Artist Talk: Tali Keren

In this artist talk, New York-based artist Tali Keren will share in-progress work from Delta/Desal: A Border Ecology, a cinematic and sonic installation in development for a solo exhibition at MOCA in fall 2026. The project traces the entangled relationship between the largely unused Yuma Desalting Plant in Arizona and the Ciénega de Santa Clara, a vast wetland in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta that emerged from decades of agricultural runoff. Through working footage, field recordings, and research materials, Keren will discuss how the project examines the ways water infrastructure reshapes ecosystems, borders, and everyday life across the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. The talk will explore maintenance practices at the plant, ecological monitoring in the Ciénega, and layered histories of treaty obligations, salinity control, and ecological emergence.

 

ARTIST BIO:

Tali Keren is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working across video, installations and expanded research methodologies. Her practice examines the often-invisible mechanisms of empire, tracing how ideology materializes through law, infrastructure, and theology. Working with video, sound, archival research, and alternative mapping, she translates these systems into visual and narrative forms grounded in lived experience across human and more-than-human worlds.

Keren’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Queens Museum; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; The James Gallery at CUNY Graduate Center; and Eyebeam. She is a 2023–2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2022 Artadia Award recipient and has received support from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Desert Humanities Institute at Arizona State University. Keren is currently the inaugural artist-in-residence at ASU’s Water Institute, where she collaborates with hydrologists, climate scientists, and students.