}

Cloud Profiles

Katherine Behar

September 8 - November 16, 2016

Inspired by the Pera Museum’s Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection, this project consisted of 3d animations installed in the collection exhibition. In Cloud Profiles: Weightless Measures, a digitized figure, partially engulfed by a cloud, must assume unrecognizable positions to interface with it. The impossible struggle to log a place for oneself in the cloud is a degraded reality that everyday users experience in cloud computing’s laborious, often frustrating interfaces. “Cloud computing,” a colloquial name for loosely networked, web served applications and data storage, connotes an amorphous nonentity floating innocuously in the ether. But to imagine the cloud as frictionless, immediate, or beyond critique is a “clouded” misperception that misses the gravity of these technologies.

About Katherine Behar

Katherine Behar explores issues of gender and labor in contemporary digital culture. Her work has been presented at festivals, galleries, and performance spaces throughout North America and Europe. Her most recent solo exhibition and catalogue, Katherine Behar: E-Waste, premiered at the University of Kentucky and travelled to Boston Cyberarts Gallery. Since 2005, she has collaborated with Marianne M. Kim in the performance art duo Disorientalism, which studies how technologized work, junk culture, and consumerism mediate race and gender. Her publications And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, co-edited with Emmy Mikelson, and Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity were both published by punctum books in 2016. She is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, forthcoming in 2016 from University of Minnesota Press. Behar holds an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College, an MA in Media Ecology from New York University, and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is based in New York and is currently Assistant Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College.

Félix Ziem (1821-1911) A nomadic, unclassifiable, and eccentric artist

Félix Ziem (1821-1911) A nomadic, unclassifiable, and eccentric artist

French artist Félix Ziem is one of the most original landscape painters of the 19thcentury. The exhibition Wanderer on the Sea of Light presents Ziem as an artist who left his mark on 19th century painting and who is mostly known for his paintings of Istanbul and Venice, where the city and the sea are intertwined. 

From two portraits of children…

From two portraits of children…

The Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation’s Orientalist Painting Collection includes two children’s portraits that are often featured in exhibitions on the second floor of the Pera Museum. These portraits both date back to the early 20th century, and were made four years apart. One depicts Prince Abdürrahim Efendi, son of Sultan Abdulhamid II, while the figure portrayed on the other is Nazlı, the daughter of Osman Hamdi Bey.

Demons, Symbols, and the Cosmos

Demons, Symbols, and the Cosmos

Beliefs surrounding illness and healing in Byzantium stem from the myths, astrology, and magic practiced around the Mediterranean by Jews, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Greeks.