Before Projection: Video Sculpture

Takahiko Limura

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1975-1995 shines a spotlight on a historical moment and a body of work in the evolution of media art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. Exploring the connections between our current moment and the point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large-scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space, Before Projection presents a tightly focused survey of monitor-based sculpture made since the mid-1970s.

Adrian Piper

Dara Birnbaum

From video art’s beginnings, artists engaged with the sculptural properties of the television set, as well as the possibilities afforded by combining multiple moving images next to each other. Artists assembled monitors in various configurations and video walls, and, from the 1980s onwards, incorporated TV sets into elaborate environments and architectural settings. In concert with technological advances, video editing and effects also grew more sophisticated. These video works articulated a range of conceptual and thematic concerns related to the television medium, seriality, figuration, landscape, and identity. Much of this work was developed in critical opposition to television and cinema alike. The material heft of the cube monitor, before the advent of the at screen, also anchored these works firmly in three-dimensional space.

Ernst Caramelle

Installation view/ Photo Peter Harris Studio

Before Projection focuses on the period after very early experimentation in video and before video art’s full institutional arrival – coinciding with the wide availability of video projection equipment – in the gallery and museum alongside painting and sculpture. Proposing to examine what aesthetic claims these works might make in their own right, the exhibition aims to re-situate monitor sculpture more fully into the narrative between early video and projection as well as assert its relevance for the development of sculpture over the course of the 1980s in general.

Maria Vedder

Mary Lucier

Installation view/ Photo Peter Harris Studio

Snake River

This exhibition will present a re-evaluation of monitor-based sculpture since the 1980’s and serve as a tightly focused survey of works that have been rarely seen in the last twenty years. Artists in the exhibition include Dara Birnbaum, Takahiko Iimura, Adrian Piper, Shigeko Kubota, Ernst Caramelle, Mary Lucier, Antoni Muntadas, Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler, Diana Thater, Maria Vedder, and others.

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1975-1995 is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions & Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1975-1995
February 8 – April 15, 2018 / MIT List Visual Arts
Please visit the exhibition page >