liat liat liat

Today’s headline: “Coinbase will lay off 14% of its staff as AI spurs ‘a new way of working’” As timely as ever: Anxious to Make (Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez) Bitcoin Futures, 2018 Wood, electronics, LCD display, thermal printer, digital coin acceptor, paint Seeing Blocks and Crypto Bros, 2018 Artist book Courtesy the artists (Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez) “Modeled after the iconic yellow General BYTES ATM, Bitcoin Futures (2018) is a functional ATM that dispenses crypto prophecies like a fortune-telling machine.  The book Seeing Blocks and Crypto Bros utilizes the outsourced labor of sixty cloudworkers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform to respond to drawing prompts. Draw how crypto works. Draw the blockchain. Draw a person who owns bitcoin. The commissioned drawings point to the often comic nature of technological beliefs and utopian crypto-fantasies. The artists note how, “like much technology, the inner workings of cryptocurrency remain ‘black boxes’ of understanding to most users. As a collective, Anxious to Make remains cautious of any technological apparatus that is believed without understanding.” (Tanya Zimbardo) Please ask the gallery attendant for quarters. These works by Anxious to Make are on view through May 22 at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San José State University as part of “Click on My Mouth Language and Technology.” Guest curated by Tanya Zimbardo, the exhibition features artworks made in the Bay Area by Anxious to Make (Liat Berdugo + Emily Martinez); Ahna Girshick; Asma Kazmi, Jill Miller and Kathy Wang; Judy Malloy; Jenny Odell; Genevieve Quick; Abram Stern; and Christine Tamblyn. @whatliat @queerai @sjsuartgalleries 📷: courtesy the artists (website screenshots), (participants view) Alani Angeles (SJSU), Tanya Zimbardo (installation view)

Thacher Gallery, Gleeson Library Finding Our Way: Feminist Approaches to Art and Work with Noopur Agarwal, Liat Berdugo, and Jenifer K Wofford. Wednesday, March 11, 12:45-2:00pm Co-presented with the Global Feminist Forum These teaching artists will speak about their individual journeys as artists, educators, and activists, telling stories about their experiences through an intersectional feminist lens.

This Saturday at 11:15am I’m doing a session called Art Sharks: Art Making while Parenting with the incredible @unrulyidiom @christiemgeorge @pfebes as part of the @batherslibrary summer symposium. Writer Leslie Jamison once called herself an ‘art shark’ while pushing her baby through a museum, never stopping lest the baby awaken. This session gathers artists working in diverse media who similarly navigate the intersections of creation and caregiving. from Bathers — tomorrow (Tuesday) is the last day to get symposium passes, but there will be single-event admission at each session and NOTAFLOF. Seating for the session will be on a first come basis so show up early. And my addition: yes you can bring your babies.

Calling all weird art moms! I am so incredibly thrilled to share that I will be participating in two panels on Saturday, August 23, at @batherslibrary as part of the Bathers Summer Symposium. In the first, I have the pleasure of facilitating a conversation with @angiewilson00 and @ilanacrispi about the two different, incredible all-mom shows they both helped curate in the Bay Area in the past year. In the second, I’ll be joining @whatliat , @pfebes & @christiemgeorge for a presentation of work and discussion about our recent reading group. And there is SO MUCH MORE at the Symposium! Incredible offerings for moms and non-moms alike! Get your passes, link in bio!

weird workshop alert 🚨 California Forever Police Department: Collective Critique of California’s Techno Rich Future A free, participatory workshop by me and @carriehott Sunday, June 1, 10 am - 1 pm at @realtimeandspace (125 10th St, Oakland, CA) Space limited — RSVP to [email protected] Who is California for? In this workshop, participants will create a speculative recruitment video for a fictional police force that will guard the new planned community called California Forever. Since 2017, wealthy venture capitalists have formed a real estate company called Flannery Associates, and spent over $800 million to anonymously acquire 60,000+ acres in Solano County as a “stealth campaign” — with announced plans to build a new city for 400,000 people. They have titled this project California Forever. Since the beginning, there has been building controversy around this plan, particularly around water supply concerns, traffic, urban sprawl, and impact on local communities. Critics have noted that designs for the new city resemble The Jetsons in their simple futurism, blustering techno-optimism, and retro desire to double down on failed approaches of the past. One thing that history has taught us is that California Utopianism is not for everyone: it is for the white and wealthy. What California Forever wants is to guard the wealth they have acquired and protect it for themselves. (Indeed California Forever’s city renderings show only white, able bodied, thin people exercising and engaging in leisure, never work.) California Forever has not yet announced their plans for a police department to protect their wealth, but we know it is coming. Drawing from the practices of culture jamming, tactical media, and performance, together we will critique this narrow vision of the future by creating a speculative recruitment video for the yet to be created California Forever Police Department. Participants are welcome to contribute as performers, behind the scenes, or both. Join us!

grateful for our fellow artists & cultural workers who refuse to be silent. There is power in refusal, alteration & making art that speaks out. As always: a Free Palestine is a Free World. Thanks @hyperallergic for the shout out, alongside so many amazing activists— and there are so many more of us. as artists, we must take a principled stand against the genocidal forces of empire. Keep going.

giant dice i made as an art assignment generator about motherhood — one die is the medium, the other is the subject. roll both for an art assignment prompt about motherhood. make a performance about the distance you can be from your child! make a website about your child’s inevitable growth! create an assemblage with forceps! these will be up and ready to solve all your creative blocks at ‘Phygital Care’, an exhibition at @rootdivision in SF opening this Saturday 6-8 pm, curated by @juditnavratil . font here is by @keltroughton

this week I withdrew my work from an upcoming exhibition at @jewseum and joined with other artists to call for the for the grievability of p@alestini @n life. As fellow artist @howlingmoondog writes, “There is power in refusal – it’s a form of honoring rebellion and imagining what cultural arts ecosystems could be like beyond zi0nism.” The work I had in the show, Seeing it for the Trees, critically examines the role of forests in the formation and maintenance of Zi0nism as a settler-colonial project. It starts with my own family history and a tree that I myself planted in the Jerusalem forest when I was six years old. It’s deeply personal and considers how questions of family histories become more urgent upon becoming a parent. You can order a copy of the book version of this piece // link in bio. I didn’t submit to the museum’s call with the intention of pulling out, nor with this collective of artists. Museum staff have been genuine and available in my interactions. But after learning more about the show and seeing how my work (and other work supporting P@lestinian life) would be contextualized, I couldn’t stay in this show. I’m working to find new ways and places to share jewish voices that uplift collective liberation. This work can feel fast, black and white, you vs us, us vs you. It’s been a hard week and I’m trying to slow down and stay true and most of all, ce@sefire n0w.

🔜 opening tonight, 5-8pm at @millsartmuseum in oakland — i’m super excited to share new work in this exhibition, alongside @leymusoom and @ranumukherjee . got some process shots for u here but the real deal is much more monumental 👀👀👀 see y’all shortly

inshallah bb #2 coming next month, so i gotta pregnant-model algorithm up this new artist book i have out called Seeing it for the Trees — it’s a meditation on interruption, making art as a mother, planting trees, israel/palestine, the jewish national fund, family legacy, afforestation as colonisation, bots, web scraping, and whether trees might be better off without us thinking we should be planting. book design by the amazing @nicolecameraphone and available to buy now at @millsartmuseum if you’re in oakland, or online (link in bio!) for $37 plus good old media mail shipping. limited run! art world scarcity! get one before i go into labour and cannot ship it to you!

yesterday i said goodbye to my studio @millscollege — did a tribute shoot in the @northeastern poncho they gave me when i moved in. farewell studio 208, i will miss yr vibes! show us open now @millsartmuseum

Coming up on Sat Sep 9, 2-4pm @millsartmuseum in Oakland— I’ll be giving a performative lecture called “Seeing it for the Trees” that critically examines the role of forests in the formation and maintenance of Zionism. Instead of using a central screen, this performative lecture will use live computer code to text images to audience members' phones during the event. REGISTRATION REQUIRED - link in bio. If you come, you’ll also get a get a special preview my upcoming exhibition at @millsartmuseum with @ranumukherjee + @leymusoom before it opens on Sep 19. All of this in partnership with @oaklandartmurmur . If you can’t attend in person, you can live-stream the event through @millsperformingarts 

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 Artist Liat Berdugo presents archival photographs from the Jewish National Fund (JNF), alongside personal images, to understand the role of trees in Israel’s ethnonationalist statehood. Central to the project is a computational bot the artist wrote to “scrape” or download the 50,000+ images of the JNF photo archive from the Internet, and text herself one image per hour for over a year. Seeing it for the Trees focuses on how the interruptive quality of a bot can challenge the ideological frameworks upon which one was raised—what a close reading of images can untangle about land, ecology, and nationalism. 

Viewers will themselves get these “interruptions,'' receiving images on their personal devices. The work asks, can a person be anti-Zionist and still be Israeli? Can a person object to the core beliefs they grew up with and still love the family and place that made them?
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