April 11–August 2, 2026
Nearly every piece in “Performing Conditions” at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center—a very smart show about labor in capitalist economies—either directly addresses contractual relations or indexes the presence or absence of a contract. Yazan Khalili’s photograph I, The Artwork (2016) efficiently communicates one of the show’s basic propositions: It depicts a literal contract while clearly demonstrating that contracts—no matter their terms—cannot function as a vehicle for political, cultural, and economic equality in most contexts. Labor exploitation, for example, will not disappear with more favorable contractual language.
The photograph depicts a three-page, unsigned contract attached to a wall above a brown couch with what appears to be poster putty. The contract, as the title suggests, imagines the work of art itself as the rights-bearing subject, able to freely enter into a contract with another individual. The contract describes the photograph that contains it—its dimensions, material, and frame depth—suggesting that the artwork in front of us might be the subject of the contract. However, the small sliver of couch at the bottom of the frame suggests that the paper above it may be on display, and the printed contract could itself be the artwork in question.
If the photograph we are looking at is the artwork in question, it cannot meet most of the terms set out in the contract, which include the requirement that the piece “cannot be shown in any exhibition worldwide and beyond, that is funded or co-funded, even in minor parts, by a state that is occupying territories of other states and nations, and attempts to remove and/or replace the existing populations.” The wall behind the insistently generic brown couch, by contrast, could be anywhere and could therefore, theoretically, be compliant—but an anonymous living room may or may not qualify as an exhibition. It is almost impossible to imagine a public venue where these terms could be met, let alone enforced. The artwork, while it can be named, cannot sign the contract, making it doubly unenforceable and underscoring the point that the subjects of any agreements regulating state violence are seldom party to them.
“Performing Conditions” also offers nuanced considerations of bodily presence and intellectual production, the weirdness of the non-disclosure agreement, and the unpredictable location of pleasure in relations of domination, among other things. But as a document or other agreement that sets out enforceable obligations between parties, the contract appears to mimic and formalize the social relation itself. And for this reason, “Performing Conditions” asks more of its audience intellectually than a show that focused on, say, bodily harm or the slow violence of low wages. Uncountable political-scientific treatises rest on the belief in a foundational social contract: the vehicle enabling man’s movement from a state of nature to society, from savagery to civilization. In this version of human history, society does not beget contracts; contracts beget society. It is a piece of common sense that is very hard to shake, and in addition to organizing life legally, it does an enormous amount of ideological work.
Contracts imply freedom and equality. The social contract is one entered into by nominally free persons, but the extent to which such freedom is circumscribed—even in its ideal form—is rarely addressed. These limitations are the subject of Goldin+Senneby’s M&A (2013), a performance that every visitor to the galleries must at least pass. A professional actor is hired to repeatedly perform a script with the optional participation of gallery visitors. The reading of the script is itself a sort of contract—an agreement to play a certain role for a certain amount of time—that you can agree to or opt out of entirely. What makes this performance of at-will employment more than a flippant parody of employment contracts (a situation of extreme anxiety for most Americans) is the terms of the actor’s actual employment. The length of the performance is pegged to an investment algorithm that speculates on corporate mergers and acquisitions (hence the title M&A). As long as there is money in this fund, the actor will continue to perform, leaving only props and other traces of his performance when the money runs out.
If you move clockwise, the next piece is the photographic documentation of a reenactment of a slave uprising in New Orleans by Dread Scott. Certainly a comment on the offensive ubiquity of Civil War reenactments, among many other things, in this context it reads as a reminder of the historical and ongoing existence of unfree labor required by capitalism. The abolition of slavery was also ideologically dependent on the notion of “free” labor as its alleged opposite. It simultaneously draws our attention to the association between freedom and contracts, and undermines the assumption that capitalism is a system of free contract labor.
Chauncey Hare’s work is also about the unfreedom of work. His photographs document, among other things, workplace domination as enabled by the strange status of the workplace as radically non-democratic. But the archival component of this small collection is noteworthy for its documentation of an assumed social or cultural contract with artistic institutions. Hare’s disillusionment with New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the art world at large, is documented in detail in long letters that accuse the institutions of treating photography like any other salable good. What is interesting is not the way MoMA operates, but Hare’s belief that it would operate differently, and his sense of betrayal when it failed to meet its obligations.
A public sphere composed of contracting individuals requires the existence of a private sphere of social reproduction that is not governed by employment contracts. Housework is performed by Blondell Cummings in Chicken Soup (1981), a six-minute black-and-white video that represents cooking and cleaning through the idiom of contemporary dance. And a very different type of contract and contract enforcement is on display in three paint-by-number versions of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Les deux amies (1895), a portrayal of two sex workers engaged in either conversation or sex with one another. The artist and dominatrix Reba Maybury’s The Two Friends (2025) was produced by three of her clients who did the paint-by-numbers as punishment and are credited by their employment title rather than their name (IT Service Management; Philosophy student/socialist; and in chastity, German Junior Art Advisor). Other standout works in a show filled with many pieces deserving of attention and analysis include a video piece by Adrian Piper about a dance competition (Some Reflective Surfaces, 1975–76), a short documentary about Polish artists working with the employees of a steel mill to produce monuments to “the worker” (Artur Żmijewski’s Sculpture Plein-air. Świecie, 2009), and the literal performance of labor in a video of a simulated birth using a black birthing mannequin named Jada (Carolyn Lazard’s Fiction Contract, 2025).
The point and purpose of representation weigh more heavily on art shows that set out to help us understand crucial and complex aspects of our society. And it is, I think, a measure of the show’s intellectual and artistic success that I left feeling acutely uneasy about the role of cultural institutions and the political implications of spectatorship and contemplation. Put more plainly, I felt really weird about the time I had spent looking at objects related to work and workers. I felt weird about doing cultural work, and I seriously wondered if the aestheticization of class, power, and exploitation was not just pointless but actually causing harm.
This is not because the show was somehow irresponsible or unthoughtful; had it just been politically misguided or formally facile, there would have been room to imagine that a really good show about class and work and reproduction would do something. This is a really good show about class and work and reproduction, and it proves that culture will not do the things we want it to until the current social relations of production and reproduction are actually destroyed—not just rethought and recontextualized.
