Katherine Behar: Ack! Knowledge! Work!

Curated by Jesse Colin Jackson
 

Feb. 3-April 20, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, Feb. 3, 2 p.m.

Beall Center for Art + Technology

In the exhibition Katherine Behar: Ack! Knowledge! Work! interactive installations, video works, and sculptures address how digital technologies of automation are reforming the future of labor. With Ack! Knowledge! Work! Behar invites us to “acknowledge” crucial labor that automation makes invisible and to question the supposed intelligence of “knowledge work” as artificial intelligence encroaches on traditionally white-collar jobs. Simultaneously, the exhibition gives a nod to the conflicted “Ack!” so many of us feel about work and automation: we understand that automation could lead to unemployment, but even so we wish tedious work could be automated away.

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About the Artist

Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist whose works exploring gender and labor in contemporary digital culture have appeared throughout North America and Europe. Pera Museum presented Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi (2016), a comprehensive survey exhibition and catalog. Additional solo exhibitions include Backups (2019), Anonymous Autonomous (2018), E-Waste (2014, catalog/traveling), and numerous others collaborating as "Disorientalism." Behar is the editor of Object-Oriented Feminism, coeditor of And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, and author of Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity. She is Associate Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Image (left): Katherine Behar. Photo: Marianne Kim. Image courtesy of the artist.

Image (top): Katherine Behar, Anonymous Autonomous, 2024. Modified office chairs, motors, sensors, custom electronics, custom software, computers, vinyl, paper, sound; variable dimensions. Photo: ofstudio Photography.

712 Arts Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697 | 949-824-6206 | beallcenter.uci.edu | beallcenter@uci.edu
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6 p.m.

Discounted Advance Pre-Paid Parking Permits Reserve at least the day before the event.

Free admission

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