Betwixt: Queer Imaginings and Liminal Futures

Rah Eleh

nov 3, 2023 - jan 12, 2024

Artist bio

Rah Eleh is a PhD candidate at Die Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Rah’s work has been exhibited extensively internationally at spaces including: Venice Biennale (ECC, Palazzo Mora), Images Festival (Toronto), Museum London, Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, Massachusetts), Miami Art Basel, Nieuwe Vide (Haarlem, Netherlands), and the Onassis Cultural Center (Athens, Greece). She has been the recipient of numerous awards including: Long-listed 2023 Sobey Art Awards, Chalmers Arts Fellowship, SSHRC Canada Graduate and Doctoral scholarships, and several Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council grants. She has been awarded many residencies including the Koumaria Residency (Greece, 2016), Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna, 2014) and the ArtSlant Georgia Fee Residency (Paris, 2014). 

SuperNova, 2019

SuperNova is a talent show parody that consists of seven characters the artist performs. The performers are Oreo, Fatimeh, and Coco and each of their acts examine issues of race and ethnic performance; Oreo performs a magic trick with a deck of white “race cards,” Fatimeh sings and performs a neo-orientalist ethnic identity and Coco performs a dance as a diasporic and hybrid subject. The talent show sets an ideal stage to critically examine race and ethnic performance.

Xenofuturist Manifesto Lightbox Installation

a text based collaboration with ChatGPT. The artist prompted the AI with the five tenets that make up her proposal for a liminal futurism and ChatGPT responded by reiterating the original text. The prompts offered to the AI from the artist are liminal melancholy, disidentification, expanding the geographical imagination, new language and limbo logic.

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