Plan your visit to The CJM!

Jewish Culture & IdeasJewish HistoryPop CultureMusicFilm & VideoContemporary Art

Kutiman: offgrid offline

Jul 20, 2017–Jul 8, 2018

Kutiman, a young Israeli musician and composer, utilizes found audio and video from the Internet as the source of his own work. That is, he subtly and magically knits together music that others have uploaded to the web. At the cutting edge of contemporary art practice, he is extending the traditions of assemblage, cut-up literary technique, appropriation, and found art into the realm of music and sound composition. 

Get Social

Share your experience with us @jewseum using #KutimanCJM

about the exhibition

In 2016 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art worked with the artist as he developed the piece titled offgrid. This work is made up of twelve monitors that play a 38-minute-long video and music composition by Kutiman on a loop. It is made up of minutely edited snippets of music played by soloists found on the Internet, downloaded by Kutiman. The composition extends spatially as well because monitors around the room periodically join in or go silent, so that there are thousands of possible combinations of video and sound sources.

The installation will be presented in the Stephen and Maribelle Yud gallery, the architectural gem of The CJM building; its eccentrically-angled walls pierced by 36 windows in a chapel-like environment is a beautiful setting for Kutiman’s state-of-the-art digital creations. 

gallery photos
ABOUT KUTIMAN

Kutiman (born Ophir Kutiel in 1982) lives in Zicchron Yaacov in Israel near Haifa. He studied music at Rimon Music College in Tel Aviv and in 2003 went to Jamaica where he worked with the Marley family. In 2006 he signed to a German label, Melting Pot, and began putting out recordings. In 2010 he won the ACUM (The Israel Association of Composers, Authors and Publishers of Musical Works) award for producing. Kutiman is best known for his viral video/audio mashup online albums Thru You and Thru You Too (2014) the latter of which was awarded a 2015 Webby Award. Due to the success of Thru You, in October 2010, Kutiman was invited by YouTube to perform at the YouTube Play grand opening at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

SUPPORTERS

Kutiman: offgrid offline is organized by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s presentation was made possible thanks to the support of the Young Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. 

The CJM’s presentation is made possible by supporting sponsorship from David Agger and the Ullman Family. Additional support is made by The Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest and The CJM Contemporaries Committee.

The Contemporary Jewish Museum thanks The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for its lead sponsorship of The Museum’s exhibition program.

Image Credits

Installation view of Kutiman: offgrid offline, on view Jul 20, 2017–Jul 8, 2018 at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo credit: JKA Photography.