OFRI CNAANI: The CONTACTLESS CONDITION

October 3, 2024 – January 31, 2025
Quiet Preview* October 3, 5:00 – 6:00pm
Public Preview October 3, 6:00 – 8:00pm

The gallery is open Monday – Friday, 11:00am – 4:00pm.

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Exhibition Research Lab is delighted to present the first UK solo exhibition of artist and researcher OFRI CNAANI: The CONTACTLESS CONDITION, curated by Or Tshuva.

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Ofri Cnaani is an artist, educator, and researcher working across performance and media. Her art and writings explore connections between data and coloniality, somatic knowledge in the age of network spatiality, and performance as a critical technology practice. The CONTACTLESS CONDITION features four of her most recent projects created since 2020, spanning video, sound, and photographic installations, alongside a rich public programme of talks and performative workshops.

At the heart of the exhibition is Leaking Lands, a monumental three-channel video installation created as part of the artist’s recently completed PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. The video recounts the story of a devastating fire that destroyed two centuries’ worth of treasures in Brazil’s National Museum, leaving almost no physical or digital trace of its building and collection. The only way to now “visit” the museum is through digital remains, such as a photo collection contributed by WikiCommons users and a Google virtual tour. These digital fragments are used to perform a ‘digital séance,’ negotiating new sites of techno-political struggles.

Another key work, Ground Control: When The Horizon Becomes A Frontier, is a video created in collaboration with astronaut Eytan Stibbe during his time at the International Space Station (ISS). This work offers a different type of virtual tour to a place one cannot visit – space. It reflects on the politics of representing the ‘new space,’ a rapidly developing techno-political arena undergoing accelerated privatisation turning it from a distant horizon, into a new technological and economic frontier. Additional works include photographic and sound installations, all of which jointly explore human-machine-space relations while raising questions of access, power, and tangibility.

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Ofri Cnaani’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum, PS1 MoMA, Tate Britain, Venice Architecture Biennale, BMW Guggenheim Lab, Amos Rex Museum, Kunsthalle Wien, and Kiasma Museum, among others. She holds a PhD from the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also served as an associate lecturer. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Visual Culture, TU Wien, and a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), studying the ‘Networked Image.’

Or Tshuva is a Manchester based curator, writer, and educator. Her curatorial projects were exhibited at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, Jerusalem Design Week, Artport Tel Aviv, Beit Hagefen: Arab-Jewish Cultural Centre, and more. She was involved in curatorial and research residencies at the MuCEM (Marseille, FR), Liverpool Biennial (UK), and Residency Unlimited (Brooklyn, NY). 

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*Please note, our events and projects are always open to all. However, our Quiet Preview is for visitors of all ages who require reduced volume and reduced numbers of other visitors compared to our Public Preview. As such, we may stagger entry for visitors to ensure the gallery doesn’t become too crowded at any given time.

If you have any other access requirements, then please contact us and we will do our best to facilitate them.