Annabel Paran

Statement

Annabel Paran is a Jerusalem-born interdisciplinary artist and performer. Paran’s work is a chain of translation across disciplines: she dances as a way to alter her consciousness; she writes to conceptualize what dancing revealed to her; she makes visual art to metabolize insight found in text and movement. Annabel treats sites of conflict as spaces of hybridity and transformation, and with her art she wishes to make space for contradictions and multiplicities embedded in situations of kinship and intimacy. Paran’s past work dealt with the politics and poetics of grief. Her most recent body of work is an ongoing research into the embodied experience of crisis, diffused between immersion in digital technologies, the threat of global ecological disaster and systemic violence. Paran is interested in world-building and the creation of immersive environments which speak with audiences’ bodies and call for psycho-somatic participation. She perceives her practice as a healing ritual grounded in negotiations between self and other, repeatedly translating bodies to each other in an attempt to find shared meaning.

GlogauAIR Project

How does grief exist in the more-than-human realm?

Annabel Paran works to build ritualistic spaces and objects as spatio-temporal containers that catalyze transformation, by integrating suppressed, erased and othered aspects of living experience into conscious presence. Her project is a sculptural + video installation. The sculptures are body-related, ritualistic/liminal pieces, made with bio-plastics and textiles. The sculptures are collaged with video work and mapped projections and sound to form a mutated ecosystem, simultaneously fractured and in flux. The project aims to explore ways in which being extends beyond the habitualized, and offer relations transgressing normative distinctions between “living” and “dead,” “natural” and “synthetic,” “self” and “other”. Annabel sees Berlin as a site in which grief /trauma is integrated into life rather than being denied. Multiplicity lives in Berlin’s tissue as a city: a past of much gravity intertwined with and into an energetic youth culture. The city thus inspires her as a fertile ground to explore these subjects.

CV Summary

• 2021
  • Ouroboric, solo performance in Deep Winter Healing, hosted by Essex Flowers Gallery and Collective View
  • What I Can’t Hold, Short Film, OFFICIAL SELECTION, NYC Independent Film Festival
  • Intentional Blur, concept writing piece published in The Kitchen Magazine
  • Investigative Operatics, Intl. collective research/performance/writing program experimenting with alternative pedagogies
• 2020
  • BFA in Sculpture and Integrated Practices, Pratt Institute, New York, USA. Honors include Excellence in Academic Achievement Award, Stutzman Foundation Senior Sculpture Award, president’s honor list and a merit-based scholarship.
  • Annabel is a member of The Moving Company performance art group since 2016, and a co-director since 2019. Selected performances with TMC include shows at Pace University Art Gallery, Katonah Museum and Battery Park.
• 2015
  • Co-founder/artist of the independent art project ‘Hamiffal’ by nonprofit art collective Bait-Reck in cooperation with the Jerusalem Municipality, Israel

Gallery