Meet the Residents: Liat Berdugo & Senem Pirler
In-person at Squeaky Wheel and online
Free or suggested donation; get tickets below
Squeaky Wheel is pleased to present this hybrid artist talk with our Summer 2026 Workspace Residents! Liat Berdugo and Senem Pirler will be presenting on their previous and current projects, along with a Q&A with the residents moderated by Kalmia Strong.
Liat Berdugo will expand her work Tsipori over Safuriyya with the creation of a speculative anti-archive using over half a million images from the Jewish National Fund’s archive to explore the relationships between state power, archives, and the right to representation. Working in Squeaky’s digital lab, Berdugo will construct speculative images: machine-hallucinated pasts that Palestine might have had, and futures it might yet hold. The project draws from a critical AI lineage, where AI is used not for efficiency or productivity, but as a tool of political and artistic resistance.
Senem Pirler will create a site-specific audiovisual performance at Silo City’s Marine A, titled Withholding. The performance positions inflatable sonic sculptures in the Silo, utilizing the structure’s concrete visual and acoustic elements, along with live modular synthesis and visuals that draw from histories of labor and extraction. This multi-sensory structure asks audiences to experience the silo not as a ruin but as an entity with ongoing memory and political charge, interrogating the architecture of capitalism through the bodies it has used and abandoned. This work continues Pirler’s explorations into how haptically engaged sonic sculptures can turn abstract concepts into embodied experiences.
For in-person attendees: The event will take place at Squeaky Wheel. Please note that you cannot enter Tri-Main Center after 7:30 pm. Catering from Ali Baba Kebab, with vegetarian options, will be provided.
For online attendees: A private link will be sent to you; the event will be available at the link at the start date and time. You will have access to the event for 24 hours; Squeaky Wheel members receive 1 week of access. Not a member yet? Sign up here.
Accessibility: If you’d like to request ASL interpretation for either in-person or the online viewing, please contact kalmia@squeaky.org by August 3. You can view additional information on Squeaky Wheel’s accessibility information here.
Funding for this session of Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is provided by the Teiger Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Special thank you to the panelists of this session of the residency, Ibrahim Kane, Carra Stratton, and Kathryn Ramey. Learn more about the program here.
Biographies of the artists
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Liat Berdugo is an American-Israeli media artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, ecology and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. Lately, her work has focused on image archives and the violent greenwashing of settler-colonialism in Israel/Palestine. Her work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), MoMA PS1 (New York), and Transmediale (Berlin), among others, and her writing appears in Rhizome, Temporary Art Review, Real Life, Places, and The Institute for Network Cultures, and various academic and open access presses. Along with Emily Martinez, she is one half of the art collective, Anxious to Make, and is the co-founder of the Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art series in the San Francisco Bay Area. Berdugo received an MFA from RISD and a BA from Brown University, and is an associate professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.
Senem Pirler (she/her) is a sound and intermedia artist, sonic improviser, and educator. Her interdisciplinary practice spans installation, performance, audiovisual essay, and spatial electroacoustic composition, rooted in Deep Listening, feminist methodologies, and improvisation as a research method—making knowledge by engaging and listening with the material, simultaneously a witness and a participant. Born in Turkey, she earned her M.M. in Music Technology from NYU Steinhardt and her Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She has performed at EMPAC, Roulette, Carnegie Hall, the LA Philharmonic, Akademie der Künste, Southbank Center, Mabou Mines, Elastic Arts, MIT Museum, and others. Her work has been supported by LMCC, Harvestworks, PACT Zollverein, Signal Culture, and EMS Stockholm. Pirler was awarded an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in the Music/Sound category in 2022, and the Malcolm Morse Award, honoring the work of Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening, in 2018. Dr. Pirler joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2024 as an Assistant Professor of Composition.
