Annie Abrahams has a doctoraal (M2) in biology from the University of Utrecht and a MA2 from the Academy of Fine Arts of Arnhem. She is known worldwide 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 considers the internet environment as a perfect laboratory to investigate the modes, the possibilities and the limits of human communication. She uses strict protocols to create situations where the participants are challenged to find space for their singularity among and with others.
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 leadperformer in the ELO2017 conference Porto. 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) In 2005, she started “provi&testi”, meetings around not yet finished art works and +++plus+++ editions. From 2006 to 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, an online symposium on cyberformance. In 2013 she started with Emmanuel Guez the “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. In 2015, also with Helen she researched and performed “unaussprechbarlich”, a project on language learning and living in a country where one can’t speak one’s mother tongue. “Distant Feelings” (2015- ) with Daniel Pinheiro and Lisa Parra researches sharing an interface with your eyes closed and no talking. In 2017 Abrahams accepted to be the artistic director of a thesis by Muriel Piqué (University of Aix-Marseille). “Distant Movements” (2018 -) is a reseach and performance project with Muriel and Daniel Pinheiro on the possibility to experience dance in front of a screenwhile closing your eyes. Also in 2018 she performed for the first time using VR. In the same year with Alix Desaubliaux and Pascale Barret they formed 3G(enerations), a group experimenting with online conversation through performative challenges in the project called “Constallations”. “Utterings” (2020-) is a recent online research group, that experiments with on-the-fly “new” language through utterings
Published articles :
Why is the use of videoconferencing so exhausting? An analysis on the demands. Video essay, Abrahams, A., Pinheiro, D., Carrasco, M., Zea, D., La Porta, T., de Manuel, A., … Varin, M. (2020). Embodiment and Social Distancing: Projects. Journal of Embodied Research, 3(2), 4 (27:52). DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.67
#PEAE Participative Ethology in Artificial Environments, Annie Abrahams, Electronic Book Review, May 3, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7273/gzp0-ay65
L’Agency Art ou une Éthologie Participative dans des Environnements Artificiels ?, Annie Abrahams, LINKs séries 1-2. ISSN 2592-6756. 2019.
The machinic author” Artist’s Statement: The Reading Club, Abrahams, Annie and Guez, Emmanuel 2019, Journal of Creative Writing Studies: Vol. 4: Iss.1, Article 8. ISSN: 2474-2937.
Preconditions for Online Participation Annie Abrahams, PAIC, 2019.
Learn together what it means to be connected Annie Abrahams, CyPosium – The Book, eds. Annie Abrahams & Helen Varley Jamieson, 2014, p156-160, ISBN 9781291988925.
Trapped to Reveal – On webcam mediated communication and collaboration. Annie Abrahams, Journal for Artistic Research #2 ISSN 2235-0225, 2012.
with/in languages – a pretty pathetic (ang) / avec et dans les langues – un assez pathétique (Fr), Annie Abrahams, The Creative Web of Languages / Le réseau créatif des langu.ages, Hybrid 07 | 2021, ISSN électronique 2276-3538