Tali Keren: Un-Charting Exhibition Opening

Un-Charting is a multimedia project by artist Tali Keren comprising film, installation, sculpture, in-depth research, and collaborative public gatherings.

Keren’s film Un-Charting employs a video game aesthetic as an unlikely vehicle for the film’s real-life characters and their actual stories. Continuing the artist’s ongoing practice of research on ethnocratic and messianic belief systems and their reverberations in contemporary life, the project introduces real people, who speak in the film about their decisions and actions that are enmeshed in colonial fantasies and contemporary political violence. Brought together in an extraordinary sensory environment, the artist’s source materials for this exhibition are research, historical and archival sources, and contemporary documentary interviews.

All this is related in the style of a journey in an animated video game based on historical and contemporary evangelical Christian visions of Jerusalem. The film moves through sci-fi scapes on sea and land, mixing quotations of real sites in contemporary United States and the Middle East, plotted on a recreated map of a 18th-century city grid drawn by the British naval officer Richard Brothers (1757-1824) imagining the Holy City of Jerusalem with himself as ruler.

The exhibition puts Brothers’ colonial map of Jerusalem to a very different use than he originally intended. The area of the physical map in the gallery is a space for public gathering where many different voices are heard. Stories of real experiences of colonialism and imaginings for a different future are relayed through a full series of artworks, screenings, performances, sounds, scents, movements, and discussions with artists and historians created in collaboration with curator Adam HajYahia, artists New Red Order, and the Middle East and Middle East American Center.

More information about the exhibition and ongoing events can be found here.
 

COVID-19/BUILDING ENTRY POLICY

CUNY attendees must show proof of vaccination by presenting a valid CUNY Access Pass through the CLEARED4 health validation platform upon entry. Non-CUNY visitors will need to show proof of ID by presenting a valid government-issued photo document. See the full Building Entry Policy for more information.