Daniella Ben-Bassat

Daniella Ben-Bassat is an artist and musician living and working in Providence, RI. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ben-Bassat’s practice comprises zines, sound art, and experimental and rock music, united under an interest in revealing and reversing the corrective and regularizing aims of technology. Her projects subject machinery to the hapharzardness and absurdism native to human touch and narratives. Gleaming the Cube, a performance piece that has undergone several iterations since its debut, places exposed circuitry in a crude wooden armature. Collapsing the categories of user and performer, Ben-Bassat’s live manipulation of Gleaming the Cube transforms the autonomy and constancy of technology into something contingent and vulnerable.

In Skymall, US Weekly, and Sports Illustrated, a series of zines distributed by Chicago-based publishing house Amigos, Ben-Bassat reproduces slick, mass-produced magazines by hand. Deliberately unpolished, they offer a translation which allows the viewer to re-examine the content of these mainstream materials for their social, cultural, and political cores. Ben-Bassat has produced projects with Amigos Publishing and AS220, and produced the weekly radio show “Get Out Of Town” at Brown University Student and Community Radio.  Ben-Bassat also performs in the two-person band Mother Tongue and the solo project Taskmaster. She is currently a member of the Dirt Palace, a feminist art space in Rhode Island.