Katherine Behar

Image depicts Katherine Behar's We Grasp at Straws, 2023.

 

Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist whose works exploring gender and labor in contemporary digital culture have appeared throughout North America and Europe. Pera Museum presented Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi (2016), a comprehensive survey exhibition and catalog. Additional solo exhibitions include Backups (2019), Anonymous Autonomous (2018), E-Waste (2014, catalog/traveling), and numerous others collaborating as "Disorientalism." Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, coeditor of And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, and author of Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity. She is Associate Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her practice can be accessed here: https://www.katherinebehar.com/index.html.

Behar's Black Box residency project, entitled We Grasp at Straws, will be a single-channel video presenting an absurd attempt at remote group weaving. An ensemble of five performers will each embody a finger to form a hand that grasps at a larger-than-life straw. Motion-capture will transcribe the performance into body-scaled data, driving a digital model of a robotic hand which exercises at once dexterity and futility. We Grasp at Straws dwells on the of the first step of basket weaving–grasping the first straw–and forms a part of Behar's larger exploration of human-machine collaboration through robotics and basketry.

 

Coming soon: 

Katherine Behar: Ack! Knowledge! Work! 

January 27–April 20, 2024

Curated by Jesse Colin Jackson. January 27-April 20, 2024

Katherine Behar: Ack! Knowledge! Work! is the artist’s first solo show at the Beall Center. Behar looks towards digital automation and the future of labor. Developed since 2016, her series of sculptures, interactive installations, and videos appropriates technologies of office work–chairs, keyboards, and printer paper–in an effort to resist the reduction of self into units of productivity. At once a gesture of revolt and of witnessing, Behar invites audiences to “ack-knowledge” the invisible marks of labor which uphold digital networks, and to interrogate the supposed intelligence often bestowed upon the menial, and near-automatic “work” of white-collar office roles.