SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art presents, in partnership with Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Tous décavés by Isabelle Le Minh, a project specifically conceived for the biennial.

In Isabelle Le Minh’s project Tous décavés (2015), the artist works with identification techniques, from the physiognomic atlases and fingerprint files that began to appear in the nineteenth century, to today’s most sophisticated facial recognition systems. Le Minh’s work, with its countless traces of identity that we supply when we visit a Web site or operate a touch screen, offers a critique of the obsession with security since 9/11 and the subsequent frenzy to create biometric data banks.

Le Minh borrows the title of her show from Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of forensic anthropometry. In his Manuel du portrait parlé, Bertillon employs the phrase “Décavés, tracez ça” as a mnemonic aid for remembering the abbreviations used to describe the shape of the human ear. D.K.V. (derived from Deq. car. vex) refers to an album containing hundreds of portraits of criminals.