Heat Signature, 2018
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Live Video Feed, FLIR FCR thermal camera, industrial heaters, audio video cables, drop ceiling, mics, PC computer
Heat Signature
Heat Signature is a culmination of Tali Keren’s ongoing research into Judeo-Christian ideology and the military-industrial complex. Juxtaposing a design for the Great Seal of the United States unsuccessfully proposed to Congress by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in 1776 with a FLIR thermal camera, Keren underscores the inherent relations between American national myths, religious belief, and the quest for power and control.
The recreation and manipulation of Jefferson and Franklin’s rejected design—which depicts the biblical story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, with America serving as the ‘New Zion’—through a heat-based performative sculpture, allows Keren to explore the effects of thermal surveillance methods on bodies and mediascapes. These conjured imageries lie at the heart of the exhibition. Jefferson and Franklin’s phantasmic vision is brought to life with an infrared camera and electric heaters. Temperature shifts translate into focus shifts in the monochromatic live video feed, as the heaters turn on and off and the image of the Seal, which is embedded in the ceiling—unseen to the eye—heats and cools. Yet, it is in the constant appearance and disappearance of the projected image, in the tension between the visible and the invisible, that the viewer is asked to ponder the relation between militarized media perception and the meaning of ‘temperature seeing’—even as their own body heat is registered by the thermal camera. In Heat Signature, Keren turns the FC-R camera, designed to make human body heat visible, away from the viewers, whose collective temperature alters the background hue of the live-projected image of the Seal.
In addition, testimonies presented as both video transcripts and audio recording reflect on a temperature-based visuality. Attorney Kenneth Lerner discusses the Fourth Amendment and thermal technology’s threat to privacy. Brandon Bryant, who served in the US Air Force, shares his daunting military experience using infrared cameras and describes humans transforming into targets between infrared’s black-hot and white-hot polarities. MIT media scholar Lisa Parks considers how temperature-based optics affect conceptions of racial and ethnic difference and perceptions of violence and death.
TALI KEREN
UN-CHARTING, 2021-2023
Currently on view at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center through June 4th. More information about the show can be found here, on the James Gallery’s website. Information about upcoming programs, can befound here.
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Un-Charting is the third chapter in Tali Keren’s trilogy which critically examines the material and ideological imbrication, both past and present, between conservative American Christian Evangelicals, and Zionism. By doing so, Keren interrogates shared settler-colonial imaginaries of Israel and the U.S. Through layering of 18th-century sources and contemporary documentary materials, Un-Charting reveals the ways transnational messianic myths travel across time and geography, manifesting in colonial state-sanctioned violence and erasure in Palestine and beyond.
All the materials presented in the 3D animation film at the heart of Un-Charting are drawn directly from historical documents, interviews, and footage recorded by the artist. Un-Charting presents the words, ideas, and architectural plan of British colonial naval officer and self-proclaimed prophet Richard Brothers (born in the British settlement of Newfoundland in the Inuit Nunangat lands, 1757), along with contemporary interviews Keren conducted with a Jewish Israeli choreographer and an American Christian Zionist Evangelical. The two women have, since the 1970s, been sending American Evangelical youth from Faith Bible Church in Colorado to perform for Israeli soldiers. The American troupe performs Israeli folk dances dressed in various “traditional” garb, including Israeli military uniforms. Keren incorporates footage she filmed on a soundstage in Colorado of the teens’ “Israeli Soldier Dance” routine.
Un-Charting consists of three spaces:
Resource Room
The Resource Room presents research materials and documentary sources used in the film as well as additional reading materials and programming information.
The New Jerusalem Plan
This space is an entry into the world of the exhibition. Visitors step on an enlargement of Richard Brothers' unrealized 1801 urban plan for a New Jerusalem, a place he imagined in detail, having never set foot in Palestine. Brothers’ plan, which is laid clearly in his book Description of Jerusalem, flattens and wipes away the real place, making way for his Biblical vision of a utopian ordered grid. During the exhibition, this space serves as a forum of interventions, talks, performances, and screenings, which challenge and counter such romanticized, ideological, and colonialist imagery. The programs are created in partnerships including curator Adam HajYahia’s “Footnotes On The Fictive Present,” New Red Order x Kite, and a series of talks with The Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center.
Simulator Room
The film at the heart of the exhibition is projected on a 180-degree screen in the Simulator Room. It combines the documentary and historical materials presented in the Resource Room, culminating in an immersive cinematic 3D animated world of militarized settler-colonial mythologies. Viewers are placed in the eye of the storm of an ideological state apparatus and invited to reflect on the crucial role that myth, ideological rhetoric, and instrumentalized theologies play in actual state violence and erasure of people and culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
Un-Charting looks at the entangled ties between Zionism’s colonization in Palestine and European colonization in the so-called “New World”. Doing so, it addresses the ongoing effects of western territorial conquest, partitions, occupation, and imperial cartography. Through an intersectional framework, the project carves a space for resisting, re-telling, dismantling, and countering these narratives and structures, while radically imagining ourselves into equitable worlds beyond destructive myths.
Un-Charting: Documentation from selected forums
Growing Beloved Community: Restorative Justice Gathering
Mona Benjamin Screening and Talk with Tali Keren (event information here.) part of Footnotes on the Fictive Present organized by Adam Hayajia
Adam HajYahia
Kamau Ware in conversation with Jennifer Jones (event information here.)
Maqam concert with musicians Amir Elsaffar and Hamid Al-Saadi. The performance followed Zahra Ali’s "Uprisings and Women's Movement In Today's Iraq" orgenised by MEMIAC
Dream Riots Musical Performance with Bergsonist and Gavilán Rayna Russom (event information here.)
Apart of Footnotes on the Fictive Present organized by Adam HajYahia
Simulator Film by Tali Keren Main Credits:
Artist and director: Tali Keren
3D art | design | compositing | animation: Ayelet Shoval
Script and development: Tali Keren, Nir Shauloff
Documentary interviews archival research: Tali Keren
Dramaturgy: Nir Shauloff
Voice Actress: Lottie Beck Johnson
Sound Design & Mixing Engineer: Micha Gilad
Cinematographer: Or Flicher
Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System?
Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System?, collaboration with Alex Strada 2021- (Queens iteration 2021-2022), participatory installation with sonic soapbox sculptures, recording booth, evolving oral archive, six 4K videos, and five 60x120” canvas banners, Queens Museum, Flushing, NY
Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System? is made in collaboration with Alex Strada. In this multi-media work, we ask visitors to critically engage with the U.S. Constitution and pose two questions: What 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would you propose? And: Do you think it is possible to amend an unequal system?
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Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System? is made in collaboration with Alex Strada. In this multi-media work, we ask visitors to critically engage with the U.S. Constitution and pose two questions: What 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would you propose? And: Do you think it is possible to amend an unequal system?
Central to the installation are sonic soapbox sculptures that build upon the history of the soapbox as a site of collective struggle, while also emphasizing listening, mutuality, and access. These objects emit an in-progress oral archive of responses to the project’s questions that have been recorded by visitors and will accrue over the course of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to engage by listening and by using the recording booth to add to this work.
The installation is activated through a series of public workshops we have planned with community partners and legal scholars from the CUNY law school. These gatherings bring people together to collectively consider, question, and debate systemic repair, radical change, and abolition to radically imagine more equitable futures. More information about the project can be found here at the Queens Museum Website. And, here you can listen to a call-in segment on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show.
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The project traveled to YBCA where a new site specific integration was on view from October 2022 to March 2023. More information about the YBCA iteration is available here.
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TALI KEREN
UN-CHARTING, 2021-2023
Currently on view at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center through June 4th. More information about the show can be found here, on the James Gallery’s website. Information about upcoming programs, can befound here.
![]()
![]()
![]()
Un-Charting is the third chapter in Tali Keren’s trilogy which critically examines the material and ideological imbrication, both past and present, between conservative American Christian Evangelicals, and Zionism. By doing so, Keren interrogates shared settler-colonial imaginaries of Israel and the U.S. Through layering of 18th-century sources and contemporary documentary materials, Un-Charting reveals the ways transnational messianic myths travel across time and geography, manifesting in colonial state-sanctioned violence and erasure in Palestine and beyond.
All the materials presented in the 3D animation film at the heart of Un-Charting are drawn directly from historical documents, interviews, and footage recorded by the artist. Un-Charting presents the words, ideas, and architectural plan of British colonial naval officer and self-proclaimed prophet Richard Brothers (born in the British settlement of Newfoundland in the Inuit Nunangat lands, 1757), along with contemporary interviews Keren conducted with a Jewish Israeli choreographer and an American Christian Zionist Evangelical. The two women have, since the 1970s, been sending American Evangelical youth from Faith Bible Church in Colorado to perform for Israeli soldiers. The American troupe performs Israeli folk dances dressed in various “traditional” garb, including Israeli military uniforms. Keren incorporates footage she filmed on a soundstage in Colorado of the teens’ “Israeli Soldier Dance” routine.
Un-Charting consists of three spaces:
Resource Room
The Resource Room presents research materials and documentary sources used in the film as well as additional reading materials and programming information.
The New Jerusalem Plan
This space is an entry into the world of the exhibition. Visitors step on an enlargement of Richard Brothers' unrealized 1801 urban plan for a New Jerusalem, a place he imagined in detail, having never set foot in Palestine. Brothers’ plan, which is laid clearly in his book Description of Jerusalem, flattens and wipes away the real place, making way for his Biblical vision of a utopian ordered grid. During the exhibition, this space serves as a forum of interventions, talks, performances, and screenings, which challenge and counter such romanticized, ideological, and colonialist imagery. The programs are created in partnerships including curator Adam HajYahia’s “Footnotes On The Fictive Present,” New Red Order x Kite, and a series of talks with The Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center.
Simulator Room
The film at the heart of the exhibition is projected on a 180-degree screen in the Simulator Room. It combines the documentary and historical materials presented in the Resource Room, culminating in an immersive cinematic 3D animated world of militarized settler-colonial mythologies. Viewers are placed in the eye of the storm of an ideological state apparatus and invited to reflect on the crucial role that myth, ideological rhetoric, and instrumentalized theologies play in actual state violence and erasure of people and culture on both sides of the Atlantic.
Un-Charting looks at the entangled ties between Zionism’s colonization in Palestine and European colonization in the so-called “New World”. Doing so, it addresses the ongoing effects of western territorial conquest, partitions, occupation, and imperial cartography. Through an intersectional framework, the project carves a space for resisting, re-telling, dismantling, and countering these narratives and structures, while radically imagining ourselves into equitable worlds beyond destructive myths.
Un-Charting: Documentation from selected forums
Growing Beloved Community: Restorative Justice Gathering
Mona Benjamin Screening and Talk with Tali Keren (event information here.) part of Footnotes on the Fictive Present organized by Adam Hayajia
Adam HajYahiaKamau Ware in conversation with Jennifer Jones (event information here.)
Maqam concert with musicians Amir Elsaffar and Hamid Al-Saadi. The performance followed Zahra Ali’s "Uprisings and Women's Movement In Today's Iraq" orgenised by MEMIAC
Dream Riots Musical Performance with Bergsonist and Gavilán Rayna Russom (event information here.)
Apart of Footnotes on the Fictive Present organized by Adam HajYahia
Simulator Film by Tali Keren Main Credits:
Artist and director: Tali Keren
3D art | design | compositing | animation: Ayelet Shoval
Script and development: Tali Keren, Nir Shauloff
Documentary interviews archival research: Tali Keren
Dramaturgy: Nir Shauloff
Voice Actress: Lottie Beck Johnson
Sound Design & Mixing Engineer: Micha Gilad
Cinematographer: Or Flicher
Heat Signature
Live Video Feed, FLIR FCR thermal camera, industrial heaters, audio video cables, drop ceiling, mics, PC computer
Heat Signature, 2018
Heat Signature is a second chapter of Tali Keren’s research into Judeo-Christian ideology and the military-industrial complex. Juxtaposing a design for the Great Seal of the United States unsuccessfully proposed to Congress by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in 1776 with a FLIR thermal camera, Keren underscores the inherent relations between American national myths, religious belief, and the quest for power and control.
The recreation and manipulation of Jefferson and Franklin’s rejected design—which depicts the biblical story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, with America serving as the ‘New Zion’—through a heat-based performative sculpture, allows Keren to explore the effects of thermal surveillance methods on bodies and mediascapes. These conjured imageries lie at the heart of the exhibition. Jefferson and Franklin’s phantasmic vision is brought to life with an infrared camera and electric heaters. Temperature shifts translate into focus shifts in the monochromatic live video feed, as the heaters turn on and off and the image of the Seal, which is embedded in the ceiling—unseen to the eye—heats and cools. Yet, it is in the constant appearance and disappearance of the projected image, in the tension between the visible and the invisible, that the viewer is asked to ponder the relation between militarized media perception and the meaning of ‘temperature seeing’—even as their own body heat is registered by the thermal camera. In Heat Signature, Keren turns the FC-R camera, designed to make human body heat visible, away from the viewers, whose collective temperature alters the background hue of the live-projected image of the Seal.
Testimonies presented as both video transcripts and audio recording reflect oמ temperature-based visuality. Attorney Kenneth Lerner discusses the Fourth Amendment and thermal technology’s invation of privacy. Brandon Bryant, who served in the US Air Force, shares his daunting military experience using infrared cameras and describes humans transforming into targets between infrared’s black-hot and white-hot polarities. MIT media scholar Lisa Parks considers how temperature-based optics affect conceptions of racial and ethnic difference and perceptions of violence.
Projected image revealed at a temprature of 131.8 f
Projected image revealed at a temprature of 99.2 f
Exhibitio documentation (video walkthrough)
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