Exhibitions



July 24th performance
The Sunday (performed on a thursday)
One performance on Thursday July 24th 7-8 pm
Elana Katz


Work created from Katz's performance will be on view daily through July 27th from 5-8pm and by appointment.

THE SUNDAY
Elana Katz, 2014


A one hour performance by Berlin-based performance artist Elana Katz, which pertains to unpremeditated cultural assimilation, and the integration of religiously-based customs into secular multicultural life.
The artist, a secular Jew, repeatedly crosses herself for 1 hour. The action transforms in its repetition, developing an inconsistent rhythm. Powder is used on the hand that commits the gesture, creating a visual map of the repetitive whereabouts of her hand. Her attire is used as a blank canvas for this visual testimony of the immediate history of her culturally-charged action.
The gesture is one that the artist has learned and habitually adopted from sources unknown. It is a result of social conditioning that cannot be localized, a sign that has been appropriated in an unconscious manner - an instance of unpremeditated cultural assimilation.

video of performance

Elana Katz is an American artist currently based in Berlin, Germany. Working often from a historical basis, Katz’s work confronts cultural conventions, critically examines the complexity that lies within contradictions, and thus aims to create an experience of unlearning the assumed. Her recent grants have included the DAAD Graduate Studies Grant (2010) and the Franklin Furnace Fund (2011). She participated as a re-performer at Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2010), and has recently exhibited/ performed at Location One, New York (2011), Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium (2011), Freies Museum Berlin (2012), Diehl CUBE Berlin (2013), P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York (2013), and Gallery12 HUB, Belgrade (2014).