Alhena Katsof was raised in Montréal, Canada and lives in New York City. She has organized exhibitions and performances including Towards the Unknown a traveling exhibition of drawings, scores, and graphic notations by the autophysiopsychic musician Yusef Lateef and Telepathic Improvisation, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s first solo exhibition and film commission in the US, which was organized with Mason Leaver-Yap at the Walker Art Center then exhibited at PARTICIPANT INC. and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
From 2011-2018 Alhena was the Director of Strategy and Protocol for Public Movement, a performative research body. The performances she created with Dana Yahalomi, Director of Public Movement, have been staged at many venues including the Santarcangelo Festival, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Alhena has presented Public Movement lectures at, for example, Universität Zürich, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and SITAC XI in Mexico City. Katsof and Yahalomi co-authored the book Solution 263: Double Agent as part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Neirmann (Sternberg Press). The book analyzes the way art is used as a tool of oppression by the settler-colonial state.
Alhena has written catalog essays about numerous artists including Polly Apfelbaum, Nicole Eisenman, and Gordon Hall. Her short-form writing has been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, KALEIDOSCOPE and MAP Magazine. Alhena's writing about exhibitions has been published in volumes including The Artist As Curator: An Anthology (Mousse Publishing); How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (MIT Press); and and As Radical, As Mother, As Salad, As Shelter: What Should Art Institutions Do Now? (Paper Monument). With Karen Kelly and Barbara Schroeder, she edited (and contributed to) the monograph Andrea Geyer: Dance in a Future with All Present (Dancing Foxes Press and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art). She edited the monograph Brendan Fernandes: Re/Form (Skira Press). Alhena is part of the editorial collective Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and serves as the editor of performance reviews.
Alhena’s research about the artist Hannah Höch’s material output and her illicit activities during the Third Reich, which included growing plants prohibited by Nazi horticulturalists while simultaneously burying in her garden artworks banned by the fascist regime, has been presented as performance-lectures. These lectures explore seeds as archives, the language of plants, colonial ethnobotany, roots, autochthony, and the ideological distinction between “humans” and “nature”. Lectures have taken place at Bridget Donahue, Rongwrong, and with the Center for Experimental Lectures. Alhena’s writing about gardens has been published in On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation (Valiz) and the upcoming Interior Garden (Hatje Cantz).
On behalf of the curator and scholar Elena Filipovic, Alhena was the primary research assistant for the book-length study David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale, which was published by Afterall: Books as part of the One Work series. Alhena was also part of the research team for the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base, a project of the Artist Archives Initiative hosted by Fales Library at New York University.
Alhena has participated in curatorial residencies and workshops at Denniston Hill, Artport, and Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. She was artist-in residence with Public Movement at IASPIS. Alhena was Volkswagen Fellow at MoMA PS1 where she worked with the design and research studio, Metahaven. Prior, she was Museum As Hub Fellow at the New Museum. She has organized exhibitions and events at A.Vermin, White Columns, Regina Rex, Leo Koenig Inc./Performa, Lucie Fontaine and de Appel Arts Centre.
Alhena has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard Collage. She is Part-Time Faculty at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School.
Alhena is pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at New York University. She was a participant of de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam, received an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art, and a Liberal Arts degree from Hampshire College.
For PDFs of Alhena’s writing please see: academia.edu