Boris Oicherman was born in 1973 in St. Petersburg (Leningrad at the time), and currently lives in Minneapolis, MN, USA. After defending his doctoral dissertation in Color Science at the University of Leeds, UK, Oicherman worked as a senior research scientist in Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Israel. In 2009, he left the technological research to pursue a career in art. In 2017, Oicherman graduated with an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University, and since then has worked as the Cindy and Jay Ihlenfeld Curator for Creative Collaboration at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota.

Oicherman’s prime interest is in extremely location- and context-specific collaborative art practices where decisions on subject matter, means and media are direct products of the context. His practice embraces the complete freedom of adapting artistic action to the context. It is a practice of resistance to habits, of uncertainty as a state of mind, of inventing one’s art anew in every new project, where craft is in the learning by doing—rather than in the discipline-specific method of treating materials.

Most of Oicherman’s work is in public spaces. His interest in learning and in public art stems from the old question: how does art fit into life? Therefore, he likes working in collaboration, and in locations where people live and work. He believes that finding how art fits into life is only possible when art is considered within the whole context of life.

Oicherman’s ultimate ambition is to establish a process that has existence—and consequences—outside of arts. He likes finding how art can connect fields of knowledge, and how questions flow between disciplines. He would like to find out how art-thinking and art-making can fit into academic research, and imagine how art can become the catalyst of inquiry that is free from disciplinary conventions.

Oicherman participated in projects in Israel, US, Spain, Bulgaria, South Korea, Poland, and Croatia. He is the recipient of the Asia Pacific Fellowship of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea (2012); the Artist in Residence of fellowship at the Faculty of Life Sciences in The Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2013-2014); a number of the Israeli Lottery production and research art grants; and the Curatorial Research Fellowship of the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2018). Oicherman completed an Artport residency in 2014.