Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form

Performing Conditions gathers twenty-five artists and collectives whose works formally enact debt and dependency. Rather than depicting labor or representing exploitation, these works perform the relationships they examine, reflexively incorporating their own conditions of production, reproduction, circulation, and display.

Performance, here, extends beyond theater and dance to include the performance of ventures, financial instruments, and workers. The labor considered is not only the output of those recognized as artists, but also the creative production and reproduction performed by everyone. The exhibition’s cast of laborers is correspondingly wide: an actor whose livelihood is tied to a financial algorithm, the submissives who execute an artist’s paintings, hospital workers who perform a childbirth simulation, the plantation cooperative whose sculpture sales buy back their land, List Center staff wearing shoes designed by factory workers for nine hours of comfortable standing.

Contracts appear as creative instruments and objects of critique, staging artistic labor’s uneasy relationship to the logic of exchange. Some works index their own entanglement with institutions and infrastructures, while others enact refusal or withdrawal. The relational asymmetries of performance are made explicit in delegation and scores. Reenactments surface inherited and interpersonal debts, which are likewise registered in sculptural materials like tobacco, memory foam, and stretched pantyhose. A constellation of works turns to the unpayable debts generated by reproductive labor: the unwaged work of care and provision upon which all other labor depends.

Debt and dependency have long connoted various forms of gendered and racialized dispossession—from sharecropping and subprime mortgages to the subjugation of housewives and colonized people. But they are an inescapable fact of social life: We are all, always, sustained by others in a communistic flux of need and ability. Rather than disavowing debts and dependencies, the works in this exhibition proliferate a vocabulary of heteronomy and contingency, service and support, leaning and needing.

Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form is organized by Natalie Bell and Ramona Ngin.

Exhibiting artists
Elizabeth Catlett, Blondell Cummings, Sophia Giovannitti, Goldin+Senneby, Irena Haiduk, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Chauncey Hare, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Yazan Khalili, Autumn Knight, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Reba Maybury, Senga Nengudi, Adrian Piper, Joshua Schwebel, Dread Scott, Xaviera Simmons, Cally Spooner, Ced’art Tamasala (CATPC), Cassie Thornton, Constantina Zavitsanos, Artur Żmijewski, and collectively authored works by Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) and Jeneen Frei Njootli, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, and Tania Willard

During the exhibition, the List Center’s Bakalar Gallery features Images at Work, a rotating moving image program organized by Ngin. The program is complemented by the display of archival material highlighting three moments of political refusal in 1969 connected to MIT, including the Art Workers’ Coalition’s protest at MoMA, a scientists’ strike against Vietnam War research, and a boycott of the São Paulo Biennial. From May 5–10, Sophia Giovannitti occupies the Bakalar Gallery for six days with Contract (2026), opening the space, by appointment, and at a price, to those wishing to enter a live choreography with her. The film and archival material in the Bakalar Gallery both supports and depends on the main exhibition, a relationship made tangible, in part, by the presence of Ghislaine Leung’s Monitors (2022), which links the spaces.

Related performances and events
Nine Hour Delay (2012–58): Borosana Shoe Issue
April 10, 7:30 pm

Goldin+Senneby, M&A (2013)
Gallery hours, until funds expire

Autumn Knight, M_ _ _ ER (2018–ongoing)
April 11, 3 pm

Sophia Giovannitti, Contract (2026)
May 5–10, gallery hours; by appointment only

Supporters
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Audrey & James Foster, Lucy Moon-Lim & Richard Lim, Cynthia & John Reed, and Idee German Schoenheimer. Additional support for Performing Conditions is provided by the Consulate General of Sweden in New York. In-kind support is provided by Yugoexport. 

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Keeril Makan, Vice Provost for the Arts at MIT; Hashim Sarkis and 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.