Paul Hobson, director of Modern Art Oxford, reflects on messages about our time from Barbara Kruger’s exhibition

At this time of year in particular, Oxford is bursting with tourists. International visitors of all ages descend on this beautiful, historic city, one of the most photographed, written about and filmed cities in the world. Finding myself amidst a herd of international students earlier in the week, I was struck by how many of them were head-down texting, recording themselves on their phones, or bunched together for the now ubiquitous group ‘selfie’. Back at Modern Art Oxford, the café was full of visitors on laptops and tablets, and likewise the gallery spaces, as people photographed themselves against the backdrop of our new exhibition.

Ever since the invention of photography in the 19th century, tourists have played out the urge to capture themselves in their various destinations, but the diverse technologies that now shape and define 21st- century existence have made tourists of us all, even in our everyday lives. Our daily routines — from the humdrum and banal — to the momentous events which mark the progress of life are captured and broadcast, circulating on the Internet for the vaguely interested, the curious and the bored.

We are all producers, editors and broadcasters now, posting images on Instagram, tweeting and blogging our views. We perform the events of our lives for an online audience and in doing so produce new forms of distributed cultures that define our times and society. Shakespeare’s idea of all the world as a stage has never felt more apt.

Often I am struck by how similar the development of new communication technologies are to the work we do at the gallery, with artists who seek to enable us to see the world in new ways. I am also struck by how so-called ‘audiences’ visiting Modern Art Oxford want to have a more participatory, interactive experience of culture, rather than a traditional passive, receptive role. Modern Art Oxford is currently presenting a major new exhibition by Barbara Kruger, one of the most influential artists of her generation, whose work over recent decades has drawn attention to the way in which our lives are defined by the powerful technologies of capitalism and consumerism.

Entering into the striking installation in the Upper Gallery, one is struck by the reality of her message that our formerly private space has for some time now been colonised by advertising, social media and information technologies.

Kruger’s landmark new work asks us to consider, if we have all become tourists in our own lives, where are we really existing, and how fulfilled are we by these drifting worlds of unattainable lifestyles, fads and fashions, unaccountable opinions and random, fleeting content? In being constantly online and plugged in, have we become detached from real social interaction, and withdrawn from the real social and political realm? In colossal letters running across one of the walls of the gallery, Kruger instructs us to ‘BE HERE NOW’ rather than escaping into the types of realities where we expect to find ourselves, but where we might in fact be more lost.

www.modernartoxford.org.uk l Barbara Kruger’s exhibition continues at Modern Art Oxford until August 31.