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Experience the art of summer at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) this season with the museum’s exciting line-up of exhibitions, performances, outdoor art and events. 

NEW Outdoor Sculpture on the Waterfront
Ugo Rondinone: Moonrise Sculptures
MAY 17 – SEPT. 11, 2016
Best known for his large-scale sculptures and installations, Ugo Rondinone (born 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) works in a diverse array of media, including photography, painting, drawing, and video. Rondinone’s Moonrise series consists of nine-foot-tall figures, first modeled in clay, then cast in aluminum, and finally painted, with the hand and finger marks of the artists remaining visible. Each is named after a month of the calendar year. Time—here represented by the relationship between moon, tide, and calendar—has been a longstanding interest of the artist’s. Derived from a series of masks, these monumental visages playfully distort faces and figures with smiles and grimaces, welcoming wonder and empathy in equal measure. In these works, his first figurative sculptures, Rondinone creates a kind of uncanny romanticism. Installed outside of the ICA, MOONRISE. east. april and MOONRISE. east. may, both from 2005, will playfully welcome visitors to the ICA all summer long.

Ugo Rondinone sculptures

 

DANCE
JUNE 11, 12, 18 + 19 | various times throughout the day TBD
ON DISPLAY: A Movement Installation
Concept and choreography by Heidi Latsky
Various locations around the ICA,  FREE

Created by former Bill T. Jones dancer Heidi Latsky, ON DISPLAY addresses our propensity to judge people by their physical appearance. For four hours on each of four days, up to 30 local performers representing the dance, disability, and fashion communities will place themselves on display in this commentary on the body as spectacle and society’s obsession with body image. The performers draw attention to the complex relationship between viewer and viewed, an attention that permeates the everyday existence of people who are different in some way.

JULY 23 + 24 | Museum Hours
Maria Hassabi
Open rehearsal for STAGED
Free with museum admission 

Summer Stages Dance at the ICA is proud to welcome acclaimed choreographer Maria Hassabi as artist-in-residence this summer. From July 10 to 24, Hassabi and her dancers will take over the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater to develop a new work called STAGED, which will premiere in New York City in October and return to the ICA in 2017.

As an artist and choreographer, Hassabi has developed a distinct practice relating the body to the still image and sculptural object; she recently presented an intensive installation at the Museum of Modern Art called Plastic, in which dancers moved throughout the museum at a barely perceptible pace during all museum hours for an entire month. For her new work, she returns to her concerns regarding the relationship between performer and audience, expectations of spectacle, and the interplay between rehearsed and unrehearsed movement.

Hassabi’s work has been presented in theaters, festivals, museums, and public spaces worldwide She is a recipient of the 2015 Herb Alpert Award, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts.

The ICA and Summer Stages Dance have teamed up for the past 10 years to host some of today’s leading choreographers as they develop new work; past participants have included Faye Driscoll, Rashaun Mitchell, Trajal Harrell, Miguel Guttierez, and Alexandra Beller.  

MUSIC
HARBORWALK SOUNDS
THURSDAYS | JUNE 30 – SEPTEMBER 1 | 6 PM
Now in its 10th season, this partnership between Berklee College of Music and the ICA, featuring the city’s most talented young musicians—all presented FREE—is a perennial summertime favorite. With the fresh ocean breeze, fresh food, and fresh music there is no better way to spend a summer evening in Boston. Visit icaboston.org for complete schedule.

SUMMER FRIDAYS AT THE ICA
FRIDAYS| JUNE 3 – AUGUST 31
Celebrate the season at the ICA every Friday from June through August. We’ve got a slew of summertime fun for you to bask in harborside, from DJs spinning your summer soundtrack on the harbor to perennial favorites Talking Taste and First Fridays

TALKING TASTE
FRIDAYS| JUNE 10, 17 & 24 – 6:30 PM
For the sixth year running, the ICA is bringing new and exciting tastes to the Boston waterfront this summer with its popular Talking Taste series. Held on the grandstand, weather permitting, or in the Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater, Talking Taste events include a cooking demonstration—with samples!—and audience Q+A. Come hear expert tips and trade secrets from some of our city’s most creative, celebrated chefs. Chef details at icaboston.org.

FIRST FRIDAYS
Free for members / $15 nonmembers
Join us the first Friday of every month for an evening of art, fun activities, dancing and music.

JUNE 3 | Caribbean Dream
We kick off summer and Carribbean American Heritage month simultaneously with a preview of Boston Caribbean Fashion Week, live performances, and Carnival costuming.

JULY 1 | Summer in the City
What better way to survive those simmering days than with some backyard favorites (cornhole anyone?), a seaside breeze, BBQ, and a live band?

AUGUST 4 | White Hot [Vol. 3]
This year we’re taking our annual waterfront white party to the next level. Don your most dapper summer whites and meet us harborside.

DJ NIGHTS
FRIDAYS JUL 8–AUG 26 | 5–9 PM
Advance sales: $5 ICA Members / $15 general admission
Day of: $10 ICA Members / $20 general admission
Fridays come alive on the waterfront as DJs spin on the ICA’s Vivian and Alan Hassenfeld Harborway. This series features prominent artists such as Tune-Yards and Beirut, celebrations of hip-hop, reggae, and disco in a gorgeous harbor setting. Visit icaboston.org for complete schedule.

EXHIBITIONS
OPENING THIS SUMMER:
 
Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood
JUNE 29 – OCT 16, 2016
Nalini Malani (b. 1946, Karachi) is India’s foremost video and installation artist and a committed activist for women’s rights. Born in Karachi in 1946, and currently living and working in Mumbai, Malani came to India as a refugee during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, an experience that deeply informs her work. This exhibition centers on Malani’s signature multimedia installation, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), the title of which comes from a poem by the revolutionary Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The installation is inspired by East German writer and critic Christa Wolf’s 1984 novel Cassandra, about a struggling female artist and visionary. Combining imagery from Eastern and Western cultures, with sound, projected image, and light, In Search of Vanished Blood is an enthralling, immersive experience. The work comprises six 11-minute video projections streamed around the room through five clear Mylar cylinders, hand-painted with a variety of cultural and historical iconography, which hang in the center of the room. As the Mylar cylinders rotate, the colorful and layered imagery is projected onto the walls, creating a magical environment reminiscent of lantern slide presentations and other proto-cinema experiments in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. The presentation of Malani’s immersive video installation will be accompanied by a selection of related works on paper.

Liz Deschenes
JUNE 29 – OCT 16, 2016
Deschenes is known for her lushly beautiful and meditative work in photography and sculpture, and since the early 1990s 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. The first mid-career survey dedicated to Deschenes’s work, this exhibition will feature 20 years of her art, including explorations of various photographic technologies and the symbolic power of color, rich and nuanced work with photograms (a type of photographic image made without a camera), and sculptural installations that reflect the movements and light within a given space and respond to a site’s unique features. The artist will be creating a striking site-specific work comprised of 20 silver reflected photographic panels which will hang directly on the glass in the ICA’s John Hancock Founder’s Gallery overlooking Boston Harbor. 
 
First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA
AUG 17, 2016 – JAN 16, 2017
Coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of ICA’s move to its iconic waterfront building, this exhibition will celebrate the museum’s first decade of collecting. Drawn entirely from ICA’s collection and featuring multiple thematic, artist-specific, and historical sections, the exhibition will bring together both new acquisitions and favorites from the permanent collection. Conceived as a series of interrelated and rotating stand-alone exhibitions, this presentation will highlight major singular works from the collection, such as a newly acquired monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau by Kara Walker, as well as the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, groupings of work by artists held in depth such as Louise Bourgeois and Nan Goldin, and thematic and art-historical groupings. A new multimedia web platform will be created to mark the occasion.

ONGOING
Geoffrey Farmer
THROUGH JULY 17, 2016
Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver) is best known for his installations and large-scale, sculptural photo collages. This immersive survey of the artist’s recent major “paper works” presents room-sized installations composed of hundreds of small sculptures made of cutout photographs, fabric, and various supports. In these recent works, processions of figures assembled from fragments of book and magazine photography and illustration manifest the artist’s interest in the cross-pollination of historical and vernacular imagery. Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest the 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.

Acknowledgments
Summer Stages @ICA is made possible, in part, with the support of George and Ann Colony and The Aliad Fund.
ICA First Fridays are sponsored by Citizens Bank.

Additional support for ICA First Fridays is provided by Harpoon Brewery

Support for Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood is generously provided by Vivien and Alan Hassenfeld, Jodi and Hal Hess, and Barbara Lee.

Support for Liz Deschenes is generously provided by Edward Berman and Kathleen McDonough, Robert and Jane Burke, Fotene Demoulas and Tom Coté, Bridgitt and Bruce Evans, James and Audrey Foster, Ted Pappendick and Erica Gervais Pappendick, David and Leslie Puth, and Mark and Marie Schwartz.
First Light: A Decade of Collecting at the ICA is sponsored by Christie’s.

Additional support is generously provided by Fiduciary Trust Company, Chuck and Kate Brizius, Tristin and Martin Mannion, and Cynthia and John Reed.

Boston, MA — Join artists, writers, and readers in a citywide discussion of Men We Reaped, a compelling memoir that tackles race, masculinity, and misfortune in the American South.  An artful take on the book club, ICA Reads connects contemporary literature with work on view at the museum. The ICA highlights one book per year and this year’s selection highlights the “raw, beautiful and dangerous” writing of National Book Award–winning author Jesmyn Ward and her moving memoir Men We Reaped. Join one of our art and book discussions to explore issues of race, gender, and history, among other themes, found in the book and in art at the ICA.  On Sun, April 10 author Jesmyn Ward will present a reading and thought-provoking conversation about Men We Reaped with artist Steve Locke, whose work was featured in a solo exhibition at the ICA in 2013.

Recounting the tragic deaths of five young men from her rural community within four years, author Jesmyn Ward attempts to understand a history haunted by economic strife and racism.  She also tells her own story of familial love, community, infidelity, social friction, addiction, strength, and what it’s like to have survived. In conjunction with art works on view at the ICA, readers will be invited to consider the book’s themes and craft, as well as artist’s role in retelling history in the wake of tragedy.

Ways to Participate
Download the discussion guide for yourself or your book club at https://www.icaboston.org/ICAreads.

Go on a tour with your friends or book club. Specially trained guides will highlight connections between Men We Reaped and works on view at the ICA. Visit https://www.icaboston.org/ICAreads for details.

Attend a Gallery Discussion on Sun, March 20 at 11 AM and Sun, April 3 at 11 AM. This program is co-facilitated by Emily Alyssa Owens and ICA educators.

Join the online conversation at #ICAreads.

The Artist’s Voice: Jesmyn Ward with Steve Locke on Sun, April 10 at 3:00 PM. FREE tickets are required and available two hours prior to the start of the program; limit 2 tickets per person.
 
For more information about ICA Reads programming and different ways to participate, see the program guide or https://www.icaboston.org/ICAreads. Copies of Ward’s book are available for purchase at the ICA Store.

Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward was born in Berkeley, CA in 1977. She received undergraduate and master’s degrees from Stanford University and an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. Ward is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University.  She is the author of Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, the latter of which won the 2011 National Book Award and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Men We Reaped, won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was named one of the best books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review.
 
Steve Locke
Steve Locke was featured in a solo exhibition, there is no one left to blame, at the ICA in 2013 that subsequently traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. His work has also been highlighted in exhibitions at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Montserrat College of Art, Boston Center for the Arts, and Samsøn. Locke writes the blog artandeverythingafter.com and teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
 
Emily Alyssa Owens
Emily Alyssa Owens received her PhD from the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Later this year, she will begin her post as Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. Owens is currently working on a book on the cultural history of sex and slavery, exploring the affective and economic dimensions of the lives of women of color in the 19th century who sold (or were sold for) sex. 
 
About ICA Reads
An artful take on the book club, ICA Reads connects contemporary literature with work on view at the museum. The museum highlights one book per year, mobilizes audiences to read and share, encourages discussions in front of works of art with similar themes, and introduces the writer in a free public event. The ICA, located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, is open Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 am — 5 pm; Thursday and Friday, 10 am — 9 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10 am — 5 pm.  Admission is $15 adults, $13 seniors and $10 students, and free for members and children 17 and under. Free admission for families at ICA Play Dates (2 adults + children 12 and under) on last Saturday of the month. For more information, call 617-478-3100 or visit our Web site at www.icaboston.org. Follow the ICA at Facebook/ICA.Boston and Twitter.com/ICAinBoston.

Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), has announced two major grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  The Warhol Foundation grant of $100,000 will support the exhibition The Artist’s Museum, opening in Nov. 2016, which examines the nature of collections and reveals art’s unexpected relationships through the lens of contemporary artists. The Mellon Foundation grant of $500,000 will support curatorial research, graduate fellowships, and publications for three major curatorial projects: Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today (2018); Mark Dion (2017); and The Artist’s Museum (2016).

Upon announcement of the two grants, Jill Medvedow commented, “We are tremendously grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon and Andy Warhol Foundations. These projects continue the ICA’s scholarly explorations into urgent questions in contemporary art, specifically: the impact of the Internet and digital culture on contemporary artists, curators, and museums; the way knowledge is organized and made accessible; and the related tension between the ephemeral and the material in contemporary art practice and museums.”

Under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the ICA continues its inquiry into key shifts in contemporary art and culture over the last  25 years. The three Mellon-funded curatorial projects—Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today; Mark Dion; and The Artist’s Museum—all address the relationships between the making of objects and the acquisition of knowledge, highlighting the transformation of both activities since the advent of the Internet and its impact on creating, collecting, and curating art today. “We are very grateful to have been selected for these awards,” said Respini. “These funds support our mission to provide inspiration, education, and build a creative community through public access to contemporary art and artists.”

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today will examine how the Internet has changed how artists see the world, make their work, and disseminate information and images. Highlighting Boston’s role as a leading center of technology, the exhibition will involve Boston-area arts organizations on innovative programmatic events to create a dynamic, citywide experience. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today features the work of approximately 30 artists from around the globe and is comprised of a variety of mediums—including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video— that incorporate the extensive effects of the Internet in their realization. Themes explored in the exhibition include emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the Internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; possibilities for new subjectivities, communities, and virtual worlds; and the aesthetics of corporate culture and branding. Throughout, the work in this landmark exhibition addresses the Internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment. 

The first U.S. survey of the internationally recognized artist, Mark Dion spans the past 25 years, bringing together many of the artist’s most significant works. The exhibition combines a series of single-room installations with large gallery presentations of sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as models of major public artworks. Informed by a deep knowledge of history and contemporary issues, these diverse projects illuminate the wondrous, absurd, and macabre outcomes that occur when the natural and cultural worlds collide.

The Artist’s Museum presents immersive installations which feature collections of art, artifacts, and natural material, creating 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. Among the artists included are Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, and Christian Marclay.

(Boston, MA — Jan. 13, 2016) On July 1, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens an immersive video installation by Mumbai-based artist Nalini Malani (b. 1946, Karachi). Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, In Search of Vanished Blood will open to the public on June 29 and remain on view until October 16, 2016. Malani, India’s foremost media and installation artist, has dedicated her career to artistic achievement as well as activism for women’s rights in her home country and across the globe. This exhibition showcases her groundbreaking installation, In Search of Vanished Blood, which was commissioned by Documenta 13, and premiered in Kassel, Germany in 2012.  This immersive multi-media work features six 11-minute projections cast through painted rotating Mylar cylinders suspended from the ceiling. Visitors will witness an intricate shadowplay as an array of layered images are cast onto the gallery walls, enveloping viewers in a dazzling multi-media environment.
 
Born in Karachi, but forced to move to India following the 1947 partition of India, Malani channeled her life experiences directly into her art. Initially trained as a painter, Malani expanded her interests into video and installation projects that invoked references to her cultural and historical past while also grappling with the inequities of women’s rights. In Search of Vanished Blood takes its name from a poem written by Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz which captures the intricacies of love, war, loss, and bloodshed within a country rocked by political unrest. Malani’s installation revives this history by painted elements that adorn the suspended Mylar cylinders as reference to Eastern and Western historical and cultural iconography, including sources such as Homer’s Illiad to the Ramayana. When illuminated, these icons dance around the room, complemented by an audio track.  Malani brings these rich and complex historical narrative threads together with In Search of Vanished Blood.
 
The presentation of Malani’s installation will be accompanied by additional works on paper and a stop-motion animation.
 
About the artist
Born in Karachi, India (now Pakistan) in 1946, Nalini Malani received her artistic training at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art in Mumbai (1964-1969). Malani’s work is influenced by her experiences as a refugee of the Partition of India. She places inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes under pressure. Her point of view is unwaveringly urban and internationalist, and unsparing in its condemnation of a cynical nationalism that exploits the beliefs of the masses. Hers is an art of excess, going beyond the boundaries of legitimized narrative, exceeding the conventional and initiating dialogue. Characteristics of her work have been the gradual movement towards new media, international collaboration and expanding dimensions of the pictorial surface into the surrounding space as ephemeral wall drawing, installation, shadow play, multi projection works and theatre. Malani was awarded the prestigious Fukuoka Prize 2013 for Arts and Culture.

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announces its exhibition schedule into 2017. Upcoming exhibitions include a major solo show of Walid Raad opening this February and an exhibition celebrating the museum’s first decade of collecting opening in August.  For more information, please contact Kate Shamon, kshamon@icaboston.org, 617-478-3143.

Walid Raad _ We decided to let them say “we are convinced” twice. It was more convincing this way

Walid Raad

Feb. 24 – May 30, 2016

The ICA opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad, a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. The exhibition brings together nearly 150 works across various mediums—including photography, video, sculpture, and performance. 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. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. 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. The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. Following its presentation in Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Jumex, Mexico City (Oct. 13, 2016–Jan.14, 2017).

FARMER_Boneyard

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 a new major 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. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Installation view, Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, Galerie Lelong, New York, September 6 – October 26, 2013

Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood

July 1 – Oct. 16, 2016

Nalini Malani is India’s foremost video and installation artist and committed activist for women’s rights. This exhibition centers on her signature multi-media 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. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Liz Deschenes

July 1 – Oct. 16, 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. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

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

First Light:  A Decade of Collecting at the ICA

Aug. 17, 2016 – Jan. 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 highlight major singular works from the collection, including a monumental cut-paper silhouette tableau by Kara Walker, a spotlight on the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, groupings of work by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Nan Goldin, and thematic and art-historical groupings featuring the work of artists as diverse as Paul Chan, Sharon Hayes, Sherrie Levine, and Cornelia Parker. A new multi-media microsite will be created to mark the occasion. This exhibition is organized by ICA’s curatorial department under the leadership of Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Rosa Barba, The Hidden Conference: About the Shelf and Mantel (still), 2010

The Artist’s Museum

Nov. 16, 2016 – March 26, 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. The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly publication. Among the artists included are Rosa Barba, Carol Bove, Anna Craycroft, Mark Leckey, Pierre Leguillon, Goshka Macuga, and Christian Marclay. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition

Feb. 15– July 9, 2017

The James and Audrey Foster Prize is key to the ICA’s efforts to nurture and recognize Boston-area artists of exceptional promise. First established in 1999, the James and Audrey Foster Prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) expanded its format when the museum opened its new facility in 2006. James and Audrey Foster, passionate collectors and supporters of contemporary art, endowed the prize, ensuring the ICA’s ability to sustain and grow the program for years to come. This iteration of the ICA’s biennial exhibition of work by Boston-based artists will be organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

Dana Schutz

July 26– Nov. 26, 2017

New York-based artist Dana Schutz has emerged as one of the most prominent painters of her generation. Known for her distinctive visual style characterized by vibrant color and tactile brushwork, her paintings capture imaginary stories, hypothetical situations, and impossible physical feats, such as a figure attempting to eat his own face. Equal parts darkly humorous and surreal, Schutz’s paintings combine abstraction and figuration with expressive imagination, compressing bodies, banal objects, and quotidian scenes into oddly compelling and intriguing pictures. Dana Schutz will be a concise survey of the artist’s paintings made over the past decade, along with a presentation of works on paper. This exhibition is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

Mark Dion, Cabinet of Marine Debris, 2014

Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist

Oct. 4, 2017 – Jan. 7, 2018

Acting as traveler, historian, scientist, and artist, Mark Dion has pioneered an influential model of artistic practice that involves research, collaboration, and fieldwork. His process-based work in sculpture, installation, drawing, and public art investigates the construction and display of knowledge about the natural world. The first U.S. survey of the internationally recognized artist, Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist spans the past 25 years, bringing together many of the artist’s most significant works. The exhibition combines a series of single-room installations with large gallery presentations of sculpture, drawing, and photography, as well as models of major public artworks. Informed by a deep knowledge of history and contemporary issues, these diverse projects illuminate the wondrous, absurd, and macabre outcomes that occur when the natural and cultural worlds collide. This exhibition is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jessica Hong, Curatorial Assistant.

 

ON VIEW

Diane Simpson

Through March 27, 2016

Diane Simpson’s elegantly constructed sculpture evolves from a diverse range of material, clothing, and architectural sources. While elements of her creations appear to effortlessly hang and fold, they are in fact the result of a rigorous approach to construction techniques, reveling in passages of pattern, joinery, and skewed angles that are by turns humorous and psychologically-charged. A concise survey of over thirty years of work, Diane Simpson is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party

Through March 27, 2016

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, Hesam Rahmanian live and work communally in a shared house in Dubai. The three Iranian artists—two brothers and their childhood friend—combine their individual work, and that of their friends, in sculpture, painting, drawing, and video, to generate consuming total environments. The ICA invited the trio to create an on-site installation in the gallery, joining the intimacy of the artists’ collective life with their critical engagement of a globalized contemporary culture. This is the first U.S. museum exhibition for the trio. Organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant.

Ethan Murrow: Seastead

Through Nov. 27, 2016

Ethan Murrow is well known for photorealistic graphite drawings that combine found and invented imagery to form unexpected scenes drenched with humor and irony. At the ICA, Murrow has created a monumental site-specific drawing, in Sharpie, on the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. This project is organized by Ruth Erickson, Associate Curator.

Acknowledgments

Walid Raad is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 LOGO_MoMA_black on clear.jpg

This 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. 

The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. 

Support for the Boston presentation is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest and The Envoy Hotel.

Major support for The Artist’s Museum is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The 2017 James and Audrey Foster Prize exhibition and prize are generously endowed by James and Audrey Foster.

Major support for Mark Dion is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Support for Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party is generously provided by Lori and Dennis Baldwin.

Installation view, Liz Deschenes: Gallery 7, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014).

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) is pleased to present the first mid-career survey of works by New York-based artist Liz Deschenes (b. 1966, Boston, Massachusetts). Organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, Liz Deschenes will open to the public on June 29, 2016 and remain on view at the ICA through October 9, 2016. Over the past two decades, Deschenes has explored and tested the limits of what constitutes a photograph, transfixing audiences with her meticulous and thought-provoking work. The exhibition at the ICA will represent a landmark in the artist’s career, as it is the first survey exhibition to bring works produced from 1997 to the present into dialogue. The approximately twenty works included chart the course of her investigation, showcasing a diverse set of objects which include installation-sized reflective photograms, dye-transfer monochromes, photo-filmic moirés, green-screen works, and sculptural elements that draw viewers’ attention to the architecture of the exhibition space. In a world where we digest hundreds of images at a quick glance, mostly on a screen, Deschenes’s works demand to be experienced in person, proposing seeing as a physical act. She employs the language of sculpture, architecture, and exhibition design to consider the apparatus of viewing art, inviting viewers to slow down, circle her work, see their reflections in it, and become attuned to the architecture that surrounds it and them.

Deschenes’s photographs are the products of her ongoing fascination with the processes of both seeing and image making. Her works reference the history of photography, the architecture of their surroundings, and the history of the spaces they inhabit. A consummate educator, Deschenes’ oeuvre traces a line through technologies that marked the development of the medium of photography—from cameraless photograms that adopt the processes of 19th century daguerreotypes to hybrid prints of digital screen that straddle the divide between the digital and the analog.  While refusing to submit to the rules of photographic convention, Deschenes demonstrates her extensive knowledge of photography’s evolving history. Working both within the darkroom and out in the field, her process is characterized not by a single technology, method, or subject, but rather by a sustained engagement with the fundamental materials of photography (light, chemistry, and time) and the mechanics of viewing. Responding to the conditions of production, she calibrates her works to the site as a way to underscore and nuance the spectator’s relationship to space, sometimes encouraging new visual encounters and at other times responding to and disrupting the architectural surround. 

The process by which Deschenes executes her distinctive photograms (which make up a significant portion of her work) is inherently performative, as the artist exposes swaths of light-sensitized paper to both the sunlight and moonlight near Bennington College in Vermont, where she teaches. As opposed to traditional photograms, which typically capture the contours of objects placed upon light-sensitive paper, Deschenes’s versions have no subject, but instead bear the literal traces of the ambient conditions present during their production: swirls, pock marks and drips which vary according to the temperature, humidity, phase of the celestial bodies, and mutable nature of the noxious chemicals involved. When mounted, the photograms reflect the viewers own image in their mirrored surfaces, adding an immersive quality to their viewing. It is this powerful play of light and color that resonates throughout Deschenes’ art and encourages the viewer to reflect upon the nature of viewing, image-making, and ultimately, representation. In Tilt/Swing (360° field of vision, version 1), Deschenes playfully deploys mounted photograms in a 360 degree circuit from floor to ceiling. The title suggests an analogy between the gallery and a camera. When viewers encounter the installation, their bodies tilt and swing resulting in an angling and manipulation of vision, the body and by extension experience.
 
A lushly illustrated publication includes a comprehensive essay by the exhibition curator, essays by noted historian and curators, others artists’ writing on Deschenes, and an interview with the artist.

About the artist
Described by the New York Times as “one of the quiet giants of post-conceptual photography,” Liz Deschenes has exhibited her work regularly since receiving her BFA in 1988 from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She has recently mounted exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Campoli Presti, London and Paris; Secession, Vienna; and Sutton Lane, Paris and Brussels. Featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, she is most recently the recipient of the 2014 Rappaport Prize awarded by the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Her work is represented in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Since 2006, she has been a member of the faculty of Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.

 

Gallery view

(Boston, MA, Dec. 10, 2015)—The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) has added 20 major works of 20th- and 21st-century art to The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, today announced Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. This exceptional gift by Barbara Lee, Vice-Chair of the ICA Board, furthers the ICA’s commitment to building a collection of art that addresses the systemic underrepresentation of woman artists in museum collections. 
 
The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, established at the ICA in 2014, represents three decades of collecting by Lee and brings together painting, sculpture, photography, and videography by iconic modern and contemporary women artists. 
 
Highlights of Lee’s most recent gift include Louise Bourgeois’s tour-de-force sculptural work Cell (Hands and Mirror) (1995); two critically important sculptures by Eva Hesse, Ennead (1966) and Accession IV (1968); Sherrie Levine’s iconic 1996 sculpture Fountain (Buddha); Ellen Gallagher’s suite of 60 prints DeLuxe (2004-05); and a monumental, room-size installation by Kara Walker titled 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). 
 
“Barbara Lee continues to lead by example—her vision and generosity allow the ICA to tell urgent and undertold histories of post-war and contemporary art,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “With these new acquisitions, our collection is enriched by some of the most important works of recent art history. The introduction of a major installation by Kara Walker is a hallmark addition to our collection and brings an essential engagement between the work in our galleries and the critical issues of our time. The Eva Hesse sculptures Ennead and Accession IV are rare and exceptional works that, in our galleries, will provide vital context for understanding Hesse’s foundational influence on generations of artists.”
 
“My gift puts women artists front and center at an institution known for breaking barriers,” said Lee. “The ICA’s vision aligns powerfully with my own. The museum has a spirit of independence, defies expectations, and challenges the status quo—all things that embody my life’s work to empower women.”
 
Kara Walker’s installation The Nigger Huck Finn…, commissioned for the 2010 exhibition Huckleberry Finn at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, is a sweeping installation composed of silhouetted cut-paper figures set on a light brown groundline painted directly on the wall and punctuated by seven framed gouache paintings on paper. To date, only one other wall work by Walker combines these three elements.

“These remarkably generous gifts provide us with an opportunity to continue to build our collection of 20th- and 21st- century art so that our community can enjoy more works by these artists, permanently, furthering the ICA’s mission to expand people’s understanding of art and the salient ideas and issues of our time,” said Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator of the ICA.
 
The complete list of new works added to The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women:

Dara Birnbaum
Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, 1979
Two channel video (color, sound; 06:26 minutes), and flight cases
Dimensions variable

Louise Bourgeois
Untitled, BOUR 0913, 1947-49
Wood and paint
25 ¼ x 10 ¼ x 6 ⅝ inches (64.1 x 26 x 16.8 cm)

Louise Bourgeois
Spiral Woman, 1951-52
Wood and steel
62 ½ x 12 x 12 inches (159 x 30.5 x 30.5 cm)

Louise Bourgeois
Spiral Woman, 1984
Bronze and slate
14 x 4 x 5 inches (35.6 x 10.2 x 12.7 cm); Slate disc: 1 ¼ x 34 ¾ inches (3.18 x 88.3 cm)

Louise Bourgeois
Cell (Hands and Mirror), 1995
Marble, metal, and mirror
63 x 48 x 45 inches (160 x 122 x 114 cm)

Carol Bove
Innerspace Bullshit, 2007
Fourteen books, comic book, letter, bronze sculpture, Marfa rock, ocean ephemera, mirror, and pamphlet on wood and metal shelves
42 x 36 ⅛ x 12 inches (107 x 91.8 x 30.5 cm)
 
Ellen Gallagher
DeLuxe, 2004–05
Photogravure, etching, aquatint, and drypoints with lithography, screenprint, embossing, tattoo-machine engraving, laser cutting, and chine collé; and additions of plasticine, paper collage, enamel, varnish, gouache, pencil, oil, polymer, watercolor, pomade, velvet, glitter, crystals, foil paper, gold leaf, toy eyeballs, and imitation ice cubes
Sixty parts, each 13 ½ x 10 ½ inches (34.3 x 26.7 cm); overall 84 x 176 inches (213 x 447 cm)
 
Eva Hesse
Ennead, 1966
Dyed string, papier-mâché, and paint
96 x 39 x 17 inches (244 x 99.1 x 43.2 cm)
 
Eva Hesse
Accession IV, 1968
Galvanized steel and rubber tubing
8 ⅛ x 8 x 8 ¼ inches (20.6 x 20.3 x 21 cm)
 
Louise Lawler
Grieving Mothers (Attachment), 2005
Silver dye bleach print (Cibachrome)
46 x 41 inches (117 x 104 cm)

Sherrie Levine
After Henri Matisse, 1985
Ink and graphite on paper
13 ⅞ x 10 ⅞ inches (35.2 x 27.6 cm)
 
Sherrie Levine
Chair Seat: 7, 1986
Casein on wood
18 x 18 x 2 ¼ inches (45.7 x 45.7 x 5.72 cm)

Sherrie Levine
Untitled (Gold Knot: 6), 1987
Oil on wood
62 ½ x 50 ¼ inches (159 x 128 cm)
 
Sherrie Levine
Fountain (Buddha), 1996
Bronze
12 x 17 x 16 inches (30.5 x 43.2 x 40.6 cm)

Marisol
Couple No 1, 1965-66
Wood, paint, fabric, electric motor, and mixed media
71 x 34 x 26 7/16 inches (180 x 86.4 x 67.2 cm)
 
Alice Neel
Vera Beckerhoff, 1972
Oil on canvas
60 x 32 inches (152 x 81.3 cm)

Alice Neel
Margaret Evans Pregnant, 1978
Oil on canvas
57 ¾ x 38 inches (147 x 96.5 cm)

Cady Noland
Untitled, 1989
Screenprint on aluminum
72 x 48 inches (183 x 122 cm)

Charline von Heyl
Untitled, 2003
Mixed media on paper
Ten parts, each 23 ⅞ x 18 ⅞ inches (60.6 x 47.9 cm)

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 ½ x 15 inches (29.2 x 38.1 cm)

The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women
The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women represents three decades of collecting by philanthropist and political activist Barbara Lee. It brings together painting, sculpture, and photography by iconic modern and contemporary artists. Ranging from portraiture to performance, abstraction and representation, conceptual and craft-based work, the art in the Collection presents personal and political explorations of identity; feminism; materiality; and the body as the site of pleasure, violence, repression and expression. Artists represented in the Collection include Louise Bourgeois, Tara Donovan, Marlene Dumas, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, and Lorna Simpson, and adds groundbreaking works by artists who are part of the ICA’s exhibition history including Sandra Cinto, Rachel Harrison, Eva Hesse, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Louise Lawler, Ana Mendieta, Doris Salcedo, Joan Semmel, Amy Sillman, Kiki Smith, Shelburne Thurber, and Lisa Yuskavage. 

Geoffrey Farmer, Boneyard (detail), 2013

On April 13, 2016, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens an exhibition focusing on the recent paper works of artist Geoffrey Farmer (b. 1967, Vancouver). Farmer is known for the epic scale and scope of his projects that are often developed over extended periods of time and remain in ongoing states of transformation. As part of the exhibition along with his recent paper works, a new major film work will be presented: a computer controlled montage of thousands of images rescued from a discarded clipping library. Organized by Dan Byers, Mannion Family Senior Curator, Geoffrey Farmer is on view through July 17, 2016.

In Farmer’s recent works, processions of figures assembled from fragments of book and magazine photography and illustration manifest the artist’s interest in the cross-pollination of historical and vernacular imagery. Each spectacular composition begins to chart the historical contours of our image-saturated contemporary culture, and suggest the 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.
 
Three large-scale works create the foundation for the exhibition. Boneyard (2013) uses photographs as a sculptural material, and it most directly addresses the relationship between photography and the history of sculpture. Boneyard is comprised of over 1,200 photographs of sculptures removed from an Italian sculptural history folio, ranging from 10 AD to the 1970s. Farmer deploys each exactingly incised figure in the round, creating unexpected historical and thematic groupings and perspectives.  The genres of Western art history, and their attendant cultural influences, march by, creating both a condensed and exploded view into the physical, material expressions of history and their photographic reproduction.
 
The Surgeon and the Photographer (2009-13) is comprised of 365 handmade figures, each a highly individual assemblage made from photographs and fabric. When Farmer heard that an important used bookstore in his native Vancouver would be going out of business, he bought hundreds of books from their inventory. Considering the relationship between the book, and the hand, he devised an installation of hundreds of hand puppet-like figures fabricated from the inventory of images culled from the purchased books.  Presented in clusters resembling social groupings, the figures evoke strange processions and gatherings, and the almost magical aura of photography in the 20th century.
 
Finally, Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell (2013) is a hypnotic computer-generated projected montage of over 15,000 images originally comprised of part of a rescued clipping library and now expanded to incorporate photographic archives for this constantly changing, expanding film. Combined with an archive of sounds, this spell-binding work offers a trans-historical, trans-cultural trip through the world as captured by photographs in the last hundred and fifty years. Each image and sound is tagged with various categories that the computer program brings together different sequences of affinity every time it’s shown. The “movie” is never the same.  In many ways, Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell, gets to the heart of Farmer’s animation and re-presentation of history through its photographic record, the driving forces in this recent body of work.
 
A full-color exhibition publication, designed by graphic designer Chad Kloepfer in close collaboration with the artist, will take a non-traditional form, inspired by the assembled paper works.
 
About Geoffrey Farmer
Geoffrey Farmer was born in 1967 in Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work.  He studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. US solo exhibitions include two shows with Casey Kaplan, New York (2011, 2014), and the recent presentation of a single large scale-work, Let’s Make the Water Turn Black, at Perez Art Museum Miami (2014), (also presented at Migros Museum, Zurich; Nottingham Contemporary; and Kunstverein, Hamburg), as well as exhibitions at REDCAT in LA (2011, the first showing of Let’s Make the Water Turn Black); and Western Bridge, Seattle (2010). Farmer has had multiple solo shows in Canada; In addition to his 2015 mid-career survey How Do I Fit This Ghost In My Mouth? at the Vancouver Art Gallery, he has exhibited the Art Gallery of Ontario (2014); Mercer Union, Toronto (2013); the Banff Center, Banff (2010); National Gallery of Canada Ottawa (2009); Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal (2009) and Contemporary Art Gallery of Vancouver (2002). European Solo Exhibitions have taken place at The Barbican, London (2013); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2011); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008); the Tate Modern, London (2007); as well as an important contribution to dOCUMENTA (13) Kassel, Germany (2012).
 

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(Boston, MA —- Dec. 2, 2015) This February, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. Walid Raad, on view from Feb. 24 through May 30, brings together over 200 works across various mediums—including photography, video, sculpture, and performance. 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. Walid Raad, which originated at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is organized by Eva Respini, the ICA’s Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Following its presentation in Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Jumex, Mexico City (Oct. 13, 2016–Jan.14, 2017).
 
The exhibition focuses on two of the artist’s long-term projects: The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–ongoing).  These two distinct projects are united by the question: How does war affect bodies, minds, and cultures?

Under the rubric of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project exploring the contemporary history of Lebanon, Raad produced photographs, videotapes, notebooks, and lectures that related imaginary stories. The stories were inspired in part by real events and extensive research in Lebanon’s various archives and elsewhere.

Raad’s recent work has expanded to address the Middle East region at large. His ongoing project Scratching on things I could disavow examines the recent emergence in the Arab world of new infrastructures for the visual arts—art fairs, biennials, museums, and galleries—alongside the geopolitical, economic, and military conflicts that have consumed the region in the past few decades.

The exhibition also features a series of live, in-gallery performances by Raad (see description and dates below). 

The Atlas Group (1989-2004)
It was with The Atlas Group that Raad established the brilliantly daring artistic methodology that he employs to this day. The project was established in Beirut in 1989 to preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary, and other documents that shed light on Lebanon’s history. Each of The Atlas Group documents is attributed to a source who, like the organization, is fictional. None of the “documents” produced by The Atlas Group is wholly imaginary: these photographs, texts, and videos are borrowed from original sources, such as newspapers, or from Raad’s own street photography. But when Raad rephoto­graphs or scans them and mediates their presentation through story lines, literary titles, narrative wall texts, and engaging performances, they move into the imaginary realm. Raad calls these hybrids “hysterical documents.”

The Atlas Group’s various characters are all seemingly involved in absurdly exhaustive tasks like recording sunsets (I only wish that I could weep, 1997/2002) or locating every car bomb detonated during the civil war (My neck is thinner than a hair: Engines, 1996–2001). Violence is rarely pictured in The Atlas Group archive, which focuses instead on peripheral details like the purported gambling habits of fictional historians during the civil war (Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese wars, 1989/1998).

A number of The Atlas Group works are attributed to Dr. Fadl Fakhouri, including Notebook volume 72: Missing Lebanese wars, Notebook volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire (199½003), and Miraculous beginnings/No, illness is neither here nor there (1993/2003). Dr. Fakhouri, an esteemed, recently deceased, imaginary historian of the Lebanese wars whose papers were donated to The Atlas Group, lends the project authenticity. Civilizationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves (1958–59/2003), is a series of small black-and-white photographs purportedly taken by the scholar during his first and only trip to Europe, in the late 1950s. These self-portraits capture the lone Fakhouri lounging in hotel rooms, reading in cafés, and viewing the tourist sites of Paris and Rome. The images, repurposed from family snapshots, actually feature Raad’s father.
 
Let’s be honest, the weather helped (1998/2006) comprises images of notebook pages featuring black-and-white photographs that Raad himself took in Beirut during and after the civil war. These images of pockmarked buildings and bombed-out neighborhoods are overlaid with different-sized colored disks that map bullets and shrapnel, again collected by Raad after bombings and battles when he was a child in Beirut. The colors are linked to the national origins of the ammunitions and form a more expressive and poetic image, rather than one that is purely meant to document. The weather, referenced in the title of the work, is a recurring motif in The Atlas Group; the banal staple of small talk, it is neutral, unpredictable, and acts as an equalizer, circumscribing the direct address of violence.

In making his own documents, along with their accompanying narratives, Raad has created the documents that he felt these experiences and situations deserved; the documents he wished someone had created all along.

Scratching on things I could disavow (2007-)

Scratching on things I could disavow, which Raad began in 2007, is an interrelated series of photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, and performances. While each of the series within this larger body of work stands individually, taken together they constitute an examination of how art history is being forged within the new infrastructures for art in the Arab world.  Why are the Sheikhs and Sheikhas in the Arabian/Persian Gulf building massive new museums?  To answer this question, Raad visited and documented the emerging museums, galleries, art fairs, and public collections, and found himself asking another question: How has art in the Arab world been affected physically and otherwise by the wars of the past century?

Scratching on things I could disavow is marked by narratives of absence and withdrawal—the shrinking of works of art, for instance, or empty museum spaces with un-enterable doorways. In this body of work, Raad seems more like the narrator of a play, creating scenarios wherein works of art are no longer fully available to be seen, read, or experienced.
 
Blank walls, polished floors, and empty doorways become active players in Section 88: Views from outer to inner compartments (2010 and 2015), the title of both a video and a sculptural installation. Raad devised a set of doorways that are fashioned from wood and mimic the architectural style of Western museums of the 19th century. This set-like quality is enhanced in the ICA display with theatrical lighting that casts strong shadows. 
 
Another work, Section 139: The Atlas Group (1989–2004), also uses museum architecture and infrastructure in innovative ways.  This work—a maquette of a never-realized Atlas Group retrospective— recognizes the need for new modes of display and content formation in areas with histories of conflict and trauma. In Section 139, Raad has faithfully re-created his own artworks, down to the videos, which play in a model-size version of a white-cube gallery space. The accompanying text explains that in 2008, after agreeing to exhibit in a chic new gallery in Beirut (in the neighborhood of Karantina, site of one of the deadliest massacres of the Lebanese Civil War), Raad found that his works had become inaccessible to him, shrunk down to 1/100th of their original size.  
 
Scratching on things I could disavow encompasses an entire constellation of the ephemera that accompany the production and display of art in today’s accelerated art economy. Appendix XVIII: Plates 22–257 (2008–14) is a series of photographs drawn from documents of real exhibitions and art activities in the Arab world: books, catalogues, posters, invoices, and invitations. One such work in the series, Plates 22–24: A History of Venice IV (2009), is drawn from promotional materials for the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 2007, the first time Lebanon was represented with its own national pavilion there.
 
Performance is the central axis around which Scratching on things I could disavow revolves—indeed the overall body of work includes a perfor­mance, Walkthrough. Scheduled regularly throughout the run of the ICA exhibition, Walkthrough takes the form of a gallery talk, accommodating 40 visitors who sit on the stools that the museum’s educators use to seat attendees at their lectures. Raad’s presentation style ranges from sober investigator to psychotic telepath, as he recounts some of the economic and ideological motives behind the cultural boom in the Middle East, but also some of the fantastical situations he found himself in along the way.

Performance Schedule
 
Tickets are required for the Walkthrough performance. A limited number of same-day performance tickets will be available at the museum on a first-come, first-serve basis. The performance is 55 minutes long and is free with museum admission.

Wednesday, February 24, 2PM
Thursday, February 25, 7PM
Thursday, March 17, 6PM 
Friday, March 18, 1PM
Saturday, April 9, 2PM
Sunday, April 10, 2PM
Thursday, May 12, 7PM
Friday, May 13, 1PM
Saturday, May 14, 2PM
                                              
About the artist
Walid Raad was born in 1967 in Chbanieh, Lebanon. In 1983, he left Beirut for the United States, where he attended high school and college. Raad enrolled at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied photography and Middle Eastern studies and earned his PhD in visual and cultural studies from the University of Rochester. Raad frequently returns to Lebanon, and is deeply involved in the artistic community there. He currently lives in New York, and has been an Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union since 2002. Recent exhibitions of Raad’s work in Europe have been met with enthusiasm and critical accolades. Solo exhibitions have been held at Museo Madre, Naples (2014), Carré d’Art, Nimes (2014), the Louvre, Paris (2013), Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, (2011), Kunsthalle Zürich (2011), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010), and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006).
 
Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 192-page scholarly publication with a major essay by the exhibition curator Eva Respini, and contributions by art historian Finbarr Barry Flood and Walid Raad, that surveys nearly three decades of Raad’s practice in a variety of mediums. Essays by Respini and Flood place Raad’s art in the international context of contemporary art making, and a special eighteen-page visual contribution by Raad provides insight into his practice. 192 pages, 216 illustrations.
 
This exhibition is organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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This 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. 
 
The Boston presentation is coordinated by Jeffrey De Blois, Curatorial Assistant, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. 

Support for the Boston presentation of Walid Raad is generously provided by Jean-François and Nathalie Ducrest.

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On Dec. 16, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) will present The Birthday Party —the first U.S. museum exhibition dedicated to Dubai-based artists Ramin Haerizadeh (b. Tehran, 1975), Rokni Haerizadeh (b. Tehran, 1978), and Hesam Rahmanian (b. Knoxville, 1980).  Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party is on view at the ICA through March 27, 2016.
 
The trio of Iranian artists—two brothers and a childhood friend—live and work communally in a shared house, using their domestic space as a site for creative production. Combining their works with others that they collect actively, the artists have constructed an exuberant environment, in which every surface is decorated with color and pattern, and every corner contains a unique assemblage. For the ICA, the artists will create an on-site installation that extends this technique to the gallery. The exhibition will bring together their collective and individual works with those of a diverse, multi-generational group of artists.

The title of the show, The Birthday Party, is borrowed from Nobel-prize winning English writer Harold Pinter’s play of the same name, which features at the center of its plot a birthday party for a man who does not know it is his birthday. Earlier this year, the three artists staged a performance in a vacant Dubai gallery that took The Birthday Party as a point of departure. During the performance, they shuffled around the space in costumes made of long prayer robes that obscured their vision, spilling paint across a floor they constructed, while unwrapping presents and making accumulative sculptures out of their contents. In the ICA’s Buttenweiser gallery, the artists will reassemble the remaining material from that performance—including the painted floor, the improvised accumulations, and video documentation of the action—in combination with a diverse group of new works and a selection of works by other artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Hassan Sharif, Bahman Mohassess, and Ree Morton. The exhibition, like the artists’ house, is both improvisational and accumulative, weaving together the intimacy of their collective life with their critical engagement of a globalized contemporary culture, all staged provocatively within the walls of an art institution.
 
Organized by Assistant Curator Ruth Erickson.

Support for Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian: The Birthday Party is generously provided by Lori and Dennis Baldwin.
 
About the artists
Ramin and  Rokni Haerizadeh have lived in Dubai since 2009, after the Iranian government raided the home of one of their collectors. At the time, the brothers were in Paris and, fearing imprisonment, they have never returned to Iran. Hesam Rahmanian joined the Haerizadehs, and the three artists have worked together in a home/studio in Dubai. The artists have exhibited individually and together internationally over the past six years. Their collaborative projects have been presented at the Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), Isabelle Van Eynde Gallery (2012, 2014), Carnegie International (2013), Kunsthalle Zürich (2015), Callicoon Fine Arts (2015), and Brisbane Festival (2015). In 2014, the three artists participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s residency in Captiva, Florida.