Annie Abrahams
Annie Abrahams (1954, Hilvarenbeek, lives in France since 1987) has a PhD in biology from the University of Utrecht and a MA from the Academy of Fine Arts of Arnhem. In her work, using video, performance as well as the internet, she questions the possibilities and the limits of communication in general and more specifically investigates its modes under networked conditions. She is known for her net art and collective writing experiments and is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art.
Abrahams develops what she calls an aesthetics of trust and attention and creates situations meant to reveal messy and sloppy sides of human behaviour, where she traps reality and so makes that reality available for thought.
She has performed and shown work extensively in France, including at the Jeu de Paume; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the CRAC, Sète; the Paris–Villette theater and in more than hunderd international galleries and museums including The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Asheville, North Carolina; the Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain; the New Musem, New York; the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan; Furtherfield gallery, London; Aksioma, Ljubljana, and NIMk, Amsterdam, in festivals such as the MoscowFilm Festival; the International Film Festival, Rotterdam and the Stuttgarter Filmwinter (1prize 2011), and on online platforms as Rhizome.org and Turbulence (NEA commission 2015). She was lead-performer in the ELO2017 conference Porto en nominated for the H3K Basel netbased award 2018. In 2019 Abrahams netart piece Being Human was included in LIMA's Digital Canon of the Netherlands (1960-2000).
She taught at the university of Montpellier in the arts department (2002-2005). Autumn 2005, she started provi&testi: meetings around art works to become, not yet finished, trespassing habits; and +++plus+++ editions. From november 2006 to january 2009 she curated the project “InstantS” and organized the “Breaking Solitude” and ”Double Bind” webperformance series on panoplie.org. In 2012 she co-organised the first Cyposium – online symposium on cyberformance,and published an article on webcam mediated communication and collaboration in JAR #2 (Journal of Artistic Research). In 2013 she started with Emmanuel Guez the project ReadingClub, an online venue for collaborative reading and writing performances. In 2014 she published two books: “from estranger to e- stranger” with CONA and Aksioma, Ljubljana; and “CyPosium – the book” published by LINK editions and la Panacée, co- edited with Helen Varley Jamieson. With Helen she also started in 2015 unaussprechbarlich a project on language learning and living in a country where one can't speak one's mother tongue. Distant Feelings, started in 2015 with Daniel Pinheiro and Lisa Parra, researches how it feels to share an interface with eyes closed and no talking. It developed into an yearly reconnection ritual. Started in 2018 with Daniel Pinheiro and Muriel Piqué, Distant Movements is a reseach and performance project on the possibility to experience dance in front of a screen with the eyes closed. Also in 2018 Annie Abrahams performed for the first time using VR. In the same year with Alix Desaubliaux and Pascale Barret she formed the 3G(enerations) group - experimenting with online conversation through performative challenges in the project Constallations. Utterings, started in 2020, is an online performance group experimenting with utterings as communication that is already at its 9th iteration. (2022)
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