Mazmanian Gallery at Framingham State University presents Katherine Behar: Backups, a solo exhibition of sculpture, video, and interactive works. While digital culture constantly generates alternative copies or “backups” to minimize risk, Behar attempts to unlock the lost potential in these stocks of substitutes. At once humorous and critical, her artworks reinvent the data and devices we have abandoned to storage.

Some works in the exhibition show the ways countless copies clog consumer culture, while others consider how, from apps to AIs, technologies of automation increasingly stand in not only for people, but also for humanity. Shelf Life finds remnants of an alternative reality amidst generations of discarded designs stashed on shelves. Correspondingly, in Modeling Big Data, a data profile—that is, a record of one’s online activities—turns into an overgrown entity with compulsive behaviors of its own. Likewise, in Autoresponder.exe, an app that automates the simple task of replying to emails keeps business running as usual while all else seems lost.

In Backups, Behar offers us a chance to “revert to backup,” that is, to air out our accounts, reevaluate our discarded drafts and duplicates, and consider what of ourselves our backups promise to replace or restore.

This exhibition will be on view September 3 – 25, 2019, with a reception on September 11th from 4:30-6:30pm.

Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist and critical theorist of new media whose works exploring gender and labor in contemporary digital culture have appeared throughout North America and Europe. She is known for projects that mix low and high technologies to create hybrid forms that are by turns humorous and sensuous. Pera Museum in Istanbul presented Katherine Behar: Data’s Entry | Veri Girişi, a comprehensive survey exhibition and catalog, in 2016. Additional solo exhibitions include Katherine Behar: Anonymous Autonomous (2018), Katherine Behar: E-Waste (2014, catalog/traveling), and numerous others collaborating as “Disorientalism.” Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, the coeditor of And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art (with Emmy Mikelson), and the author of Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity. Fellowships and residencies include The MacDowell Colony, Nida Art Colony, Pioneer Works, Art Journal, Wassaic Project, Rubin Museum, Franklin Furnace, and others. Behar is based in Brooklyn and is Associate Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College, CUNY.

Mazmanian Gallery Contact: Ellie Krakow, ekrakow@framingham.edu