Sophisticated surveillance technologies are ubiquitous today, but the concerns they raise about privacy and government control are not new. Counter/ Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency traces the historical roots of modern surveillance devices, the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them, and the ways artists have reclaimed agency by critically and creatively responding to—or evading—these technologies. In the 19th century, French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon pioneered identification techniques that prefigured the proto-biometric methods of the Cold War: facial recognition, forensic portraiture, and fingerprinting. Innovative surveillance devices such as miniature cameras and bugs were the stuff of real-life espionage dramas; and by the early 1960s facial recognition was computerized. Along with activists and dissidents, many of those surveilled were artists who then developed creative responses to authoritarian oversight. The exhibition presents an overview of Cold War-era surveillance practices using historical artifacts and artworks from the Wende Museum and other collections, including facial recognition training materials used by East German border guards in the 1970s and 1980s.