WATER MILL, NY.- The Parrish Art Museum has selected Jonah Bokaer for Platform: the exhibition series that invites a single artist to respond to the art, architecture, and environmental conditions of the Museum, presented this year from July 9 through October 16. Bokaer is the first choreographer to be featured in the Platform series, an open-ended invitation to a single artist per year to present a project within the building and grounds of the Parrish Art Museum. Platform invites artists to consider the entire Museum as a potential site for new works.

Bokaer, recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, is an interdisciplinary artist who merges choreography, visual art, film, and artistic research. The artist has cultivated a new form of choreography with a structure that relies on visual art and design, with the aim to transform notions of how the public views and understands dance. He has been active as a choreographer and exhibiting artist since 2002, showing museum works in over 30 nations.

Bokaer's Platform project will feature a two-channel projection of a new choreographic work for film, shot within the dramatic vistas of the Parrish Art Museum. The artist will also create 122 choreographic drawings based on the musical score of Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett's 1977 opera NEITHER. The delicate mylar drawings will be installed on the wooden beams that form the Museum's "spine," or central corridor. Suspended in space, unframed, and exposed to the air currents of the museum, Bokaer anticipates that the drawings, too, may display movement.

“It is eye-opening to witness Jonah Bokaer’s singular creative process. He brings to Platform a sensibility that combines dance, media art, history, and storytelling,” says Andrea Grover, the Century Arts Foundation Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum, who organized the exhibition.

"My dialogue with curator Andrea Grover and colleagues of the Parrish Art Museum began in 2012, and over the years I've come to admire the museum's architecture from the inside out,” said Bokaer. “Andrea and the staff at the Parrish are stewarding some of my best work; this is also a very special moment to be supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the United States Artists Award, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation which help me to realize these works. Sometimes in an artist's life, circumstances come together in the best possible way—this is one such moment."

Jonah Bokaer was born to Tunisian and American parents, and has been active as a choreographer since 2002. He has created over 55 works in a wide range of mediums, such as film, opera, applications, and installation, in a variety of venues, ranging from stages, to museums and galleries. He works internationally, exhibiting and touring worldwide.

Bokaer has created works that merge choreography, visual art, and moving images for Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, PS1 MoMA, The New Museum, The Museum of Arts & Design, MASS MoCA, Miami MOCA, MAC Marseille, IVAM Valencia, Palazzo Delle Arti Napoli, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, SCAD Museum of Art, Ludwig Museum of Budapest, MUDAM Luxembourg, La Triennale di Milano, and others. Bokaer’s frequent artistic collaborators include Daniel Arsham, Anne Carson, Richard Chai, Merce Cunningham, Anthony McCall, Abbott Miller, Tino Sehgal, and Robert Wilson.

Bokaer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Visual Arts (Italy, 2016), the United States Artists Award (Dance, 2015), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Choreography (USA 2015), the Prix Nouveau Talent Chorégraphie (Paris 2011), the Jerome Robbins Special Prize Fellowship in Choreography from the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy, 2011), and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011).