CounterIntelligence, a project by Berlin-based artist Charles Stankievech, contemplates the intersection of art and military intelligence communities, gleaning historic examples ranging from a 1930s anarchist double agent who designed Spanish torture cells based on Surrealist and Bauhaus aesthetics to a civilian bookwork circumventing the NSA’s control of encryption. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of propaganda or questioning the power of the image in today’s media saturated Military Industrial Complex, this exhibition explores the hidden gestures and strategic deceptions of a shadow world, covering a spectrum of work from historical military artifacts to contemporary artwork. At the core of the show lie the concepts of the double agent and the secret, specifically where a historical figure or artifact appears to serve one community but also functions in the realm of another. Strategically, the exhibition counterpoints maneuvers-of-circumvention alongside artwork-as-ciphers expanding the field of interpretation through poetic connections such as black sites vs. non-sites, interrogation vs. performance, field manuals vs. bookworks, decoy vs. readymade. Methodologically, CounterIntelligence questions the contemporary role of the exhibition as caught in the no man’s land between the didactic museum and the conceptual gesture. Much like camouflage, appearances can be deceiving and surface meanings often misleading when tactics such as double agents and ‘security through obscurity’ are executed with the explicit intention not ‘to make the invisible visible’ as Paul Klee would say, but rather to use the image to hide what matters most.