We are constantly told, we constantly feel, that we live in a digital age. Technology is more than merely big business. Surveillance of our online behaviour, a lucrative business model for tech giants, has come to pervade our lives as individuals; our very democracies.

In the exhibition Session 8, the artist duo Ghost Agency investigate how digital technologies have taken our right to privacy and our ability to form communities. Drawing on experiences from women in Mexico and young people in the American borderlands, Ghost Agency explore how, if at all, we can find refuge and resilience in the digital world. How can we quite simply be allowed to be left in peace?

In Mexico, a woman disappears every hour. Eleven women die every day as a result of violence. In a society greatly defined by patriarchal structures, organised crime and high levels of impunity, surveillance capitalism – a term coined in 2014 by the American professor Shoshana Zuboff – has particularly far-reaching consequences. Surveillance is never a matter of mere business in Mexico. It is an infrastructure of social control, serving both the state and the drug cartels. And, crucially, the Mexican government is currently seeking to pass laws that will abolish privacy altogether, introducing things such as facial recognition for all citizens.

Ghost Agency is the visual artists Gro Sarauw (DK) and Anni Garza Lau (MX). Over the last years, they have collaborated with women and young people in Mexico and Southern California and with a number of different NGOs, seeking to bring together professional bodies with the aim of developing a collective, digital refuge. The goal is to provide security. To this end, they have developed strategies and software permitting individuals to communicate and move around in safety.

THE ART SPACE AS DIGITAL SANCTUARY
With the exhibition Session 8, Ghost Agency document elements of their extensive interdisciplinary practice in various artistic idioms: film, sculpture, photography, and light installation. As a whole, the works explore the condition of human rights in our digital age, conjuring a shared, bodily desire for protection and awareness.

The exhibition title is taken from the final scene of their film Black Box Sanctuary (2025), created during a five-week workshop with young people close to the Mexican border in San Ysidro, San Diego. Here, the participants were tasked with imagining and staging a digital sanctuary in a theatre space, a so-called black box. This now forms the scenographic starting point for the exhibition at Room Room.

The concept of session also refers to Ghost Agency’s continuing workshops with communities of women throughout Mexico, in which women learn to advance their safety skills and agency so they may effectively counter the technological surveillance they are under.

LOST AGENCY
Awareness of the nature of surveillance capitalism is also required beyond Mexico. In a Danish context, Ghost Agency believes we have lost freedom of action and thought to digital structures – and this includes our right to privacy.

In their work, therefore, Ghost Agency seek to share research and knowledge across cultures and countries. More specifically, they seek to create cross-disciplinary partnerships to the benefit of agency – in the form of places where learning, imagination and change can grow outside the algorithms.

As a central part of their artistic research project, Ghost Agency thus look at the possibilities for creating genuine change through the inclusion of diverse methods – art production, social work, collaborations with NGOs and institutions. They have been assisted by substantial support from the Danish Ministry of Culture and Foreign Affairs and the Nordic Culture Fund, among others.

The exhibition Session 8 opens with a vernissage on Friday, 7 November 2025, from 5–7 PM. All are welcome! The exhibition runs until 14 February 2026.

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INFO

Ghost Agency: Session 8
7 Nov 2025 – 14 Feb 2026

Opening Friday, 7 November at 5.00-7.00 PM.

Room Room
Thoravej 29
2400 Copenhagen NV

During the exhibition period, Ghost Agency will facilitate workshops for the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, ITU and the School of Architecture, as well as school classes in Copenhagen’s Nordvest district. In January, they will launch the book Digital Sanctuaries, further unfolding the project, including interviews with several of the women in Ghost Agency’s network.

The exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Foreign Affairs’ Strategic Development Projects funding scheme for international cultural cooperation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, the Nordic Culture Fund and the Danish Arts Foundation.

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ABOUT GHOST AGENCY
Ghost Agency is the collaborative practice of the Danish artist Gro Sarauw and the Mexican artist and technologist Anni Garza Lau. Through practice-based research in collaboration with local NGOs and institutions, Ghost Agency develop an organisational structure that demonstrates how artistic experimentation founded on collective processes can articulate challenges and contribute to the advancement of the rights of women, and wider human rights, in the digital age. Through the development of collective technological understandings in both local and global contexts, Ghost Agency’s practice offers practical countermeasures to contemporary gender-based violence in Mexico, and the exploitative mechanisms of surveillance capitalism in general.

Ghost Agency present the work in Art Hub Copenhagen’s exhibition platform Room Room as part of AHC’s collaborative Micro Institute programme for 2023–2026.

ON AHC’S MICROINSTITUTE
AHC’s Micro Institute programme is a format for practice-based research consisting of a two- or three-year research residency for an artist or curator. The Micro Institute is founded on the idea that the artistic process creates a surplus of aesthetic knowledge and experience through a diverse processing of knowledge, language and materials, often in collaboration with others, including researchers, specialists, audiences and social communities. Not all elements of the artistic process find place in the finished work, however. The Micro Institute is an experiment in making the artistic process itself, in all its diversity, the focal point of a research process. It unfolds in close relation to relevant social and professional communities, partnerships and publics, thereby contributing to the creation of collective experiences.