Katherine Behar
Optimized, not Optimistic

Artist Talk

September 8, 2016 / 18:30

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.

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. A previous solo exhibition and catalog, Katherine Behar: E-Waste , premiered at the University of Kentucky in 2014 and traveled 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, coedited with Emmy Mikelson, and Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity were both published by punctum books in 2016. She is the editor of ObjectOriented 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.

Free of admissions, drop in.
The talk will be in English with simultaneous translation to Turkish.

Temporary Exhibition

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

Medicinal Herbs in Byzantium

Medicinal Herbs in Byzantium

Knowledge of plants and the practice of healing are closely entwined. The toxic or hallucinogenic nature of some roots, and the dangers associated with picking them, conferred a mythical or magical character and power. 

Cameria (Mihrimah Sultan)

Cameria (Mihrimah Sultan)

Based on similar examples by the European painters in various collections, this work is one of the portraits of Mihrimah Sultan, who was depicted rather often in the 16th century.

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.