Photo by Lars Jan
Called “incendiary with hope…” (Los Angeles Magazine), The Institute of Memory (TIMe) is a multimedia performance about how the future of remembering is currently changing. Two men hunt each other as a kinetic light sculpture hovers and cuts through the air, signaling keystrokes from a hacked 1950s typewriter. Featuring archival wire-tap transcriptions, communist spy missives, and MRI brain scans, TIMe conjures a portrait of director Lars Jan’s enigmatic father — a Cold War operative whose story exhibits how the future of privacy looks dangerously like the darkest era of its past.
The son of émigré parents from Afghanistan and Poland, Jan grew up in Cambridge, where his father, Henryk Ryniewicz, moved after World War II to take a position at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Today Lars is a director, writer, visual artist, and the founder of Early Morning Opera, a genre-bending performance and art lab whose works explore emerging technologies.
The Institute of Memory (TIMe) was co-commissioned by the CalArts Center for New Performance, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, REDCAT, The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and the National Performance Network’s Creation and Development Fund. This project is organized by Culture.pl as part of a program celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Tadeusz Kantor. TIMe has received generous support from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theatre Project Creation & Touring grant. Crucial residency support was granted by the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, and technology support by FARO.
The ICA’s presentation is funded in part by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
First Republic Bank is proud to sponsor the ICA’s 2017–18 Performance Season.
Co-sponsored by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT Media Lab, and the Institute of Contemporary Art
