Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form
Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form
Embedded Files
MIT List Visual Arts Center
April 11 - August 2, 2026
Co-curated with Natalie Bell
Performing Conditions gathers twenty-five artists and collectives whose works formally enact debt and dependency. Rather than depicting labor or representing exploitation, these works perform the relationships they examine, reflexively incorporating their own conditions of production, reproduction, circulation, and display.
Performance, here, extends beyond theater and dance to include the performance of ventures, financial instruments, and workers. The labor considered is not only the output of those recognized as artists, but also the creative production and reproduction performed by everyone. The exhibition’s cast of laborers is correspondingly wide: an actor whose livelihood is tied to a financial algorithm, the submissives who execute an artist’s paintings, hospital workers who perform a childbirth simulation, the plantation cooperative whose sculpture sales buy back their land, List Center staff wearing shoes designed by factory workers for nine hours of comfortable standing.
Contracts appear as creative instruments and objects of critique, staging artistic labor’s uneasy relationship to the logic of exchange. Some works index their own entanglement with institutions and infrastructures, while others enact refusal or withdrawal. The relational asymmetries of performance are made explicit in delegation and scores. Reenactments surface inherited and interpersonal debts, which are likewise registered in sculptural materials like tobacco, memory foam, and stretched pantyhose. A constellation of works turns to the unpayable debts generated by reproductive labor: the unwaged work of care and provision upon which all other labor depends.
Debt and dependency have long connoted various forms of gendered and racialized dispossession—from sharecropping and subprime mortgages to the subjugation of housewives and colonized people. But they are an inescapable fact of social life: We are all, always, sustained by others in a communistic flux of need and ability. Rather than disavowing debts and dependencies, the works in this exhibition proliferate a vocabulary of heteronomy and contingency, service and support, leaning and needing.
Featured artists: Elizabeth Catlett, Blondell Cummings, Sophia Giovannitti, Goldin+Senneby, Irena Haiduk, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Chauncey Hare, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Yazan Khalili, Autumn Knight, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Reba Maybury, Senga Nengudi, Adrian Piper, Joshua Schwebel, Dread Scott, Xaviera Simmons, Cally Spooner, Ced’art Tamasala, Cassie Thornton, Constantina Zavitsanos, Artur Żmijewski, and collectively authored works by Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, Jeneen Frei Njootli, and Tania Willard
Comprehensive documentation of the exhibition and the accompanying performances is available here
Selected Press:
R.H. Lossin in e-flux Criticism
Christopher Alessandrini in Frieze
Emily Watlington in Art in America
Martha Buskirk in Burlington Contemporary
Dina Ramadan in Boston Art Review
Images:
(1) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
(2) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Melissa Blackall
(3) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
(4) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
Images at Work
Images at Work
MIT List Visual Arts Center
April 11 - July 12, 2026
This film and video program was conceived as an offshoot of and appendix to Performing Conditions—dependent on the whole, even as it supports it.
Comprising nonfiction and experimental works made over the last half-century, the program sketches an unruly history of labor and its refusal. It also contends with recurrent debates around the image’s use-value—particularly the social documentary and militant cinema traditions that haunt the representation of labor. Across these works, “the worker” and the “working class” are not unified or historically stable entities. Instead, they flicker in and out of view, evincing their contested and elusive nature.
Each thematic program screened for three weeks in the Bakalar Gallery, the List Center’s projects space. “Strike and Sabotage” proposes a shared grammar and common ground for labor struggle and anticolonial struggle. “With and Against Housework” presents visions of domestic work from diversely located feminist filmmakers in the 1970s and eighties. “Solidarity and Form” gathers oblique, abstract approaches to the representationally overdetermined subject of the worker. Finally, “Non/performance for the Camera” examines the figure of the cultural worker and their possibilities of refusal.
Featured artists: Razan AlSalah, Karimah Ashadu, Kevin Jerome Everson, Mike Henderson, Mako Idemitsu, Alanis Obomsawin, Letícia Parente, Amol K Patil, Morgan Quaintance, Margaret Raspé, Joyce Wieland, Fronza Woods, and collectively authored works by Yugantar Film Collective and Brigitta Kuster, Isabell Lorey, Marion von Osten and Katja Reichard
Images:
(1) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
(2) Margaret Raspé, Der Sadist schlägt das eindeutig Unschuldige (The Sadist Whips the Unquestionably Innocent), 1971 (still). Super 8 film, color; 6 min. Courtesy of the estate of Margaret Raspé, Galerie Molitor, Berlin and Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin
(3) Kevin Jerome Everson, Sound That, 2014 (still). 16mm transferred to digital, color, sound, 11:40 min. ©Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; and Picture Palace Pictures
Three Strikes, 1969
Three Strikes, 1969
MIT List Visual Arts Center
April 11 - July 12, 2026
Staged in the List Center's Bakalar Gallery in conjunction with Performing Conditions, this selection of archival material narrated three episodes of refusal at and around MIT in 1969. The first was the inauguration of the Art Workers’ Coalition, sparked by Takis’s withdrawal of his work from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (the artist was then a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies [CAVS]). The second was the March 4 “Scientists Strike for Peace,” a student/faculty protest of the Vietnam War and the Institute’s contributions to weapons research. The third was the international boycott of that year’s São Paulo Biennial in response to Brazil’s deepening military dictatorship, resulting in the cancellation of the CAVS-organized American delegation. The documents were presented in informal reproduction on bulletin boards as an homage to Andrea Fraser and Helmut Draxler’s Services (1994), a series of meetings and a “working-group exhibition” that, among other things, examined histories of cultural organizing and their relevance to a new generation of practitioners.
In their own way, each of the protagonists of these movements sought to blur the boundaries between previously distinct and calcified roles: student, scientist, artist, and worker. These redefinitions enabled novel routes of action and strategic alliances but also produced friction and dissensus. In contrast to Performing Conditions’ emphasis on the politics of aesthetic forms, this material examines the work of study and struggle that happens before, beneath, and around form: what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call “deformational, subformational, formless formation.” Intended as neither a romanticization of the past nor a lament for its failures, these painfully unresolved histories are offered as resources for the unfinished struggles of the present.
The exhibited material was drawn largely from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) and Social Action Coordinating Committee (SACC) records at MIT Libraries, and encompassed fliers, correspondence, statements, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera. Additional material came from historical issues of The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper, and the Art Workers’ Coalition’s two collectively authored publications, Documents 1 and Open Hearing.
Images:
(1) Non a la Biennale de São Paulo – Dossier, 1969. Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) records, Distinctive Collections, MIT Libraries
(2) Installation view: Explorations, curated by György Kepes. Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) records, Distinctive Collections, MIT Libraries
(3) Flier, 1969. Social Action Coordinating Committee (SACC) records, Distinctive Collections, MIT Libraries
List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes
List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes
MIT List Visual Arts Center
September 18 - December 14, 2025
Co-curated with Natalie Bell
“If it is ever possible to diminish fear, it is beautiful to witness.” So says the death doula in Every Ocean Hughes’s One Big Bag (2021). The video—alongside the performances Help the Dead (2019) and River (2023)—is part of a trilogy that considers the intimate processes of dying and grieving.
In One Big Bag, Hughes stages a monologue by a millennial death doula (performed by Lindsay Rico, with choreography by Miguel Gutierrez). Surrounded by the objects of her mobile “corpse kit,” the doula assuredly explains her tools: tampons for absorbing fluid, scissors for cutting cloth, bowls for washing, ceremonial bells. In her address, the practical matters of dealing with a corpse are balanced with an unencumbered spirit of care for the dead and those around them.
The same objects in One Big Bag are similarly hung in the gallery—the height of each indexing the height at which they are used. Encountered in this way, the objects register as active instruments of tending, inviting an embodied awareness of the gestures of care they enable. A new photograph assembles these objects in a still life, echoing the memento mori tradition within still life painting, in which ordinary objects double as meditations on mortality.
Refusing the fictions of euphemism or automatic recourse to biological family, One Big Bag insists on alternative forms of kinship and communion made in and around death when it is confronted as a brute and beautiful fact. As the performer in the film says, “Death has to be understood with the senses. The mind doesn’t get it.”
Selected press:
Cleo Harrington in Boston Art Review
Images:
(1) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
(2) Every Ocean Hughes, One Big Bag, 2021 (still). Courtesy the artist
(3) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
List Projects 32: Elif Saydam
List Projects 32: Elif Saydam
MIT List Visual Arts Center
June 5 - August 31, 2025
Berlin-based artist Elif Saydam conceives of painting as a space for the projection of fantasy. Throughout history, many painting traditions have served the fantasies of a state or an imperial court, but Saydam’s approach emphasizes eros in the textures of everyday life. In their paintings, quotidian sites, including gas stations, apartment blocks, and convenience stores, are layered with gold and ornament, suggesting the persistence of fantasy—particularly the desires of precarious urban populations—in increasingly gentrifying and financialized cities.
Saydam’s paintings are rich with references to the history of the medium, particularly so-called “minor” genres like miniature painting and illuminated manuscripts. Their textual sources are equally eclectic, ranging from twelfth-century Persian poetry and Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (1977) to the slogans of contemporary social movements. Saydam also experiments with painting on unconventional surfaces and supports, including antique bathroom stall doors, anti-shoplifting mirrors, and kitchen sponges.
For their List Projects exhibition, the artist presents four large, multi-panel paintings that employ the vernacular geometric motif of the brick. Its references range from art-historical works by figures like Martin Wong and Philip Guston to social history, such as the Stonewall riots, and architecture across different geographies. In Saydam’s practice, the brick is an open-ended object that signifies possibilities of both isolation and connection, blockage and porousness. “Partitions are predetermined and embedded in our lives in ways we can’t control,” they have reflected. “I’m not trying to pry anything apart but rather seeing what kind of glances can be stolen from an obstructed view.”
Selected press:
Images:
(1) Elif Saydam, After (THE RENT IS TOO HIGH), 2023. Photo: Julia Featheringill
(2) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Julia Featheringill
List Projects 31: Kite
List Projects 31: Kite
MIT List Visual Arts Center
January 30 - May 18, 2025
Co-curated with Selby Nimrod
Iteration and translation are fundamental to Kite’s work, which prompts viewers and collaborators to listen closely to each other as well as to dreams and nonhuman beings.
Her practice—spanning experimental composition, graphic scores, video, sculpture, and live performance—examines Lakȟóta ontology and ethics alongside emerging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence. Featuring video documentation of individual and collaborative performances alongside scores that translate dreams into a Lakȟóta grammar of symbols, Kite’s List Center exhibition brings key aspects of her performance and composition practice into focus.
Kite has worked with interactive interfaces for music and live performance since 2013, and a number of works on view feature the artist’s signature wearable interface: a length of braided hair that uses machine learning to modulate light, video, sound, or AI-generated text through a performer’s movement and touch. Somewhere between instrument and sculpture, the braid is woven with digital sensors that enable this nonhuman entity to “listen without ears.” In parallel, Kite has developed an extensive body of scholarship on Indigenous protocols for AI, proposing more ethical futures for this technology.
The exhibition’s central installation, Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya (Dreamlike Star) (2024), also serves as a stage for the artist’s performance of the same title. A hallucinatory, immersive environment of doubles and reflections, Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya emerges from Kite’s translations of dreams into Lakȟóta visual language, expressed in this work as a constellation of stones that is also a score. Projected behind it is an expansive network of stars in a purple night sky. The imagery and objects (stones, stars, and shapes) that recur in the video, in its reflection, and in the sculpture evoke a vast, interconnected universe: Earth and sky are entangled in what Kite calls an “ancient and future dance.” Here and throughout Kite’s work, dreaming and waking, land and cosmos, human and nonhuman are brought into forms of ethical and reciprocal relationship.
Selected press:
Christopher T. Green in Artforum
Images:
(1) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
(2) Kite,Wičháȟpi Wóihaŋbleya (Dreamlike Star), 2024. Performance: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2025. Photo: Melissa Blackall
(3) Installation view. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni
Steina: Playback
Steina: Playback
MIT List Visual Arts Center
January 30 - May 18, 2025
Steina: Playback presents the first solo exhibition in over a decade of Steina, the pathbreaking media artist whose work traverses video, performance, and installation.
Since cofounding The Kitchen in New York City in 1971, Steina has created works shaped by her experimental approach to electronic processing tools, persistent explorations of what she called “machine vision,” and an enduring ethos of play. A classically trained violinist, Steina took up video in 1970, bringing to her new instrument—initially a Sony Portapak—a musician’s attention to the “majestic flow of time.” Unlike many of her peers working in video in its early decades, the Icelandic-born artist did not consider US television culture a central force against which her video activity was defined. Instead, human perception was a key site of confrontation as she sought the exuberant and even utopian possibilities of an “intelligent, yet not human vision.”
With more than a dozen single-channel works, as well as multi-monitor arrays and multi-channel environments, this focused retrospective surveys Steina’s fearless DIY approach to new media and her pioneering synthesis of the electronic and the natural. While Steina’s early collaborative works with her life partner Woody Vasulka centered largely around the pair’s obsession with video’s signal and the custom-designed hardware that could distort and manipulate it, her independent works from 1975 onward probe the limits of human perspective and pursue non-anthropocentric modes of visualizing the natural world. Throughout her career, her works were continually shaped by her shifting environments: from downtown New York’s avant-garde and Buffalo’s experimental media arts scene of the 1970s, to the vast landscapes of New Mexico and Iceland. In her works from the 1990s onward, new projection technologies allowed her video environments to become even more immersive: flows of river, waves, light, and wind spatialize what the human eye cannot see and seem to offer analogues of the electronic flow of video and audio signals. With her distinctive translation of musical modes, like polyphony, into the visual realm and her effort to exceed human perception, Steina reveals an electronic sublime and attunes us to the vibrant, invisible energies inherent to both video and natural phenomena.
I served as the curatorial research assistant for the exhibition, which was organized by Natalie Bell and Helga Christoffersen. The exhibition traveled to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the National Gallery of Iceland and Reykjavík Art Museum; and the Haus der Kunst, Munich. An accompanying catalogue was published by The MIT Press in 2025, for which I authored five short essays— “Systems Performance,” “Signals,” “Tools,” “Machine Vision,” and “Ecologies”—and co-authored a biographical timeline, bibliography, and artist interview.
Selected Press:
Corinna Kirsch in The Public Review
Images:
(1) Steina, Flux, 1977 (still). Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík
(2) Steina, Geomania, 1986 (still). Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík
(3) Steina and Woody Vasulka, Noisefields, 1976 (still). Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary, Reykjavík
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