Career
Zakari's studio practice freely combines research methodologies and artistic strategies borrowed from various disciplines such as photography, documentary, performance, storytelling, installation, graphic design and social interventions. According to her web site, Zakari draws upon contemporary social issues by making connections through personal narratives, history and popular culture. Combining her skills as a graphic designer and an artist, Zakari's work often culminates in the form of an artist's book. One of her early projects was a diary ''The Turk and the Je''w on which she collaborated with her husband Mike Mandel while he lived in Pullman, Washington and she in Chicago, Illinois. They used the web as a means to communicate daily and further explore their cultural differences, then published the diary as an artists' book in 1998. The book ''webAffairs'' (2005) is a narrative, told in photographs and text, of Zakari's experience in virtual space. Using a pseudonym, she began a four-year-long performance and documentation of a webcam community where people meet to have virtual sex. The book comments on viewer's relationship to technology, the objectification of the body, personal surveillance tools and gender performativity. For fifteen years, Zakari and Mandel collaborated on a body of work about the conflict between secularist culture and the Islamist movement in Turkey. Their journey, which began in 1997, resulted in photographic images, video interviews and public performances. In 2010 they published an encyclopedic artists' book, ''The State of Ata'' (2010) followed later by a conceptual exhibition ''7 Turkish Artists.'' Zakari and Mandel produced the book ''Lockdown Archive'' (2015) in response to the manhunt and lockdown of April 19, 2013, in their hometown of Watertown, Massachusetts. The couple designed and produced a series of commemorative porcelain plates "Shelter in Plates" depicting SWAT teams and heavy artillery near their home during the lockdown.Collections
Zakari's work is in the permanent collections at Yale University Library, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute library, The Kinsey Institute Library, Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and the Addison Gallery of American Art.Exhibitions
She has had solo exhibitions in Boston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Los Angeles and also in Izmir and Ankara, Turkey. Recent exhibitions include ''Relay,'' January 2017 and ''Strategic Planning,'' January 2018 at Kingston Gallery, ''Boston and Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today'' at theReferences
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zakari, Chantal Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century American women artists American graphic designers American women graphic designers Book artists American contemporary artists American digital artists Women digital artists Feminist artists Interdisciplinary artists American performance artists Tufts University faculty American women academics