Renowned for his large-format colour Photo:graphs, Andreas Gursky’s production often employs digital technology. Often presented at an epic scale and viewed from an elevated vantage point, his images seek to capture the microscopic details of lived experience. For his Pyongyang series (2007), the artist travelled to the Arirang Festival, held annually in North Korea in honour of the late Communist leader Kim Il Sung. Gursky’s image allows the viewer to witness the festival’s slew of activities, including more than 50,000 participants performing tightly choreographed acrobatics, against a backdrop of 30,000 schoolchildren who can be seen holding coloured flip-cards. Here, the performers’ smiling faces presented from within the state-controlled apparatus sit incongruously with narrations of day-to-day life in North Korea. We might ask ourselves, does the event allows the crowd to express a condition of life that must otherwise remain concealed?