Look How Hard They Work
October 23, 2026–February 28, 2027
I Witness
October 23, 2026–February 28, 2027
List Projects 36
December 17, 2026–April 11, 2027
Cambridge MA 02142
United States
The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce its fall 2026 exhibition and programming schedule. The galleries feature solo exhibitions by Uri Aran, Hao Jingban, and Will Stovall.
Uri Aran: Look How Hard They Work
October 23, 2026–February 28, 2027
Hayden Gallery
Uri Aran’s first major institutional solo exhibition in the United States gathers new work made from materials typically found in the home or schoolroom: pompom fringe, keepsakes, craft supplies, sticker sheets, cartoon figures. Learning, and the effort and reward that sustain it, runs through his work. Classroom desks are heaped with googly eyes, sheets of animal stickers (a child’s micro-currency of approval) are enlarged to the scale of tapestries, and Duolingo’s characters brighten and slump on monitors that loom high above the viewer. The exhibition’s title is the refrain in Aran’s new video work: This line is rehearsed until its meaning loosens and the instruction to “look” becomes a rhythm. The artist’s formal gestures of repetition, quotation, and misalignment cast ordinary objects into characters, giving them an artifice that is tender, elusive, abject, and humorous.
Uri Aran: Look How Hard They Work is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator.
Hao Jingban: I Witness
October 23, 2026–February 28, 2027
Reference Gallery
A three-screen montage filmed in Beijing, Hao Jingban’s I Witness follows people living in the wake of different kinds of loss: an older woman moving through her daily routine, a loose collective pacing a riverside park, and pairs of bereaved participants engaging in a somatic practice inspired by Authentic Movement, a therapeutic method in which one person moves with their eyes closed while another observes what they witness. The soundtrack gathers breath, murmurs, weeping, coughs, and the low hum of electronics; yet, it is the silence surrounding these sounds that resonates most. Dwelling in the register of affect, I Witness asks how witnessing can occur outside of language and how one’s own grief, and the grief of others, might be understood through the body.
Hao Jingban: I Witness is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator.
List Projects 36: Will Stovall
December 17, 2026–April 11, 2027
Bakalar Gallery
Will Stovall’s new paintings on canvas and machined aluminum explore machina mundi: a metaphor from antiquity that, by the seventeenth century, came to describe the world as a mechanical clock, governed by underlying technological and scientific systems that, while open to measurement and modeling, cannot be experienced in full. Many of Stovall’s works depict figures moving through densely built cities full of gears, trams, and mysterious devices. One kinetic piece, Tower (2026), applies the clockwork metaphor to the painting’s substrate, as three nested aluminum columns, each with a painted surface, rotate at different speeds when cranked from below, returning to their original alignment only after roughly forty hours of continuous turning. Across the exhibition, mechanisms, in both imagery and form, engage philosophical questions about social time, civic order, and the boundary between human action and programmed motion.
List Projects 36: Will Stovall is organized by Marina Caron, Assistant Curator.
Related programming
Artist talk: Hao Jingban with Huirong Ye
Thursday, October 22, 5:30–6:30 pm EST
Artist discussion: Uri Aran
Thursday, February 11, 2027, 6–7 pm EST
Sponsors
Major support for Hao Jingban: I Witness is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
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.
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; Dean 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.
