blind me! LIGHT
Monira Foundation
888 Newark Ave, Jersey City, NJ
Reception: October 19, 12-6 PM
In 2023, Katharina Gruzei, in Vienna, and Ann Messner, in New York, collaborated on a project in public space. Over 4000 miles apart, they mapped the locations of publicly accessible online surveillance cameras within their two respective cities. Choreographing each other’s movements through the online surveillance view, they tracked one another through the city, each carrying a full-length mirror. They passed camera to camera, using the mirror as a device to refract the sun into the lens of each unsuspecting surveillance cam – throwing back the stare and thus blinding the recording of their passing in view of each camera. Back and forth, they recorded each other’s actions as one camera after another was struck by blinding light. At night, they switched the mirror for a torch. The resulting video blind me! LIGHT, presents the recorded evidence the two artists left behind – traces of their movements through their respective cities. The glitched recordings become spectral artefacts, resisting the public surveillance with rudimentary tools and momentarily blinding the surveillance gaze.
blind me! LIGHT is presented by Monira Foundation and will be publicly installed at the front entrance of Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, starting October 19, 2025. The work will be on view 24/7 till Feb.17 2026.
About the artist Katharina Gruzei: Katharina Gruzei was born 1983 in Klagenfurt, Austria. She is an independent artist working across photography, video, film, sound, and installation. Her practice explores societal tendencies and socio-cultural issues, ranging from gender-related themes to questions shaped by urban environments. A central focus of her work lies in feminist concerns and projects in public space, often realized in site-specific contexts. Katharina Gruzeis works have been shown in international exhibitions and Film Festivals. Furthermore she participated in the Screen City Biennial (Stavanger, Norway), the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the Wroclaw Media Art Biennial (Poland), and the Linz Triennial (Austria). She has realized public space projects in New York, Montpellier, Klagenfurt, Lunz am See, Linz, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Hamburg, and Tokyo. Her work has received multiple awards and scholarships, among them the Theodor Körner Prize, the Ö1 Talents Award, and the Best Experimental Short Award at the Nashville Film Festival (USA). In 2023, she was selected as a Berlinale Talent for the Berlinale Film Festival 2024. Gruzei has also been awarded scholarships for Los Angeles, Paris, Paliano, Genoa, Moscow, and Tokyo. katharinagruzei.com
About the artist Ann Messner: Ann Messner, 1952 b. NYC, currently lives in Brooklyn. Ann Messner is a trans-disciplinary artist. Her work is a research based, often project focused, practice challenged by the more perplexing of dilemmas society finds itself in inner conflict over. Through processes of discernment, social constructions of reality are engaged and interrogated, as specific works develop. “The practice is an empathic response to unacceptable conditions. I respond to the fragile, tenuous, bonds that confirm our humanity. Thinking and acting in the world as an artist allows me to problem solve, to make peace on an emotional level, while at the same time intellectually recognizing space for imagination is closing in.” Ann is recipient of numerous fellowships inclusive of the National Endowment, Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. She was fellow at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (1999-2000) and senior fellow Princeton University Council on the Humanities (2001-2). She has been tenured Professor of MFA Integrated Practices at Pratt Institute. annmessner.net