Booklaunch,

Minerva Project 3

Miki Carmi and Tamy Ben-Tor with Coco Fusco

May 25, 2022, 6:30pm
Café & Bookstore

Editor and writer Yasmeen Siddiqui, founder of Minerva Projects, presents Project 3: Tamy Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi.

Artists Tamy Ben-Tor, and Miki Carmi engage in an intimate and honest conversation that launches their two-part monograph Text Book and Archive published by Minerva Projects. Book contributor and past professor of Miki and Tamy, Coco Fusco talks with them about the book-making process and the artists’ longstanding relationship. Together, they will reflect on and introduce topics that jostle between Tamy’s absurdist performances that conflate subjects to unravel core emotional, social, and hierarchical formulations embedded within contemporary US culture and Miki’s iconic, probing paintings that construe the specificity of humanity and memory.

Image: Detail from Tamy Ben-Tor and Miki Carmi archive

About the Artists

Tamy Ben-Tor, a performance artist, and Miki Carmi, a painter, are both from Israel but met in New York during their MFA program. Since then, parallel explorations have developed into an exchange, full of excavations and analyses of human archetypes/clichés. Miki reveals the marks that define internal drives and desires; Tamy turns up the volume of normalcy to the point of perversion.

About the Books

Text Book includes authors from distinct fields who have been commissioned to respond to the artists’ work [Martin Brest, Norman Chernick-Zeitlin, Coco Fusco, Kate Gaudy, Kosuke Kawahara, Adara Meyers, and Alpesh Kantilal Patel]. By intersecting art historical analyses, an artist’s interpretation, the reaction of a playwright, and a work of experimental fiction, Minerva Projects aims to upend the usual ways painting and performance art are described. Text Book’s companion, Archive: Tamy Ben-Tor & Miki Carmi, manifests in physical form the progression of Tamy’s and Miki’s work and the development of their interrelated practices. Both the tome structure and the embedded texts function to shift points of view for both reader and authors.

Minerva Press makes artist-centric books and was founded by editor and writer Yasmeen Siddiqui in 2018.They develop projects “in all sorts of places—a garage, perhaps a library, an artist’s studio, or park—these settings help us think and talk about art, all in the hopes of generating and exchanging ideas among experts and general audiences. We gather, we talk, we document the exchanges, and then writers and designers create the books.”

Series

Dear Reader

Dear Reader is an occasional, yet focused forum that presents publications (some in process, some existing, some just seeing the light) and unpacks their processes of making

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