June 26–August 21, 2024
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This summer, we invite you to join us for our remote summer series, “Profiling,” which will present five artist-designed questionnaires or forms that reconsider how we present ourselves through online profiles, or how the data we input shapes our identity.
Online profiles have been folded into the fabric of our identities, but can we take a step back and reconsider the information we are asked to provide that construct our online digital selves? Alternatively, can we analyze the forms and questionnaires that structure the way we are forced to identify ourselves? These profiles have increasingly become a way of establishing interpersonal relationships. We are forced to fit ourselves into a persona that shapes how we interact and are perceived by others. We check boxes that limit our personality and are thus placed into a category that we might not even identify with. In this series, artists will take a deeper look at the structures that collect data that inform our profiles, rethink what shapes our identities, and expose how the data being collected is used by these invisible entities.
A new iteration will be released on the List Center website every other Wednesday, from June 26–August 21, 2024. Participants are invited to engage with the series asynchronously throughout the season.
“Profiling” is organized by Emily Garner, Senior Manager Campus and Public Programs, with Cassidy Westjohn, Program Coordinator.
Visual identity by Gwyneth Jackman.
Participating artists
Mary Stephenson: June 26, 2024
Mary Stephenson (b. 1989, London, United Kingdom) completed a postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2019–2023), having graduated from The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (2007–2011). Working primarily in painting, Stephenson’s canvases convey complex narratives across liminal, psychologically charged surrealities. Governed by an intuitive internal logic, their scenographies are often rendered in luminous twilit settings populated by idiosyncratic sylph-like beings or left seductively vacant. Throughout, an uncanny mood pervades her work, offset by shades of poignancy and dark humour, revealing the subtle persistence of the unconscious upon our constructed identities and projected selves.
Lauren Lee McCarthy: July 10, 2024
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She creates performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. Lauren is the creator of p5.js, an open-source creative coding platform that prioritizes inclusion and access with over 10 million users worldwide. She is also Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. Lauren’s work has been recoginzed by Creative Capital, United States Artists, LACMA, Sundance, Eyebeam, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, and Ars Electronica, among others.
Mariam Suhail: July 24, 2024
Mariam Suhail’s work stems from the incidental, undocumented minutia of conversations, media, culture, and the everyday. She employs language from everyday sources to dissect and re-present what may exist in the spaces between exchanges, ideas, historical events and daily occurrences, resulting in works in sculpture, video, digital images, text, drawing and books.
Mariam’s work has been part of All the World’s Futures, Venice Biennale (2015), Berlin Biennale-8 (2014), Sheher, Prakriti, Devi, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2024), Parallel Cities, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New Delhi (2024), How To Reappear: Through the quivering leaves of Independent publishing, Invitations programme, Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022), The Missing One at Dhaka Art Summit (2016) & Office of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2016/ 17). Solo exhibitions include, Larger than Life-size Raven on a Roof (2024) and Sweet Subjunctive (2015) at GALLERYSKE, New Delhi, Inhabitate (2020) and Accidental Excavations (2014) at Grey Noise, Dubai, Breakdown of Shorter Concerns (2011) and fig.1. (2009) at GALLERYSKE, Bengaluru. Mariam has also contributed to publications like Paessagio (Coral Issue) by Blauer Hase (2016), Shifter21 - Other Spaces (2013), Protocollum (2016/17) and Silicon Plateau - Volume 2 (2019).
Kameelah Janan Rasheed: August 7, 2024
A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores Black knowledge production and fugitivity. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books: in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021).
Anne Le Troter: August 21, 2024
Artist Anne Le Troter mixes sound installation, performance, literature and poetry. After writing two books, she turned her attention to the place of speech in the workplace through several sound pieces. Invited by the Pernod Ricard Foundation, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, she has initiated writing cycles on the notion of biography, fiction and utopia, around the question of our modes of reproduction.
With a particular interest in the question of care, health and possible bridges between the artistic and medical worlds, Anne Le Troter has carried out research on artists who have participated in notorious medical advances. Those she calls “volunteers”—like the artists William Brockedon, inventor of the tablet, and Louise Hervieu, originator of the health record - are also representatives of the condition of male and female art workers.
Anne Le Troter is represented by galerie frank elbaz.
About MIT List Visual Arts Center
The List Visual Arts Center, MIT’s contemporary art museum, collects, commissions, and presents rigorous, provocative, and artist-centric projects that engage MIT and the global art community.
The List Center galleries, programs, and public art collection are always free and open to all.
