[1] Brought into a world of agriculture, her academic pathway led her to become internationally known for her pioneering networked performance art and collective writing experiments.
Abrahams began to work with computer software (specifically DOEK, created for her by Jan de Weille in 1993[3]) to develop and construct installations based on the complexities of her paintings.
She developed a website called Being Human with net art works she described as performative interventions in the public space of loneliness = the Internet (1997–2007).
[10] Since 2007, Abrahams' work delves into and contextualizes how people react and form relationships in distributed online groups, for example in Huis Clos / No Exit[11] and Angry Women.
Abrahams states "[t]he site [Being Human] is based on the idea that the internet is an artistic medium that permits addressing people in their own intimacy, non-mediated by an art context.
[24] The exhibition held the event entitled Shared Still Life/Nature Morte Partagée which was centralized with a telematic still life for mixed media and LED message board.
Participants were given the opportunity to communicate with those at Kawenga – territoires numériques, situated in the media arts centre in Montpellier, France where they played and rearranged objects in still life whilst sending messages between each other.
[25] In a review written by Maria Chatzichritodulou, she comments on how the minimal use of physical objects gave the performance a sort of 'nakedness' whilst creating a still life piece of artwork from stationery and office equipment.
It also initiates a technological and physical exchange between participants as well as recognising a disconnection from an intangible corporeal reality shared by fellow active audience members.
With the title pertaining to a theatrical terms as a claustrophobic piece of Satre, Abrahams integrates the virtual world and the performance device at a distance through the visual and audio recordings of a webcam clustered together to create a split screen.
Huis Clos/No Exit was also presented at On Translation, NIMK Amsterdam, 2010, with Ruth Catlow, Paolo Cirio, Ursula Endlicher, Niciolas Frespech and Igor Stromajer.
This was an emotional journey for a group of women participants who, connected via webcams and with Abrahams as the facilitator, expressed and shared their inner frustrations with the condition to remain on camera throughout.
[33] The internet is part of her daily life, and her social engagement online allows her to interweave iteration, producing glitches, connection resistance (through buffering and dis/reconnection), sending information, and recognizing holes in the time space continuum.
Abrahams proposes that Sherry Turkle's description of how we hide behind technology instead of engaging in more direct and intimate relationships with people[34] is just one part of what is happening: at the same time, new modalities of communication are developing online.
[38] The project was included in the show Erreur d'Impression, curated by Alessandro Ludovico at publier à l'ère du numérique, Jeu de paume, Paris in November 2013[39] and the Electronic Literature Collection volume 3, February 2016.
[41] Abrahams created a sound piece meant to externalise the discomfort felt by people during the Covid-19 pandemic through the raw and raspy reality in a "song" where personal respirations and computer generated distorted heart beats mix.
She gathered extracts from "Silences" by Frans van Lent to provide more background sounds to further the experience of anxiety and loneliness felt by people all over the world during the pandemic.