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What Is to Be Undone? Modernism in the 21st Century

Bakunin’s Barricade, 2015. Various materials, scrap cars, police fences, pieces of plywood painted in light Cadmium Red (s 1080y806r) recycled from the exhibition design by Liam Gillick, bricks and other building materials, plastic tubes, metal tubes, wooden stakes and street lights, and paintings from the Van Abbemuseum’s collection by artists Asger Jorn, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, René Daniëls, Jan Vercruysse, Marlene Dumas, and El Lissitzky, and a loan contract.

Gallery Talk

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA

In the Lightbox Gallery, artist Ahmet Öğüt (b. 1981) will discuss works of his that have been stolen, censored, vandalized, or attacked, such as Fahrenheit 451: Reprinted, The Castle of Vooruit, and Stones to Throw. He will position this discussion alongside an examination of the silences in the Harvard Art Museums collections, framing a conversation about how museums can be sites of exclusion, erasure, and alternate history.

Öğüt will also discuss an experimental workshop held at the Harvard Art Museums earlier in the week, in which he and a team of advanced fellows staged a temporary intervention in the museums’ office spaces, renaming them after a series of art institutions and biennials that were forced to close due to economic crisis, natural disaster, or armed conflict.

This event will take place in the Lightbox Gallery, Level 5.

Free with museums admission. This talk is limited to 15 people and is available on a first-come, first-served basis; no registration required.

What Is to Be Undone? Modernism in the 21st Century, by Ahmet Öğüt, Fernanda Fragateiro, Raqs Media Collective, and Renée Green, is a series of workshops and lectures that will unfold throughout the month of April at the Harvard Art Museums. During each “intervention,” one artist or collective will interrogate specific cultural objects, both within the Harvard Art Museums collections and beyond, as sites of exchange, contestation, restitution, and critique. The series is bookended by two related exhibitions, The Way We Live Now: Modernist Ideologies at Work (Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, February 5–April 5, 2015) and Jesse Aron Green: Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Harvard Art Museums, May 23–August 9, 2015). The series considers how artists today use a variety of research methodologies to reimagine the lasting and conflicted legacies of modernism in the contemporary moment.

Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.