Nora Khan

Nora N. Khan is an independent curator and writer of criticism on digital visual culture, the politics of software, and philosophy of emerging technology. She is Executive Director of Project X for Art and Criticism, supporting X-TRA’s 25-year legacy of artists’ writing and art criticism in Los Angeles. She is the invited Curator for the next Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement in 2023, with Andrea Bellini, hosted by Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed in New York City in 2020, she worked closely with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions, in an exhibition that also featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. Khan’s decade of research and writing has focused on experimental art, music, and literature, with a focus on digital art, algorithmic art, machine learning-based art. Her short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019) on the logic of machine vision, and one co-written with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information). Forthcoming are The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole) on simulation and semantic mapping, and AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries). She frequently publishes prose and criticism in publications like Artforum and Art in America, and has written commissioned essays for major exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, the Venice Biennale – Estonian Pavilion, Centre Pompidou, Swiss Institute, and Kunstverein in Hamburg. Her curatorial practice and her writing have been supported by many awards over the last decade, including, a residency at La Becque, a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation (2018), an Eyebeam Research Residency (2017), and a Thoma Foundation 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art . She studied literature and fiction writing at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has served as editor of Topical Cream, focusing on supporting GNC and BIPOC critics, HOLO magazine; she was a longtime editor (2014-2021) at Rhizome. From 2018-2021, she was a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media, teaching critical theory and artistic research, experimental writing for artists and designers, and technological criticism. Her practice extends to a wide span of artistic collaborations, producing scripts, librettos, films, and even a tiny house, in A Wild-Ass Beyond: Apocalypse RN, with Sondra Perry, American Artist, and Caitlin Cherry at Performance Space, New York.