Double Centre: Charles van Otterdijk

Double Centre appears as a sort of archive revealing two mysterious buildings discovered by Dutch artist Charles van Otterdijk while wandering through the woods near his family home in the east of Germany. Photographs of the locations, taken by van Otterdijk during his long-term investigative project, suggest that they could have been rendition centers those sovereign sites of exception used by democratic states in their effort to eliminate, contain or otherwise manufacture terror. This artist s book, a report in photos and documents, feels similarly out of sight. The apparent objectivity of image and text belies an eerie suspicion about the truth of the narrative, where boundaries between legal and illegal, fiction and reality become blurred in our current moment of political crisis and government surveillance. Accompanying exhibitions at the Hague and the Van Abbemuseum.

Published by Book Works, London; Van Abbemuseum, The Netherlands; and Stroom Den Haag, The Netherlands