Jennifer Abessira (b.1984, Paris) lives and works between Tel Aviv and Paris. She holds an MFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. She graduated her MA studies in Interdisciplinary Arts and her BA in general history and French Literature, all from Tel Aviv University.
Jennifer Abessira
Selected solo exhibitions: What is the Use of a Book Without Pictures, Ariella Public Library, Tel Aviv (2022-2023); My Bauhaus is Better than Yours, Beit Hanna Harabi, Tel Aviv (2022); Our Tourism with Julien Donada, Institut Français, Tel Aviv (2022); SoFun with Eitan Bartal, Artists’ House, Tel Aviv (2021); The Intensity of Images, St. James Market, London (2021); reGeneration4, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2020); 100 years of Bauhaus, Engineering Administration in collaboration with Liebling House & Tel Aviv Municipality (2019); Don’t Think Twice, London Bridge Station (2017); La Tangente - The Impossible Project, Paris (2016); Alone Together, MFA Bezalel graduate show (2015); We Live As We Dream – Alone, ArtStation Gallery, Tel Aviv (2014)
Selected group exhibitions: Correspondences, La Galerie Rouge, Paris (2020-21); Primun Non Nocere, Minshar Academy, Tel Aviv (2020); London Is Open, London City Hall (2019); Always Duty Free, Artists Residence, Herzliya (2018); Tel Aviv Museum of Art + Teder, (2018); Au Soleil, Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Paris (2018); Fragments Of, Castel Gibson, London (2016); Yesterday We Wanted To Be The Sky, Kamarade, Stockholm (2015); Nothing Perishes, Soho Revue, London (2015); The Disappearing of Light, Artists’ House, Tel Aviv (2014); Goods, Moby Museum, Bat Yam (2013)
Selected awards and grants: Israeli Lottery (Mifal Ha’pais), 2013
“Jennifer Abessira is a photographer who works in between Tel Aviv and Paris, but the actual site of her art is her Instagram account. She posts her palpable images daily, creating an intimate journal that belongs to the public. Privacy, for her, is not opposed to being in the open. She does not need a “room of her own,” a studio in which the world’s imposing presence – its noise and flux of images -- could be bracketed [… ] In Abessira’s life, her images function as a coordinate-system for managing the formless and chaotic. She has always been attracted to archives and archival work and, in this sense, “Instagram comes in easy, with the simple platform it provides for organizing things.” In her Instagram journal, chaos and void do not disappear. They are fully present. But they appear through idiosyncratic modulations of order instantiated by a system of sardonic hashtags: #She Wanted to Die but She also Wanted to Live in Paris / #A Girl is a Gun Peow Peow / #TelAviv Forever / #The Triumph of Vegetation is Total / #Contribution to a Theory of Architecture, etc. Abessira carefully tags her images. Her hashtags are the verbal seams of a multi-levelled visual matrix. Encountering her work, we look at a new atlas of images that dreams of an infinite catalogue while speaking to us in an intensity that cannot be represented.” | Text by Prof. Hagi Kenaan
Projects
