Sonya Rapoport: biorhythm
San José Museum of Art
February 7–September 27, 2020
Curatorial Consultation to Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust and San José Museum of Art
Public Talk via Zoom and Video, April 30th, 2020
Biorhythm: Extensive Catalog Co-authored with Alla Efimova
Sonya Rapoport: Biorhythm installation at San José Museum of Art, 2020
“Throughout (1980), Rapoport used a commercially available biorhythm kit to track her physical, emotional, and intellectual condition each day. After completing a year, she compared her personal assessments with the computer-derived biorhythm calculations and found they correlated on only 13 days. On the one hand, Rapoport seemed to anticipate the future ubiquity of self-tracking—the use of digital applications to trace our exact location, monitor our sleeping habits, or even read personalized daily horoscopes to obtain self-knowledge through quantitative information. On the other hand, she exposed the fallacy of such a system.”
– From Biorhythm (catalog), 2020, by Terri Cohn and Alla Efimova
Terri Cohn was instrumental in the development of the Sonya Rapoport: biorhythm exhibition at the San José Museum of Art in 2020, curated by Kathryn Wade. The exhibition was centered on an in-depth exploration of Sonya Rapoport’s Biorhythm (1980-84), a data-oriented yet playful exploration of the human body as a computer. Cohn also enabled the recreation of Rapoport’s 1983 interactive, computer-mediated “audience participation performance.”
Serving as a curatorial consultant to both the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust and the museum, Cohn contributed to the conceptualization and execution of the exhibition. She also delivered a public lecture with Alla Efimova via Zoom on April 30th, 2020, discussing the significance of Rapoport’s work. Most notably, she and Efimova co-authored the comprehensive exhibition catalog Biorhythm (2020), providing in-depth analysis and contextualization of Rapoport’s pioneering exploration of technology and the human experience.
Building on her extensive history of working with Sonya Rapoport, including curating her 2011 and 2012 retrospective exhibitions and editing Pairing of Polarities, the definitive collection of essays on Rapoport’s work, Cohn’s fluency in Rapoport’s work was instrumental to the success of the exhibition and catalog.
While the Biorhythm exhibition was being prepared, Cohn consulted closely with the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust and the museum, bringing her deep knowledge to the forefront of the exhibition’s development. Her expertise was instrumental in shaping the show, which explored Rapoport’s pioneering use of technology to analyze data about the human body, emotions, and personality.
Cohn also played a significant role in the public discourse surrounding the exhibition, participating in a well-attended Zoom gallery talk on April 30, 2020, alongside curator Kathryn Wade and fellow Rapoport scholar Alla Efimova.
Cohn co-authored with Alla Efimova the exhibition catalog Biorhythm (2020), which is the most comprehensive study of this important work, and has found wide distribution through the San José Museum of Art and the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust. The catalog explores Rapoport’s creation of a “scientific method” that combines personal experience with technological analysis, a unique synthesis of subjective and objective inquiry.
The catalog offers a thorough analysis of Rapoport’s journey from traditional art forms to computer-based work, highlighting how Biorhythm anticipated the digital world we currently inhabit.
