The Pera Museum presents "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" show how working bodies can defy repetitive drudgery as 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 seeks out solidaritiy between humans and non-humans 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 challenges the metaphor of cloud computing, which suggests that data is atmospheric and weightless. Behar's animations depict users of cloud computing swallowed in cloud-like growths. In another work, a dancer must negotiate an impossible mountain of QWERTY keyboard keys representing data's material presence in the mind-numbing work of data entry.
When: From Sept. 8 to Oct. 16
Where: Pera Museum, Istanbul
