}

Katherine Behar

Data’s Entry

September 8 - October 16, 2016

Pera Museum presented Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry, the first museum survey exhibition of this New York-based artist who moves fluidly between sculpture, performance, video, and writing. Behar is drawn to the often confounding—and sometimes rebellious—ways that people and technologies manage to coexist in digital labor. Curated by Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley, the works in Data’s Entry showed how working bodies can defy repetitive drudgery: user interfaces fail to fully script human action, machines run amok rather than faithfully automating human labor, and algorithms are crippled by their own exacting logic. Instead of claiming special importance for human subjectivity, she seeked out solidarities between humans and nonhumans and finds in these connections unexpected traces of traditional gender, racial, and class dynamics.

In three new works inspired by the Suna and Inan Kıraç Foundation’s Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection, the artist challenged the metaphor of cloud computing, which suggested that data is atmospheric and weightless. Behar asks, how has our understanding of data perversely evolved to become all measure and no weight? Her animations depicted users of cloud computing swallowed in cloud-like growths. In the performance Data's Entry, performance artists Aslı Bostancı and Melih Kıraç must negotiated an impossible, unforgiving interface of QWERTY keyboard keys representing data's material presence in the mind-numbing work of data entry. The exhibition also included robotic vacuums doing the Roomba Rumba; the post-apocalyptic USB sculpture series, E-Waste; 3D-&&, in which a 3D printer grinds out Morse Code messages for a herd of computer mouses; and a selection of the artist’s parodic and poignant video works.

 

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Exhibition Catalogue

Katherine Behar

Katherine Behar

Pera Museum presented Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry, the first museum survey exhibition of this New York-based artist who moves fluidly between sculpture, performance, video, and writing....

Katherine Behar<br/>Optimized, not Optimistic

Katherine Behar
Optimized, not Optimistic

Presented as part of Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry exhibition, the artist Katherine Behar will give a talk titled “Optimized, not Optimistic”. In this talk, Behar presents her artwork and discusses the often confounding and sometimes rebellious ways that people and technologies manage to coexist in digital labor.

Data’s Entry

Data’s Entry

As part of Katherine Behar’s exhibition, a performance titled Data’s Entry will take place on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. 

Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley

Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley

Join curators Fatma Çolakoğlu and Ulya Soley for a tour of the Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry exhibition. The tour will offer a unique insight to the works of the exhibition.

Academician Can Candan on "Cinéma Vérité"

Academician Can Candan on "Cinéma Vérité"

Pera Film, within the scope of the Cinéma Vérité: The Truth of the Camera film program, is conducting an conversation with documentary filmmaker and academician Can Candan, moderated by film critic Aslı Ildır.

Video

Midnight Stories: COGITO <br> Tevfik Uyar

Midnight Stories: COGITO
Tevfik Uyar

He had imagined the court room as a big place. It wasn’t. It was about the size of his living room, with an elevation at one end, with a dais on it. The judges and the attorneys sat there. Below it was an old wooden rail, worn out in some places. That was his place. There was another seat for his lawyer. At the back, about 20 or 30 chairs were stowed out for the non-existent crowd.

Midnight Stories: The Red Button <br> Funda Özlem Şeran

Midnight Stories: The Red Button
Funda Özlem Şeran

It was a quiet night in the dessert. Even the mice weren’t around. A few LEDs blinked in the dark, and the sound of a fan filled the infinite void. The conversation cutting the silence seemed to go nowhere.

Midnight Stories: The Soul <br> Aşkın Güngör

Midnight Stories: The Soul
Aşkın Güngör

The wind blows, rubbing against my legs made of layers of metal and wires, swaying the leaves of grass that have shot up from the cracks in the tarmac, and going off to the windows that look like the eyes of dead children in the wrecked buildings that seem to be everywhere as far as the eye can see.