Fall 2024
November 6, 2024
Leaking Collections: The Digital Afterlife of Cultural Objects
An online event. Book!
6:00 – 8:00pm
A online presentation/conversation between curator/researcher Annet Dekker, researcher and curator Daniela Agostinho and artist Ofri Cnaani, as part of The CONTACTLESS CONDITION exhibition public programme, moderated by Prof. Joasia Krysa.
Inspired by the works in the exhibition, the conversation will address the politics of digital collections and the data afterlife of cultural objects. In recent years, many museums have incorporated data-driven tools into their digital collections. However, just as the drive to archive information has historically been fundamental to the exercise of colonial power, the digitization and datafication of collections are far from a purely technical endeavour. Recent research has shown that data infrastructures often perpetuate the colonial taxonomic gaze, transforming it into a symbolic calculus. This event will explore possible critical methodologies required to disseminate cultural knowledge while simultaneously protecting it, especially in the context of ongoing colonial power dynamics. The discussion will also consider how practice-based methodologies can trouble the afterlife of cultural data, and reimagine how we engage with and interpret these collections.
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23. - 26. October 2024
AFTER MEMORY - Recalling and Foretelling across Time, Space, and Networks
Device Amnesia: Lecture Performance in Two Parts
In this lecture performance, artist Ofri Cnaani will present two segments from her ongoing Digital Afterness research project. The performance serves as a method to develop a lexicon that activates the space between theory, visual representation, and speculative writing. Leaking Lands (Part One) examines the catastrophic fire that destroyed two centuries of treasures at Brazil’s National Museum. The work investigates the residues of body, data, and matter left behind, forming an ecology of ‘leftovers’ that exists between eras and orders. Motivated by the notion of non-human testimonies, this piece aims to splice scientific and poetic knowledge to capture the post-fire transition from physical or biological form to the digital realm, through the perspective of six entities. Device Amnesia (Part Two) explores the island nation of Tuvalu’s journey toward becoming the “First Digital Nation” amidst the looming threat of climate change, using digital twin technology. The work explores the nation’s digital transition, through the lens of four technological devices, each representing a different techno-political affair, to ask how accumulated local knowledge could become intelligible and reproducible across contexts.
Center for Art and Media - ZKM
orgenized by Nathalia Lavigne, Víctor Fancelli Capdevila and Lisa Deml
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23. - 26. October 2024
AFTER MEMORY - Recalling and Foretelling across Time, Space, and Networks
Center for Art and Media - ZKM
orgenized by Nathalia Lavigne, Víctor Fancelli Capdevila and Lisa Deml
Unmaping Landscapes
Giselle Beiguelman, Ofri Cnaani, Thiago Leiros-Costa, Pedro Oliveira
Moderated by: Lisa Deml
The first roundtable explores how memories are inscribed in datafied landscapes and across networked cartographies. Contesting the notion of the digital as a “terra nullius,” artists and researchers Giselle Beiguelman, Ofri Cnaani, Thiago Costa-Leiros, and Pedro Oliveira retrace the ways in which colonial systems, national identities, and extractivist economies are carved into virtual topographies. Through their respective practices, ranging from media archaeology, ethnomusicology, transmedial performances, and anticolonial studies of listening, they investigate the correlations between geographical and computational territories and the different agencies and ideologies that seek to claim them. Considering the mnemonic nature of platformed landscapes, this roundtable seeks to uncover buried histories, to gather scattered testimonies, and to activate ruins as repositories for multiple histories, both real and imagined ones.
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October 3, 2024 – January 31, 2025:
Ofri Cnaani: The Contactless Condition
Exhibition Research Lab (ERL), Liverpool
Exhibition Research Lab is delighted to present the first UK solo exhibition of artist and researcher Ofri Cnaani: The Contactless Condition, curated by Or Tshuva.
the exhbtion features four of my most recent projects created since 2020. Developed during the onset of a global pandemic and its subsequent crises, this selection of artworks – spanning video, sound, and photographic installations – raises questions of access, power, and tangibility while suggesting an expanded understanding of the ‘Contactless’ not merely as a technological solution, but as an emerging living condition.
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October 19th, 2024
Live-Line, 2024
A four hours perfromance at the empty Herzlyia Museum of Art
How do we keep a line of thought or the horizon line in these very dark days?
a four-hours perfromance where I tried to maintain a line and thinking through the very basic yet highly political question of the moment: Where do we draw the line?
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September 29-30, 2024
Political Imagination Workshop at the Van Leen Institute with Mushon Zer Aviv
These are days of thick darkness. Many who live between the river and the sea can no longer imagine a future. For two days, I joined Mushon Zer Aviv to co-lead day long workshops about political imagination here and now. We were thinking about structural imagination, critical imagination, and a much needed creative imagination and borrowing methods from science fiction and tools from design fiction to consider the predicted, probable, plausible, possible, and preposterous futures that we want to see in the layered lands between the river and the sea.
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Summer 2024:
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
School of Listening: (Im)possible Conversations
22.07.2024 — 15.09.2024
Curators: Maayan Sheleff (guest curator) with Christina Penetsdorfer
School of Listening is the title of this year’s program of events at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. The program was developed by guest curator Maayan Sheleff and is dedicated to listening differently.
With works by Ofri Cnaani, Thalia Hoffman, Stav Marin, Samira Saraya, Neta Weiner, and Manar Zuabi as well as works from the Generali Foundation Collection – permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg by Joan Jonas and Peter Tscherkassky
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School of Listening is the title of this year’s program of events at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. The program was developed by guest curator Maayan Sheleff and is dedicated to listening differently.
With works by Ofri Cnaani, Thalia Hoffman, Stav Marin, Samira Saraya, Neta Weiner, and Manar Zuabi as well as works from the Generali Foundation Collection – permanent loan to the Museum der Moderne Salzburg by Joan Jonas and Peter Tscherkassky
Agust 5th-18, 2024
I will be teaching a two-weeks course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts
The Space between Us: somatic knowledge and new techno-spatial scopes
8.8.24
Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg:
Listen to it like you haven’t been born yet, tell it as if you are still in the surrogate womb
Ofri Cnaani with Agnė Jokšė, Carmen Hines and Morgane Billuart.
How deeply are we attuned to the technological systems in which we place ourselves, and which we place in ourselves? The programme will focus on the role of platform capitalism in shaping and orienting user bodies, gender and sexuality. Combining performance, participatory experience and live podcast, the evening will bring together artists Agnė Jokšė and Ofri Cnaani, and researchers-creators Carmen Hines and Morgane Billuart.
The event is part of Public programme for the 2024 Salzburg International Summer Academy, School of Listening orgenized by Maayan Sheleff
and School of Listening: (Im)possible Conversations exhbtion at Museum der Moderne
Curated by Maayan Sheleff (guest curator) with Christina Penetsdorfer
August 2, 2024
Choreographic Devices
co-orgnized by Murat Adash, Ofri Cnaani, Edgar Schmitz, Sara Sassanelli
Choreographic Devices is an annual event series that activates the choreographic as a methodology for trans-disciplinary forms of inquiry and rehearsal. Bringing together contributors from across an expanded ecology of practices, this multi-format forum speculates on and with choreographic arrangements and their complex modes of co-production. Choreographic Devices tests how material assemblages, organisational forms, and modes of being alongside each other might be choreographed otherwise.
For our first Vilnius iteration I co-hosted with Vaida Stepanovaitė
A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a form.
Ofri Cnaani and Vaida Stepanovaitė with Agnė Jokšė, Esther Siddiquie, Paveldo institutas, OMSK Social Club, Tarren Johnson and Joel Cocks.
The anonymous collective Invisible Committee once suggested that in times of multiple breakages, we need mutable forms, not affixed institutions. Life, they say, whether biological, singular, or collective, is a continual creation and interaction of forms: ‘A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a form.’ Artist Ofri Cnaani and curator Vaida Stepanovaitė invited artists and collectives to rethink social and institutional spaces as inherently choreographic acts and to weave potential openings in their operations. Together, they will respond with short interventions using text, voice, image, and movement. A series of offerings will explore the form’s momentum and its inseparability from other configurations through methods of doing rather than knowing and poke at the calcified imaginaries and structures of knowledge.
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June 18th, 2024, University of Amsterdam
hosted by the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis
Precarious Collections and Data Colonialsm
A Masterclass with Ofri Cnaani and Annet Dekker
Followed by
Digital Afterness: A public talk by Ofri Cnaani
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June 4th, Centre for Critical Data Practices, Aarhus University
Troubling the Lifecycles of Data
Critical Data Practices: Remaking Data Archives, Subjects and Technologies
Symposium
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May 2nd, 2024, University of Applied Arts Vienna
MUSEUMS AS COMMONS: Digital Strategies to Reappropriate the Public Sphere
Lecture by
Ofri Cnaani: From Practice To Commons
followed by a Panel discussion with
Petra Schaper Rinkel, Ofri Cnaani, Julienne Lorz
and Nora Sternfeld
Moderated by
Martina Griesser-Stermscheg
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5–17 August 2024, Salzburg Summer Academy
The Space between Us: somatic knowledge and new techno-spatial scopes
Two-weeks summer course at Salzburg Summer Academy
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August 8th, 2024 at Generali Collection / Museum der Moderne
As part of Salzburg Summer Academy‘s Public Program, curated by Maayan Sheleff
Listen to it like you haven’t been born yet, tell it as you are still in the surrogate womb.
How deeply are we attuned to the technological systems we place ourselves in, and we place in ourselves? The program will focus on the role of platform capitalism in shaping and orienting user bodies, gender and sexuality. Combining performance, participatory experience and live podcast, the evening will bring together artists Agnė Jokšė and Ofri Cnaani, and researchers-creators Carmen Lael Hines and Morgane Billuart. Agnė Jokšė works with words. They are currently creating a non-binary Lithuanian language and use performance to explore queerness and language. Jokšė will present Lezbynai (2020), an erotic story about lesbian love in the background of the Lazdynai district where the artist grew up. Artist Ofri Cnaani will lead the audience in Stories from the Surrogate Womb, an exploration of the Generali collection / Museum der Moderne(?? Location dependent) that focuses on the idea of somatic listening. The performance is a personal wandering through call-and-response prompts and allows participants to re-experience familiar or unfamiliar sites in the collection through the notion of choreographic listening.
Carmen Lael Hines and Morgane Billuart's recent research and writings focus on the fast-growing industry of Femtech, a term which describes the software, products and digital services that focus on female health. In their performative lecture and live podcast recording, Girlemployee, Billuart and Hines use podcasts as a performative medium for presenting research and discussing the history of critiquing platforms via platforms. Together with the audience, they ask when the podcast becomes a space for articulating alternative knowledge-making structures. How do podcasts appeal to the temporalities of post-capitalist time-keeping – voices that feed you information as you move from one location to the other?
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Choreographic Devices 2023
TU Wien
Choreographic Devices 2022
December 6th, 2016
Public Performance and Social interventions
Public Art Course, School of Visual Arts
January 28th, 2106
Compare and Contrast, lecture performance at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Helena Rubinstein pavilion
January 29th, 2016
Museum is a School
Talk at Haifa University, MFA program
Fall 2016
The Fourth Dimension: Video Space and the Broken Screen at SVA
February 25th, 2015
Artist Talk and studio visits at Hunter MFA (my alma mater)
February 11th, 2015
Studio visits at New York Studio Residency Program (AICAD)
School of visual Arts, New York
check out my SVA Profile
City as Site: Public art as Social Intervention
I'm the coordinator and serve as a core faculty at the new SVA residency, City as Site: Public Art as Social intervention.
for more info, check out SVA site
or our dedicated site:
https://www.sva.edu/special-programs/summer-residency-programs/public-art/city-as-site
https://cargocollective.com/svacitysite
SVA : Critical and Visual studies / continuing Ed courses:
Sites Unseen: Memory, Place and Identity
The Fourth Dimension: Video, Space, and the Broken Screen
International Center of Photography
The Photographic Image In Space: Photography, Video and Installation