Dear David, A Surveillance Love Story

OONA

Artwork Description:

Dear David by OONA is a performance and video art project that critically engages technological and social surveillance through real CCTV footage from London’s Transport for London Underground network. Captured during the artist’s own performances, the footage transforms a bureaucratic system into a site of intimacy, resistance, and reflection. In the work, TfL’s cameras become camera, stage, and co-author, exposing the ways institutional systems objectify and fragment the body while OONA reclaims agency through choreographed interventions. At its core, Dear David interrogates visibility, consent, and data governance, asking what it means to be observed, recorded, and archived by public infrastructures. The project evolves through an exchange of footage requests and correspondence with David, a TfL CCTV manager, becoming a virtual love letter that humanizes the machinery of surveillance and reveals the interpersonal textures embedded within protocol. Structured through episodic chapters such as “Dear David, I am a Spoilt Girl” and “Dear David, It’s a Spoilt World,” the work turns repetition into narrative and critique, shifting between vulnerability, defiance, and poetic address. It considers how surveillance systems shape identity while also opening space for authorship, performance, and refusal. Dear David has been presented at HEK Basel, in a solo exhibition in Berlin, at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and in “Art on Tezos: Berlin” curated by Anika Meier. Across these contexts, the work examines how systems of observation produce power, but also how they can be reimagined as sites of narrative, agency, and emotional complexity.

Project Collaborators:

David Kelly, Transport for London, CCTV Data Manager