Annie Abrahams

In 2013, Abrahams and Emmanuel Guez began the ReadingClub, an online venue for collaborative reading and writing performances. The project was included in the show Erreur d'Impression, curated by Alessandro Ludovico at publier à l'ère du numérique, Jeu de paume, Paris in November 2013 and the Electronic Literature Collection volume 3, February 2016.

During April to August 2014 while on a residency at CONA in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Abrahams explored what it means to be an '(e)stranger'. The project involved a website, a performance and the publication of a book.

On 12 February, On Collaboration Graffiti Wall combined text and audio communication: participants reflected on the problems that persisted in online collaboration on a website created for the exhibition. This documentation and reflection were displayed to other participants throughout the duration of the exhibition. Subsequently, Huis Clos/No Exit – Jam, a sequel from an earlier telematic performance event, challenged the reception of auditory information through collaborating to create a sound performance using webcams from across the world in which played throughout the exhibition.

Abrahams challenges the dramatic orderings in her web performance of Huis Clos/No Exit – On Collaboration situated in CNES La Chartreuse in early 2010 for six performers whom became accustomed to reading material, illustrations that symbolized and depicted computer monitors. The purpose was to make the creation come to life through the performers. With the title pertaining to a theatrical terms as a claustrophobic piece of Satre, Abrahams integrates the virtual world and the performance device at a distance through the visual and audio recordings of a webcam clustered together to create a split screen. The objective of the piece was to test the levels of intimacy that can be gained from webcam sessions through a task based activity. The performers were then asked to create a single human face using the entire video frame of the webcams, made up of skins and bodies and evoking a sense of unity and intimacy despite the singular audio and visual capture of each performer.

In 2012 Abrahams started the project Angry Women. This was an emotional journey for a group of women participants who, connected via webcams and with Abrahams as the facilitator, expressed and shared their inner frustrations with the condition to remain on camera throughout. Abrahams commented that the performance also tested the cultural barriers between women. In total, 24 participants took part in the installation. The webcam conversations were also presented on a 3x4 grid. The project developed as a research project of 5 performances with only women, an Angry Man performance that took place on 12 April 2012 in Labomedia Orleans, followed by two mixed gender versions for the 2012 Upstage festival. Videos of Angry Women Take 1 & 2 were shown in Training for a Better World, Abrahams' solo exhibition at the CRAC Sète (28 October 2011 – 1 January 2012).

In a questionnaire in 2012, Abrahams stated that her original reason for studying biology was the quest to find answers about herself and the world she is living in; however, this proved indecisive and so she pursued a career in creating artworks that taught her how to live and how to respond to what life presents. The internet is part of her daily life, and her social engagement online allows her to interweave iteration, producing glitches, connection resistance (through buffering and dis/reconnection), sending information, and recognizing holes in the time space continuum. Abrahams proposes that Sherry Turkle's description of how we hide behind technology instead of engaging in more direct and intimate relationships with people is just one part of what is happening: at the same time, new modalities of communication are developing online. Abrahams also asserts that while social networking platforms such as Facebook encourage users to give clear optimistic images of themselves, it becomes more and more important to cherish and reveal the 'messy' sides within us and to find room for the darker side of human nature, as she found in her exercises for Huis Clos/No Exit. Her performances continue to reveal human behaviours that we consciously or perhaps subconsciously try to avoid.

In 2012 she co-organised the first CyPosium – an online symposium on cyberformance, and published Trapped to Reveal – On webcam mediated communication and collaboration, in JAR No. 2.

Abrahams first networked performance from the UK, If Not You Not Me, took place at the HTTP gallery in London in 2010. It incorporated previous projects such as the One the Puppet of Other (2007) and The Big Kiss (2008) with its central communicative medium entitled Shared Still Life/Nature Morte Partagée. The exhibition held the event entitled Shared Still Life/Nature Morte Partagée which was centralized with a telematic still life for mixed media and LED message board. Participants were given the opportunity to communicate with those at Kawenga – territoires numériques, situated in the media arts centre in Montpellier, France where they played and rearranged objects in still life whilst sending messages between each other.

This methodology of performance was then adapted and re-performed on a smaller scale with four performers instead of six. As part of the festival based in London If Not You Not Me at the HTTP Gallery in London (12 February till 20 March 2010) it furthered Abrahams' concept of employing traces from previous events. The adaptation is entitled as Huis Clois/No Exit – Jam; the four performers Antye Greie (Finland), Pascale Gustin (France), Helen Varley Jamieson (New Zealand) and Maja Kalogera (Spain/Croatia) were given the task to synchronize sound together whilst competing with the technological constraints such as time delay when transferring from peer to peer. As part of the whole exhibition in London, Abrahams used digital technologies that accessible to the general public and communicates the factors that create a 'disconnection' in amongst a live video/sound collaboration. This fragmented connection between peers in both the virtual and real words consequently generates a fragmented intimacy, frustrations of connectivity (real-time application), shared absences and the desperation to connect from a distance as well as the body's needs of relieving sensual longing in regards to corporeal reality. Huis Clos/No Exit was also presented at On Translation, NIMK Amsterdam, 2010, with Ruth Catlow, Paolo Cirio, Ursula Endlicher, Niciolas Frespech and Igor Stromajer.

From 2007, Abrahams' work delves into and contextualises how people react and form relationships in distributed online groups, for example in Huis Clos / No Exit and Angry Women. She has collaborated with a number of artists including Mark River, MTAA, Nicolas Frespech, Igor Stomajer and Antye Greie. Her interactive performances often follow a desired 'footprint left in the sand' imprinted and left by the duration of the piece as well as formulating and creating a collective language from many different ethnicities and identities of individuals. The key factor of investigation revolves around the notion of human behaviour when presented with a new interactive archive of networked based performance; she explores how participants 'click' and 'choose' opportunities to create new behaviours and perhaps a new way of thinking, for example a personal interaction without any interference from peers in ViolenceS, a 2009 collaboration with Nicolas Frespech.

Abrahams also engaged with the traces left behind from a performance on the personal level, as well as generating a new collaborative voice, for example her 2006 collaborations with Clement Charmet in The Webflaneur; "a Data Dandy trip" and with Igor Stromajer in Operra Internettikka.

Abrahams continued to explore computer functions, telematic performance and visitor choices through artworks that are concerned with an appreciation of beauty through contemplation and observation of aesthetic detail (for example Separation, Painsong, Karaoke). In a 2005 interview by ARTeMEDIA she makes reference to her educational background in biology and her engagement with social networking, comparing the new and continuously developing form of social networking to the engagement and communication skills of monkeys in her studies, concluding that the internet has great potential as a universal platform for many new modalities of interaction.

Abrahams taught at the University of Montpellier as part of the arts department from 2002 until 2005. Following this, she curated InstantS for the net.art platform panopile.org (2006 to January 2009), and the online performance series Breaking Solitude and Double Blind (2007, 2008 and 2009)

Brought into a world of agriculture, her academic pathway led her to becoming internationally known for her pioneering networked performance art and collective writing experiments. After completing her doctorate, she was assigned as an assistant researcher at the University. At the same time she studied painting, and after gaining her diploma Abrahams received arts funding from the Dutch government. Moving to France in 1987, Abrahams began to work with computer software (specifically DOEK, created for her by Jan de Weille in 1993) to develop and construct installations based on the complexities of her paintings. In 1992 her computer drawings were exhibited in her show Possibilities, located at the l'espace Forum in Nice, France. From 1996, Abraham delved further into networked performance, with the emphasis on space and distance social networking entails, by creating a physical space to interact with the 'virtual world' in a show in Nijmegen. She developed a website called Being Human with net art works she described as performative interventions in the public space of loneliness = the Internet (1997–2007).

Abrahams was born in a small farmer's village in the Netherlands. She gained a Doctorate in Biology from the University of Utrecht (1978) and a Diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts Arnhem (1985).

Annie Abrahams (born 1954) is a Dutch performance artist specialising in video installations and internet based performances, often deriving from collective writings and collective interaction. Born and raised in Hilvarenbeek in the Netherlands, she migrated to and settled in France in 1987. Her performance work challenges and questions the limitations and possibilities of online communication and collaboration.