Exhibitions & VIDEOS
SHEFFIELD MUSEUMS’ ARTIST TALK ON CREATIVITY AND MOTHERHOOD - JANUARY 2025
A recording of my online artist talk for The Sheffield Museums is available by clicking this link.
The MOTHERLOAD series in the ACTS of CREATION exhibition shows what it looks like when one tries to pursue a creative life and live with your children simultaneously. Soren will share images from her collection and talk about the process and consequences of making photographs of the sleep deprivation, emotional turbulence, isolation and physically draining rollercoaster that is a mother’s unconditional love.
GET IN THE GAME - san franicsco museum of modern art
October 2024- January 2025
Artists Shaun Leonardo and Katherine Majkut, SFMOMA Director Chris Bedford with Tabitha Soren at the SF MOMA opening reception in October 2024.
California State Warriors Basketball Coach Steve Kerr and Tabitha Soren in front of “Net Impact,” Soren’s sculpture in the GET IN THE GAME exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The show travels to the Perez Art Museum in Miami and the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas in 2025.
SURFACE TENSION at the Princeton University Art Museum (Installation Photo By Jason Hu)
Don’t We Just Touch Each Other To Prove We Are Still Here: Photography and Touch
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM MAY 11, 2024 - AUGUST 4, 2024
Don’t We Just Touch Each Other To Prove We Are Still Here: Photography and Touch || Curated by Susannah Baker-Smith and Susan Bright
The title of this exhibition is a line from the poem ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ by the Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist Ocean Vuong. Threaded throughout the poem are feelings of longing, rapture and pain, the knowledge that it is through touch that we find ourselves, not just our physical selves, but who we are, our humanity as well as our vulnerability. Susannah and I take up the question ‘Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? for this exhibition, and explore its aliveness and complexity through the framing of materiality, affect, embodiment and collaboration in relation to touch and photography.
To touch is always to be touched, our bodies are always responding to our environment in some way. Touch is a mutual tool for social connection, a way to communicate, it is also our means of feeling embodied, and the vehicle for intimacy. The haptic, however, is not immediately associated with photography, but we propose that it has a significant relationship with the medium, one that can be inclusive and diverse, spanning all kinds of relationships, as well as different processes and approaches. As Merleau-Ponty observes, “since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world”.
Featured artists: Katrien de Blauwer, Phoebe Cummings, Odette England, Sayuri Ichida, Jeff Mermelstein, Joanna Piotrowska, Patrick Pound, Clifford Prince King, Richard Renaldi, Tabitha Soren, Carolee Schneemann Melissa Schriek and Lisa Sorgini
NEW TERRAIN - WORCESTER ART MUSEUM
April 6, 2024–July 7, 2024
New Terrain: 21st-Century Landscape Photography, opened at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. Surface Tension photographs are shot on 8x10 inch film negatives so the photographs are often very big. WAM has printed "Katie's Vacation Photo" larger than I ever dreamed of (18 x 28 feet) and hung it on the front of the museum's impressive facade. I'm thrilled! The exhibition focuses on how 21st-century artists use different photographic processes to explore the idea of landscape. Comprising approximately 30 artworks created over the past 20 years, the exhibition will highlight a wide range of techniques—including 3-D printing, weaving, embroidery, collage, and the use of nontraditional materials like rusted cans and lake water — that reinterpret the traditional practice of photography. Through these artworks, New Terrain serves as an entry point into deeper narratives about technology, identity, political activism, and history through the concept of the landscape. This exhibition is organized by Nancy Kathryn Burns, the Museum’s Stoddard Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs, shown above. The museum is located at 55 Salisbury Street, Worcester, MA 01609, USA The exhibition is in Gallery 223.
ACTS OF CREATION - BRISTOL, ENGLAND
March 8 - May 26 th, 2024
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, a major group traveling exhibition, curated by Hettie Judah, plunges into the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the feminist avant-garde to the present day.
While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about motherhood as a lived experience, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will address this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important – if rarely visible – cultural figure.
Featuring the work of 60 artists including Tabitha Soren, Paula Rego, Tracey Emin, Chantal Joffe, Sally Mann, Wangechi Mutu, Celia Paul, Hannah Starkey and Carmen Winant, among others, this exhibition will approach motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation will explore lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights.
DAEGU PHOTO BIENNALE - SOUTH KOREA
September 21 - november 5, 2023This year’s Daegu Photo Biennial pays attention to the unique characteristics and power of the photographic medium that lead contemporary visual culture and visual arts by increasingly dominating human consciousness, senses, and art. In this way, the biennale seeks to revive the amazing power and unique capabilities of photography, which have been misunderstood as being forgotten in the visual arts since the 1990s, summoning them back to Daegu, the proud home of Korean photography. Surface Tension is part of the “Light Bursts” main exhibition in the Daegu Art and Culture Center.
ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: LOCAL LANGUAGE OAKLAND
JUNE - SEPTEMBER 2023Summer 2023 : I was the Artist In Residence at Local Language Art, a fabrication studio in Oakland. The results are photographs printed on unconventional materials. These photographs actually have a surface. It's my push for materializing photographic culture now that very few people even print their snapshots.. Local Language's address is 477 25th Street in Oakland and the work is on view and for sale there.
PhotoFairs new york - THE MIND BABY PROBLEM
SEPTEMBER 7TH - 10TH, 2023The Mind Baby Problem, my first large-scale installation in New York City, is a series of five self-portraits as a nursing mother, printed on coated cotton bedsheets at 54 x 75 inches each, hung in the manner of a laundry line, whose palette follows the day from cool dawn to warm dusk. From a truss at the Javits Center, two of the five sheets folded over themselves slightly askew, but the same image continued uninterrupted. Each double-sided sheet is crisply photographic and gracefully sculptural. Each one makes public the intimate dyad of mother and child, which is the root of our highly social species. At a time when artificial intelligence and global political regression pose the question “What does it mean to be human?” this series answers with images of the sleep deprivation, emotional turbulence, and physically draining rollercoaster that is unconditional love.
BERKELEY ART MUSEUM - What Has Been and What Could Be
June 7, 2023 - July 7, 2024Tabitha Soren’s Surface Tension series is featured in What Has Been and What Could Be: The BAMPFA Collection at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, an exhibition of pieces from the museum’s collection and organized by Executive Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm. The year-long exhibition showcases seventeenth-century Japanese scrolls, eighteenth-century European paintings by women artists, and American landscapes and folk art of the nineteenth century, alongside mid-century abstract painting, feminist art, quilts, and conceptual art. Other artists include Romare Bearden, Albert Bierstadt, Margo Humprey and Christina Quarles.
RIVALRY PROJECTS - collective selection / selective collection
April 28 - June 16, 2023 BUFFALO , NEW YORK 
CURATED BY CAMILØ ÁLVÅREZ
This exhibition considers collective action - how to make people move, be moved, and be moved by them. Defined as an action taken together by a group, whose goal is to enhance their condition and achieve a common objective, the exhibition utilizes this idea to consider how the aggregation of our choices impacts how we see, experience, and relate to the world -- for better or for worse.
Concurrently, this exhibition rebukes the impulse of compartmentalizing visual art, instead asking questions around cultural divestment, permacrisis, performative nihilism, bodily relations, manufactured relatability, and the aspiration for controlled narratives. collective selection / selective collection revels in the ambiguity of an anti-narrative, or moreover, a narrative which is not “…strictly autobiographical nor auto-fictive, but rather gleaned from a mixture of experiences and temperaments…”
Included Artists:
Alia Ali, Katherine Bradford, Kitty Brophy, Delia Brown, Rashayla Marie Brown, Crystal Z Campbell, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Talia Chetrit, Jaina Cipriano, Susanna Coffey, Mairikke Dau, Karon Davis, Taylor Davis, Ashley Doggett, Caroline Douville, Latifa Echakhch, Patricia Encarnación, Regina José Galindo, larí garcía, Gina Goico, Raven Halfmoon, Allison Janae Hamilton, Clarity Haynes, Laleh Khorramian, Adriana Lara, Laryssa Machada, Joiri Minaya, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Yvette Molina, Azita Moradkhani, Rebecca Morgan, B. Ingrid Olson, Andrea Ottenwalder, Raquel Paiewonsky, Yelaine Rodriguez, Beverly Semmes, Alexandria Smith, Sheida Soleimani, Tabitha Soren, Christl Stringer, Martine Syms, Carrie Mae Weems, Brittney Leeanne Williams, and Francesca Woodman.
RULE GALLERY - SOFT MIRROR
March 16 — May 6, 2023 DENVER, COLORADO
at RULE DENVER || Guest curated by Britland Tracy ||
Kei Ito, Dionne Lee, Rafael Soldi & Tabitha Soren
Soft Mirror unites four contemporary photographers who transform histories of violence into personal reflections on ritual, power, intimacy, and survival. Their practices stretch the material and representational functions of a photograph, reimagining it as both relic and reckoning in a culture saturated with visual input. Through alternative darkroom processes and repurposed screen-based imagery and ephemera, these artists cast their gaze onto the world while simultaneously looking back at themselves.
LANEY CONTEMPORARY - RELIEF
February 3rd - March 25th, 2023
Artist Talk / Book Signing: Saturday, Feb. 11, 11:30 - 1pm
Laney Contemporary is pleased to present Relief, a selection of works by California-based artist Tabitha Soren. A visual artist in different domains for over twenty-five years, Soren has long explored the intersection of psychology, culture, politics, and the body. Books, research studies, and statistics lay a necessary analytical foundation for the visual ideas she communicates. These data points then merge with her experiences growing up in a military family, spending her youth moving around the world and adjusting to cultural differences, social structures, and visual cues that came with each relocation. A through-line connects the three bodies of work, evoking the universal paranoia and contemplation of our historical moment.
Laney Contemporary || 1810 Mills B Lane Blvd. || 2nd Floor || Savannah, Georgia 31405
Open Tuesday - Friday 11am – 5pm || Sat. 11am - 2pm and by appointment.
Tel 912.438.4442 || info@laneycontemporary.com
Jackson Fine Art GALLERY - RELIEF
September 16 - december 23, 2022
RELIEF: Selections from Running, Surface Tension & Relief
Though a palpable sense of pathos connects all her images, Soren begins each new series using the methodical investigative tools she used during her time in journalism. Books, research studies, and statistics lay a necessary analytical foundation for the visual ideas she communicates. These data points then merge with her experiences growing up in a military family, spending her youth moving around the world and adjusting to the cultural differences, social structures, and visual cues that came with each relocation. This constant navigation of environments hinged on threat and survival led to a true understanding of what it means to always live on high alert, giving Soren a level of empathy for internal struggle and a sincere desire to show the myriad ways we reveal ourselves as we move through the world.
Jackson Fine Art is located in the Buckhead shopping district of Atlanta, just one mile south of Lenox Square Mall. East Shadowlawn Avenue is two traffic lights south of the Piedmont Rd/Peachtree Rd intersection (off of Peachtree Rd).
Jackson Fine Art
3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue
Atlanta, GA 30305
info@jacksonfineart.com || Tel 404.233.3739 || Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 5pm
BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE MAKING OF RELIEF
TULCA Festival of the Arts- The world was all before them
november 4 -20, Galway Ireland 
TULCA Festival of the Arts, Galway, Ireland
This forthcoming edition of the festival titled The World Was All Before Them, explores the notion of futurity and asks—in this moment of global change, upheaval and uncertainty—what the political potentials might be in imagining new futures and envisioning new ways of being in this world.
This year’s TULCA will run in November 2022 across multiple venues in Galway city and county. Surface Tension will be shown along with work from Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Elise Rasmussen, Becca Albee, Caroline Jane Harris, Christopher Steenson and Filip Berte & Cliona Harmey among others.
Clare Gormley is a curator and researcher from and based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is Head of Programmes and Partnerships at Belfast Photo Festival, where her recent projects include the curation of Zanele Muholi’s first solo exhibition on the island of Ireland (2021), and major forthcoming commissions with artists including Kensuke Koike (2022) and Hannah Starkey (2023).
WABE City Lights Interview with Tabitha Soren 🎧
Tabitha Soren's new photo exhibition Relief opens at Jackson Fine Art Gallery. Before there was YouTube and online video streaming platforms, there was MTV — “Music Television.” The channel revolutionized the way we viewed music, and it elevated the music industry in a completely new way.
Anyone who watched it in the 1990s probably saw TV reporter Tabitha Soren. The former journalist has since pivoted from news to photography, now internationally renowned for her work in the medium.
Her new exhibition, Relief is currently on view at the Jackson Fine Art Gallery from Sept. 16 to Dec. 23. Soren recently sat down with “City Lights” producer Summer Evans over Zoom to talk about her body of work.
MASS-ART art museum - Motherload
june 11 - december 18, 2022
Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, is organized by a curatorial team that includes design historians, birth advocates, and medical and midwifery history experts. The exhibition explores the arc of human reproduction through the lens of design and art from the 19th century to the present day. The display of nearly 200 works includes historic and contemporary breast pumps, baby monitors, forceps, and maternity clothes, alongside vintage advertisements, and contemporary art across media. The exhibition demonstrates the evolution of rights and societal norms pertaining to con(tra)ception, pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experiences over the last 150 years, highlighting that birth – and the material culture that surrounds it – impacts every living person.
Designing Motherhood at the MassArt Art Museum will bring together, for the first time, the art and design works exhibited at two previous venues and will incorporate work by five additional contemporary artists – Joan E. Biren, Jess Dugan ‘07, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ani Liu, and Tabitha Soren – who join a rich group of contemporary and historic artists and designers tackling subjects and ideas related to the topic at hand.
MassArt is located at 621 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA and is open Wednesday - Sunday from 12pm - 6pm excepts Thursdays when it is open until 8pm.
BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE MAKING OF SURFACE TENSION
Pier 24 - Surface tension
June 2022 - JANUARY 2023
Looking Forward—the second of the anniversary exhibitions—will examine works collected primarily since Pier 24 Photography’s founding, including Soren’s large scale Surface Tension photographs. Together with Looking Back from 2021, these shows consider the collection’s origins, recent history, and future trajectory.
Pier 24 is located on the Embarcadero directly beneath the Bay Bridge, between Pier 26 and the Fire Station in San Francisco. Admission to Pier 24 Photography is always free of charge and open by appointment Monday - Friday 9:00am to 5:15 pm.
ULSTER MUSEUM NORTHERN IRELAND - Surface Tension
May 27 - October 30, 2022
Surface Tension will be exhibited outside the United States for the first time this summer as part of the Belfast Photo Festival. The Festival and the Ulster Museum will present, “Against The Image: Photography. Media. Manipulation,” featuring the work of Soren, Victor Sloan, Alexandra Rose Howland and Now You See Me Moria. Soren’s artist talk will take place Saturday, June 4, 2022 at 12pm at Ulster Museum. It is free and open to the public.
The exhibition looks to examine the authority of the photograph in our era of mass media and mass (mis)information. How we consume news and media imagery has evolved, with access to the world seemingly at our fingertips: is what we see the reality?
Artists are exposing this tension, between the truth of events and how they are presented. Responding to various global events and conflicts, the artists included here challenge and expose photography’s highly subjective and mediated nature. They do this by subverting the medium itself — working onto the surface of, distorting or otherwise manipulating images — to expose narratives that often go unseen or some ways resist representation. In doing so they encourage us to question what photographic practice is in the modern age and reflect on how we absorb media in our daily lives.
This exhibition is co-curated by Clare Gormley, Head of Programmes and Partnerships at Belfast Photo Festival, and Anna Liesching, Curator of Art at Ulster Museum (National Museums NI).
Museum of CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY - Surface Tension
July 8 - October 22, 2022 
Beyond The Frame, curated by Kristin Taylor, includes Surface Tension along with many other photographs from the permanent collection of MOCP. From storytelling to journalism, expressions of selfhood to shedding light on social issues, photographs have infinite capacities to engage, communicate and convey.
Each gallery features works focused on critical topics that appear over and over again in the history of the medium, such as portraiture and the human subject, landscape and place, and staged and constructed images. By placing works by historical and contemporary, local and international artists together according to distinct themes, this exhibition invites viewers to look with awareness, and when they re-enter the image-saturated world beyond the museum’s walls, to pursue thoughtful, questioning engagement with the visual depictions they encounter. There is always more to the story beyond the frame.
MOCP is located at 600 South Michigan Avenue and open everyday from 10am -5pm except Thursdays when it is open until 8pm.
ARTIST TALK: National museum of women in the arts , washington dc
Recorded presentation: Tuesday, March 8, 2022
San Francisco Airport United Terminal 2 november 2021 - March 2022
Surface Tension
These photos speak of the startling and uncanny continual interaction between our skin, itself a screen for complex fleshly machinery, and the phone, which masks a world of machinery that was built with the express purpose of more efficiently monetizing everything that our flesh (and mind, and soul) might desire. These two systems, animal and machine, meet on this glassy surface; the marks left behind are the only physical record of this meeting, and the marks have become near-invisible to us, in part because they’re on the eye’s surface, and are thus one of the few parts of daily experience that the eye can’t easily record.
FLOWERS GALLERY november 25, 2021 –january 8, 2022
Small Is Beautiful
Flowers Gallery is pleased to present the 39th edition of the annual Small is Beautiful exhibition, which will take place at the Cork Street gallery and online.
Small is Beautiful was first established at Flowers Gallery in 1974, inviting selected contemporary artists working in any media to present works with a fixed economy of scale, each piece measuring no more than 7 x 9 inches. Continuing in the same spirit to the present day, Small is Beautiful XXXIX presents a rare opportunity to purchase smaller pieces by internationally recognized names and discover new talents. Two pieces from Tabitha Soren’s brand new unique resin work, called Some Blows Are Heavy, will be on view for the first time.
Small Is Beautiful Installation, Cork Street, 2021
Burn It All Down, 2021
Mixed Media: archival ink jet print, water-based ink, archival resin, acrylic paint, birch wood back frame
Mills College Art Museum September 18 – December 12, 2021
Surface Tension
Featuring photographs by Bay-Area artist Tabitha Soren, Surface Tension explores the intersection of everyday technology with culture, politics, and human contact.
The Mills College Art Museum Surface Tension exhibition is from September 18 - December 12, 2021. It is free and open from 11am - 4pm (except Mondays when the museum is closed.) Please wear a mask inside the museum. The show is curated by Stephanie Hanor, director of the Mills Museum.
Using an 8x10 large-format camera, Soren shoots iPad screens under raking light to reveal the tactile trail we leave behind. The images beneath are a compendium of private and public experiences, from a young child blowing a kiss goodnight to her mother, to the protests that followed the fatal 2014 shooting by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The images she chooses are drawn from web searches, text messages, social media content, and personal pictures, raising questions about authenticity and exploring the difficulty and lack of desire to distinguish between reality and fiction. Soren’s images serve as a poignant meditation on the role of digital devices in society and offer a reminder of the traces, both physical and digital, that we leave behind when using them.
3D Tour courtesy of Artland
Modern Art Notes Podcast
Tyler Green and I discuss my work on the occasion of “Surface Tension” at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California. The exhibition features work of pictures of iPad screens made to reveal how we interact with digital screens in ways that join touch, art history and the present. The exhibition is on view through December 12. To listen click on the image here 🎧
Nearest Truth Photography Podcast
In this Nearest Truth episode, Brad and I speak about my new book published by RVB Books and my exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum both entitled Surface Tension. The interview deals with the myriad anxieties and tensions placed on us through the technological use of the internet, screens, and social media. Click to listen 🎧
Fraenkel Gallery
Another West
In 2019, Fraenkel Gallery presented Another West, curated by American photographer Richard Misrach. Comprised of work by eleven established and emerging artists, the exhibition surveys contemporary approaches to the Western landscape, and offers a counterpoint to Watkins’s sublime vision. While Watkins was at times employed by railroad and mining companies that were transforming the land, the artists here use a variety of strategies to reveal the consequences and aftermath of the American concept of Manifest Destiny. Included in the show are works by Tabitha Soren, Johnnie Chatman, Lewis deSoto, Mercedes Dorame, Mishka Henner, Nancy Holt, Zig Jackson, An-My Lê, Meghann Riepenhoff, Ed Ruscha, and David Benjamin Sherry. By presenting wide-ranging responses from artists with diverse backgrounds, the show illustrated shifting echoes of established traditions.
Images available to view by request at
49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94108
