Dina Kelberman
Nervous

From June 1st to July 31, 2020
Residency on Dazibao's Instagram account
@dazibaomtl

Dazibao’s 2020 Instagram residency will host the work of artist Dina Kelberman.

Kelberman’s practice is one of obsessive collection and organization converted by a perfectionism that provokes interminable repetitions. Though her images are often sourced from the Internet, the artist doesn’t work within the random and fragmented semiotics of that medium. Instead, with a character of care and resourcefulness, she leans into that which is expressed through multiplicity or reiteration: “My work is about how everyone and everything is special, and so while specialness is not special, it is still pretty much the most exciting thing going.”

Dina Kelberman’s project Nervous will feature a series of video loops that compare and combine compulsive habits, recursively exploring the areas where comfort and anxiety are simultaneous. In the midst of Covid-19, these restless gestures for coping, once experienced privately by a minority, might suddenly become familiar to a vast majority who attempt to take cautionary measures. Instagram in this context and as a platform for the work, also speaks to a feeling both of necessity and of insatiability, while inducing the user/viewer in the repetitive, almost irrepressible gestures of tapping and scrolling.

A project by Dina Kelberman presented by Dazibao and broadcasted in partnership with Internet Archive.

Dina Kelberman is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. Kelberman has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Internationally and has created web-based collection works for the New Museum and The Marina Abramovic Institute (New York). Her work has been presented in numerous international biennials and has been written about in The New York Times, Art21, NPR, Known and Strange Things (Random House, 2016) and most recently The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2018) and in Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2018). In 2018 she was invited by poet Kenneth Goldsmith to speak at the UbuWeb conference in Athens and by Fotomuseum Winterthur to the P3 Post-Photography Prototyping Prize Biennial in London. In 2019 she completed her first feature-length recontextualization film, The Goal Is To Live. She is currently ranked 5th in the world for Most Lines in Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System.