Data Relations brings together artist-led projects that lyrically wrestle with some of the key issues and challenges of our contemporary data-driven society. The exhibition includes major new commissions and site-specific installations by Australian and international artists and collectives who critically and speculatively engage with the ways in which the data economy and related technological developments manifest in inter-personal and wider social relationships.

In Surrogate, Lauren Lee McCarthy engages with the ethics of human-informed and data-led decision making through long-term projects that test the limits of how much bodily autonomy we are prepared to relinquish to technological monitoring and control.

“The Surrogate project began with a desire to serve as a surrogate. As Roe v Wade is overturned and gene editing opens entirely new productive futures, this project asks: How much control should we have over a birthing person’s body and over a life before it begins? What happens when our industrialised drive for control collides with the natural process of birth?” Lauren Lee McCarthy