INGA FONAR COCOS - Bio | www.ingastudio.com
Inga Fonar Cocos is a multidisciplinary artist born in Warsaw, Poland living and working in Tel-Aviv.
She Graduated from Tel Aviv University, Faculty of the Arts - B.A. Magna Cum Laude (1988) and is a Dean’s list recipient; she also graduated from Kalisher- Israel Polak Tel Aviv School of Art and continued M.A. interdisciplinary studies in the Arts faculty, Tel Aviv University.
Her work — ranging across layered installations, video, photographs, drawings and writing — engages with the change in Memory and in the way we remember, preserve and transfer personal and cultural knowledge and data in the Digital Era. The works evoke questions concerning memory spaces and the potential of disruption and erasure which actually grows as far as technology and its tools are perfected, and knowledge and data are kept in the digital Cloud.
By approaching notions of temporariness, speed, generation-change, virtual and concrete, she aims to understand the mechanisms and the invisible processes in daily phenomena, and to point at the disruption of reality which undermines the familiar order and human existence.
Fonar Cocos creates a complex language using elements at the intersection of technology, nature, science and art, which is expressed at the exhibition space which she transforms into exploration field. She uses elemental materials such as gypsum, wax, concrete, rubber, graphite and sound, and creates installations which emphasize the gap between the virtual and the concrete, the visible and the invisible and illuminate underlying processes of control, accessibility to knowledge, system failures and disappearance of data.
She has exhibited her works internationally in museums and public spaces, as well as in conferences: MWW Contemporary Museum Wroclaw, Poland; Mediations International Biennale, National Museum Poznan, Poland; International Conference ACSIS - Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden, Norrkoping, Sweden; Drawing Biennial Jerusalem; The Tenth International Conference on Jewish Names, Bar-Ilan University NAME; Ein-Harod Art Museum; Janco Dada Museum, Israel; Ashdod Museum of Art, Israel; The Prozna Project, Singer Festival, Warsaw, Poland; Kunstverein Bellevue-Saal Wiesbaden, Germany; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany, and other.
Fonar-Cocos is a recipient of numerous awards for her works- Ministry of Culture Prize for Creativity Encouragement 2016, Ministry of Foreign Affairs grant 2007, Council for the Arts grant 2004, Israeli Lottery and others.
Her video Name was finalist in the Israeli Documentary Film Competition, Doco-Beer-Sheba in 2011.
A comprehensive catalog of her works Viewer’s Version was published in 2009, by Ein-Harod Art Museum, Israel.
In 2014 she was invited to contribute a chapter about her work to the book, Sexing the Border -Gender Art and New Media in Central Europe. (Cambridge Scholars Pub.).
Her works are found in public and private collections: Museum of Art Ein Harod, Ashdod Museum of Art, Youna Fischer Collection in Ashdod Museum of Art, Janco Dada Museum, Phoenix collection, Coca-Cola collection Israel and others in Israel, France, Monaco, Germany, U.S.A.
Fonar Cocos is the initiator, co-founder and former chairman of the Israeli Professional Artists Organization, fighting for artists’ rights. She teaches and writes about art and her articles can be found in Terminal Contemporary Art Journal and Muse Art Quarterly Israel Museum Jerusalem.
An elaborated CV with list of publications about her works can be found in her site: www.ingastudio.com
