List Projects: Kambui Olujimi
January 21–February 23, 2014
MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames Street
Wiesner Building E15
Cambridge, MA 02139
Artist talk: January 24, 6–7pm
ACT CUBE (Bldg. E15-001)
Wiesner Building (lower atrium level)
Kambui Olujimi works in a variety of media, ranging from film to installation to photography. His past projects have often included viewer participation exploring social practices such as dream interpretation, penny wishing, and photo sharing. List Projects: Kambui Olujimi features A Life in Pictures, an interactive installation functioning as a social space where visitors are invited to exchange pictures from their lives with selections from the artist’s photographic archive. For this project, Olujimi provides over two thousand of his own personal photographs to exchange with gallery visitors. As part of the transaction participants are encouraged to record and share their thoughts about the personal photos that they have contributed and the ones they’ve selected from Olujimi’s archive.
The picture exchange mimics the way the public shares images online but recontextualizes the transaction by creating a physical space for individuals to give and receive photographs. The exhibition space creates an environment for unplanned and unmediated exchange with other visitors. A Life in Pictures allows visitors to interject moments from their own lives into a larger shared life in pictures.
To investigate questions of community exchange through art making, A Life in Pictures involves targeted collaborations with the MIT and local communities, including the MIT Center for Civic Media, the Cambridge Citywide Senior Center, Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, and 826 Boston, a non-profit writing center. Olujimi will also lead an Independent Activities Period (IAP) class at MIT exploring intersections between photography and storytelling.
About the artist
Brooklyn artist Kambui Olujimi (b. 1976) received his BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York and MFA from Columbia University, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the de Saisset Museum, California; apexart, New York; and Art in General, New York. His works have been included in group exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Olujimi has been awarded fellowships from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Santa Fe Art Institute, The apexart Outbound Fellowship to Kellerberrin, Australia, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The artist has recently been awarded the Artist Files grant from A Blade of Grass, New York.
List Projects: Kambui Olujimi is curated by List Center Director Paul C. Ha.
Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, TOKY, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the List. Outreach activities supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
