Biography
Rene Gabri often works within the folds of cultural practice, social thought and politics. Much of his practice springs from contact with others; dialogues and conversations with friends, colleagues, thinkers and individuals he encounters by chance.
In Disorientation II, Rene Gabri and frequent collaborator Ayreen Anastas presented What Everyone Knows (2006), a video installation work that explores the lives lived by Palestinians in occupied Palestine and in Israel.
Anastas and Gabri were among the principal organisers of the New York artist community 16 Beaver Group, founded in 1999. Their work together includes The Meaning of Everything, One Step Forward Two Steps Back (2010),Camp Campaign (2006), RadioActive Discussions (2002) and United We Stand (2003). Their films have been shown widely, including at the Beirut Art Center (2009) and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2009). Their book The Meaning of Everything, Vol. 1 was published in 2009 by Paraguay Press, Paris.
Other projects by Gabri include his film Movements (2002) and his work with the German collective e-Xplo. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Sensible Grounds: Tuning into the Rhythms of the Chronic, Nida Art Colony, Lithuania (2021); Out Of The Shadows, Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan (2019); Tanya Leighton: 10 Year Anniversary, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2018); and I can call this progress to halt, LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, USA (2017).
Gabri completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Programme in 1999. He has taught at the University of Architecture in Venice and the City University of New York, Staten Island.
Born in Tehran, Gabri lived in Athens and Los Angeles before moving to New York where he continues to live and work.
SAF participation:
Sharjah Biennials 12 and 8
Related
In the absence of the objects seen
The work of Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri engages questions of the human condition amid a world of increasing speed, scale, automation and accumulation by dispossession.
MM 2015: memories of our underdevelopment, a symposium
memories of our underdevelopment, a symposium takes the form of an arabesque—interwoven motifs, which together form a composition. The three motifs are: the arabesque itself (in the shadows of Said's Orientalism); the binary of development/ underdevelopment and the past, the present, the potential.
