2016 exhibitions

Walid Raad
February 24–May 30, 2016
The ICA opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad, a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work across various mediums investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. Informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90) and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades, Raad’s work is dedicated to exploring archives and photographic documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world. This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition is curated by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Geoffrey Farmer
April 13–July 17, 2016
Geoffrey Farmer is best known for his installations and sculptural photo collages. Three large-scale works—two “paper works” and computer-generated film work—create the foundation for this exhibition. Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest recurring cultural themes and formal patterns. Farmer uses movement, sound, animation, puppet characters, and a panoply of highly choreographed bodies and characters to investigate world history from the different angles of its photographic and sculptural accounts.

Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood
July 1–October 9, 2016
Nalini Malani is India’s foremost video and installation artist and committed activist for women’s rights. This exhibition centers on her signature multimedia work, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), accompanied by a selection of related works on paper. The work is comprised of six video projections streamed around the room through five hand-painted Mylar cylinders. As the cylinders rotate, colorful and layered iconography from Eastern and Western cultures is projected onto the walls, creating an arresting environment reminiscent of lantern slide presentations and other proto-cinema experiments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Liz Deschenes
July 1–October 9, 2016
This exhibition is the first museum survey of the Boston-born, New York-based artist Liz Deschenes. Deschenes is known for her lushly beautiful and meditative work in photography and sculpture. Since the early 1990s, she has produced a singular and influential body of work that probes the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image making processes, and modes of display. In addition to making discrete two-dimensional works, the artist has created carefully calibrated installations that blur the lines between photography and sculpture. On the occasion of her first museum survey, the artist will create a new site-specific work.

First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA
August 17, 2016–January 15, 2017
Coinciding with the ten year anniversary of the ICA’s move to its iconic waterfront building, this exhibition celebrates the museum’s first decade of collecting. Drawn entirely from the ICA’s collection, the exhibition will feature significant new acquisitions. Conceived as a series of interrelated and rotating stand-alone exhibitions, this presentation will include major singular works from the collection, such as a monumental cut-paper silhouette tableaux by Kara Walker, a spotlight on the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, and thematic and art-historical groupings.

The Artist’s Museum
November 9, 2016–March 12, 2017
The Artist’s Museum presents immersive installations that feature collections of art, artifacts, and natural material to create distinct models from each artist’s world. Employing the language of museum display, the artists chart the recurrence of forms and themes across cultures and history, revealing unexpected relationships and affinities and engaging a variety of disciplines and subjects, from dance, music, and design, to gender, sexuality, and technology. Artists include Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, and Christian Marclay.

For more information, visit icaboston.org.

*Kara Walker, The Nigger Huck Finn Pursues Happiness Beyond the Narrow Constraints of your Overdetermined Thesis on Freedom - Drawn and Quartered by Mister Kara Walkerberry, with Condolences to The Authors, 2010*. Cut paper and paint on wall and gouache and ink on paper, approximately 57 feet, 16 cut paper elements, dimensions variable; 7 framed works on paper, each 11 1/2 x 15 inches. Collection of The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co. © Kara Walker, 2015.