Ofri Cnaani addresses the omnipresence of the digital in everyday life. Her practice takes the form of performances, prints, films, and installations.
At the core of this exhibition is Leaking Lands (2022), which premieres on this occasion. The film explores the 2018 fire at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, an institutional product of colonialism, and the museum’s immaterial re-emergence thanks to an ad-hoc online image bank created by past visitors. Themes explored include the archive and the subalternisation of narratives and identities of the “other”—for example from the South, Indigenous, Black, and queer. The exhibition also features Testimonies of Things (2022), a group of texts and images that speculate on the even—from its origins to its aftermath—through six entities that “translate” matter into something virtual: meteorite, water, ashes, skins, JPG, and cursor. Both works consider contemporary society’s reliance on algorithms as related to data generation, collection, archiving, and monetization, and the inevitable accompanying questions of control and extraction in the age of so-called cognitive capitalism.