List Projects: a new exhibition initiative
MIT List Visual Arts Center
20 Ames St.
Cambridge, MA 02139
The MIT List Visual Arts Center announces a new exhibition series, List Projects, starting in May 2013.
As an ongoing program of exhibitions and presentations, List Projects will support the work of younger artists at pivotal points in their career, as well as those artists otherwise lacking an institutional voice. This new exhibition initiative augments the List Center’s exhibition program, allowing both the institution to continue its support of emerging and underrepresented artists, and its galleries to remain on view throughout the year.
The first three exhibitions in this inaugural series feature the work of Gabriel Abrantes, Ken Okiishi, and Kambui Olujimi.
List Projects: Gabriel Abrantes
May 9–June 30, 2013
Gabriel Abrantes (b. 1984) is a Lisbon-based artist and filmmaker whose films reflect identities and relations of desire forged through globalization. Often produced in collaboration and with local and non-professional actors, Abrantes’ films readily deal with the human impact of historical, economic, and political forces through the confines of cinematic narrative, from love story, to war film, or melodrama. Abrantes’ brand of post-colonial cinema also implicates desire—and repression as its dialectic—in the reconstructing and reimagining of colonial pasts. Filmed in Luanda, Angola, Liberdade (co-directed with Benjamin Crotty, 2011) is focused on the new relationships of love and desire created by mass migration and economic consequences of global capital. Fratelli (co-directed with Alexandre Melo, 2011) is a film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s prologue to The Taming of the Shrew, its Portuguese dialogue spoken with the Brazilian accent from Bahia and filmed in the Lazzio region of Italy. Ornithes (2012), shot in Jakmel, Haiti, is a theatrical adaptation of Aristophanes’ play The Birds, featuring costumes made by local artisans and dialogue in Creole and Attic Greek. In 2010, Abrantes established A Mutual Respect, a production company that seeks to find alternative means to produce moving-image work.
List Projects: Gabriel Abrantes is curated by List Center Curator João Ribas.
List Projects: Ken Okiishi
July 16–September 1, 2013
Ken Okiishi (b. 1978) investigates the disjunctive affective and cognitive states that are evoked through the act of translation, the ruptures that occur when we attempt to turn one language into another, map between proposition and enunciation, location and culture, sound and image. Using existing text, music, and film as source material, Okiishi eschews style in favor of translation as a form that he realizes through a range of mediums.
List Projects: Ken Okiishi features (Goodbye to) Manhattan (2010), a video work consisting of re-imagined scenes from Woody Allen’s iconic movie, using as the script the Google translation of the original film’s official German translation. parapluies/paraplyer/’nobody can tell the why of it’/1857/oslo/2011 (2011) weaves together a Depeche Mode cover band playing a song from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a jazz band, and the disembodied head of a young male tenor. The Deleted Scene (2013) takes as its starting point the opening scene of the Hollywood musical Gold Diggers of 1933 to explore relations of art and real estate in Zurich, the headquarters of Switzerland’s largest banks.
List Projects: Ken Okiishi is curated by List Center Assistant Curator Alise Upitis.
List Projects: Kambui Olujimi
January 21–February 16, 2014
Kambui Olujimi (b. 1976) works in a variety of media, ranging from film to installation to photography.
Olujimi’s project for the List will feature A Life in Pictures, an interactive installation functioning as a social space where visitors will be invited to exchange their own personal photos with selections of photos from the artist’s personal archive. Olujimi will provide over a thousand of his own images to exchange with visitors. Participants will be invited to record their thoughts about the personal photos that they have contributed and those that they received from Olujimi’s photo archive.
List Projects: Kambui Olujimi is curated by List Center Director Paul C. Ha.
Support for List Projects has been generously provided by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the List. Artist’s travel supported by Sata Internacional Airlines.
