Tali Keren - Un-Charting

UN-CHARTING, 2023 - Ongoing

Un-Charting is an ongoing multi-media project consisting of an immersive 3D animated documentary film and a platform for collaboratively developed public programming.

Un-Charting , 3D animation film still

The simulator film Un-Charting is, at core, a documentary. Approaching the genre critically, the 17-minute film weaves narrated 19th-century documents together with interviews and footage that I began recording in 2017. These sources are displayed in annotated museum cases that are encountered by viewers before they enter the immersive 180-degree video installation, informing the experience of a film that appropriates science fiction aesthetics with precise historical context.

Un-Charting, simulator room consisting of 180-degree screen and 3D animation film.

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

Un-Charting Archival Materials, Vitrine : Presenting archival, visual and historical materials of the 3D simulator film.

Un-Charting: New Jerusalem Plan, Custom vinyl flooring with an 18th century British colonial plan.
Installation view, James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center.

UN-CHARTING, Public Programs.

Key to Un-Charting are public programs that take place on top of – and actively unsettle and counter – Brothers’ map of his envisioned New Jerusalem. These programs are created collaboratively with organizations, scholars, artists and activists, and reflected on local and global themes relating to the exhibition from an intersectional lens. At the James Gallery, public programs were created in partnership with curator Adam HajYahia's "Footnotes On The Fictive Present,” curator Katherine Carl, New Red Order & Kite, and with CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center (MEMEAC). These gatherings are aimed at creating a site of gathering and collective knowledge production, grounded in a de colonial framework. The programs included talks, performances and screenings which foreground the emancipatory possibilities of political imagination, through experimental pedagogy, conversations, and artistic experimentation.

“Growing Beloved Community: Restorative Justice Gathering”. 2023, James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 2023

“Charting The Archive of Ancestral Histories and Place" Artist Kamau Ware in conversation with researcher Jennifer Jones

Maqam concert with musicians Amir Elsaffar and Hamid Al-Saadi. The performance followed Zahra Ali’s "Uprisings and Women'sMovement In Today's Iraq" organized by MEMEAC

"Dream Riots:" Musical Performance with Bergsonist and Gavilán Rayna Russom. April 1st, part of Adam HajYahia’s “Footnotes on the Fictive Present”

Un-Charting, installation view, CUNY Graduate Center.

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