Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning

Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s exhibition at the List Center materializes our polyrhythmic experiences of time.

“We live in an age when contrasting temporalities coexist with an intensity that often feels irreconcilable,” the artist has said. “Media saturation, geological alteration, algorithmic immediacy, 24/7 labor culture, supply chain dynamics, and the relentless spectacle of political cycles” all condition how we make sense of the world.

Within The Great Learning, the artist’s first US museum solo, architectural spaces are cut open and multiplied, interrogated, and made to eclipse or dissolve. Objects are cast in precise relationships and move in ways that may evade perception—at times harnessing gravity or finding unexpected alignment. Visitors are spectators, listeners, and animating lenses as they move through the space or pause in curiosity.

The Great Learning borrows its title from a work by British composer Cornelius Cardew and is inspired, in part, by Cardew’s experimental work with an ensemble of non-musicians known as The Scratch Orchestra. Gómez-Egaña, who trained as a musician and composer before turning to visual art, similarly delegates some of the show’s action to a team of gallery attendants, or Orchestrators, who shift the exhibition’s physical elements and soundscape. Their gestures—both utilitarian and improvisational—are conceived as a conversation with the works and the space itself.

Anchoring the exhibition, the large-scale installation Virgo (2022) contrasts different modes of experiencing and understanding time. Set-like reproductions of a domestic interior are bisected by 28 walls, teasing viewers with mise-en-abyme viewpoints. A path for visitors cuts its architecture on a diagonal; two large steel frames, mounted on a hidden system of wheels, connect to furnishings and objects that the exhibition Orchestrators move through precise gaps in the walls. Like stills in a film strip, each space within Virgo repeats with slight variation, but here visitors act as the animating agent, just as a projector’s mechanics animates a series of images to create the illusion of motion and time. Cosmic rhythms are alluded to in overhead lighting that simulates the movement of the sun over the course of a day, casting shadows that drift and dwell in ways that reward durational attention.

In the adjacent gallery, a room saturated with red carpet and walls, Gómez-Egaña presents The Great Learning (2025), an unadorned copper rod hinged at the floor and suspended by microfilament threads. From an initial vertical position, it slowly falls to the ground over three hours, the result of a meticulous balance between the weight of the rod and its eleven counterweights (the artist’s “gram-by-gram” choreography). In the same space, steel pendulums [The Ask (2025)] knock on the walls, their movement impelled by gravity and hidden electromagnetic triggers. Deep Rivers (2025), a new work blending sculpture and sound appears as a nightstand embedded askew in the seating that wraps the gallery’s perimeter. When activated by the exhibition’s Orchestrators, a bellows-driven instrument within the work adds a layer of drone-like tones to the sound work Cordillera (2025), which emanates from multiple speakers. This minimalist, phased composition brings together harmonies associated with Andean music—which, for Gomez-Egana, are both “cosmic and melancholic”—as well as recordings of everyday sounds from his home in Oslo and his parents’ home in Colombia. Collectively, these works create an unsettling, atmospheric soundscape, evoking the tension of the filaments suspending The Great Learning. 

Pedro Gómez-Egaña (b. 1976, Bucaramanga, Colombia) lives and works in Oslo, Norway where he is professor of sculpture and installation at the Oslo National Academy of The Arts. The Great Learning is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center. Special thanks to the List Center’s Orchestrators and installation crew.

Related programming
Artist Discussion: Pedro Gómez-Egaña in conversation with Natalie Bell
Thursday, February 20, 2025, 5:30pm

Graduate Student Talk: Félix Antoine-Gélineau
Thursday, April 10, 2025, 5:30pm

Curator Tour: Natalie Bell
Friday, April 11, 2025, 12:15pm

Graduate Student Talk: Megan Masterson
Thursday, April 24, 2025, 5:30pm

Supporters
Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning is made possible with the support of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the Royal Norwegian Consulate General New York, the David Bermant Foundation, and OCA Norway.

Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Sara-Ann & Robert Sanders.

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Vice Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Board Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.