Dutch artist Renzo Martens and Yael Bartana participate in group exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge.

Fri, May 9 - Sun, Jul 13  2014

From May 9 until July 13, 2014 Dutch artist Renzo Martens and Yael Bartana participate in the international, multigenerational group exhibition ‘9 Artists‘ at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge. 

The group exhibition 9 Artists

9 Artists is an international, multigenerational group exhibition that considers the changing role of the artist in contemporary culture. Bringing together the expansive practices of some of the most provocative and engaged artists working today—Yael Bartana, Renzo Martens, Liam Gillick, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Bjarne Melgaard, Nástio Mosquito, Hito Steyerl, and Danh Vo—the exhibition examines ways that they negotiate the complexities and contradictions of living in an ever more complex and networked world.  Featuring some 40 works, both past and new, 9 Artists includes a range of sculpture, drawing, installation, and video. The exhibition is organized by the Walker Art Center and curated by Bartholomew Ryan; Alise Upitis is the organizing curator for the List. The exhibition recently closed at the Walker Art Center and opens at the List on May 9, 2014.

About Renzo Martens

Dutch artist Renzo Martens (b. 1973), who lives and works in Brussels and Kinshasa, is known for his satirical and disturbing video documentaries in which he travels to war-torn countries and places himself narcissistically at the center of the action, demonstrating how Western spectators consume distant trauma. For the List, he will present the work of the Institute for Human Activities, an organization he has founded dedicated to the transformation through artist-propelled gentrification of a former Unilever plantation 800 miles north of Kinshasa on the Congo River. 

About Yael Bartana

Yael Bartana (b. 1970) is a Dutch-Israeli artist who lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, the School of Visual Arts, New York and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. A key theme in Bartana’s work is the investigation and then intervention in the processes by which communities convene, subjects are formed, national mythologies maintained, gendered behaviors enforced. The exhibition will feature her dynamic video trilogy, and Europe will be stunned, which has received considerable international attention since it debuted at the 54th Venice Biennale, where the artist represented the Polish Pavilion. and Europe will be stunned tells the story of the rise of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, a quasi-fictional political group that calls for the return to that country of 3.3 million Jews. Ultimately, in a European context that has seen a resurgence in nationalism in recent years, the group becomes home to all who feel that citizenship should be organized around more than national, ethnic, or religious identity.