phones and CCTV cameras to transit cards and biometric surveillance––“is privacy dead?” brings forward archival news media footage to highlight the existence of these mass surveillance phenomena as nothing new to our reality. Alas, viewers will be forced to question their own sense of privacy.
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Niya Ahmed Abdullahi is a Multi-disciplinary Artist, Technologist and the founder of @Habasooda, a collective dedicated to sharing the richness of the Muslim experience through a variety of storytelling avenues. Her work has been exhibited at Nuit Blanche Toronto, TIFF Next Wave, Black Film Festival Zurich, Gallery 44, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, MENA Film Festival, Eastern Edge Gallery, amongst others. She was a 2021 Hot Docs Accelerator Fellow and currently sits on the Advisory committee for the Nia Centre of the Arts BLACKOUT project and the City of Toronto’s ArtworksTO program. Her work evokes memory, both past, present and future, in connection with diasporic experiences, and ancestral awakenings. Pillars of resistance are drawn through her divine labour of love.