Three New England Shows Look at Labor, Capital, and Incarceration

Experimental practice remains shaped by capital and power, with contemporary arts constrained by market influence and government interference. “Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form” examines student debt, labor precarity, and worker alienation, often implicating the art institution itself. The exhibition uses bureaucratic operations, including a vinyl spreadsheet listing itemized costs totaling $271,859. Several works treat contractual agreements as prompts for performances or as prerequisites for engaging with artworks. Projects foreground care and domestic labor, and others leave exhibition spaces unchanged to preserve traces of prior shows, including unpatched holes and vinyl shavings, emphasizing absent custodial labor. Dense wall labels sometimes reduce works to citations, but affective and participatory dimensions of labor counterbalance this risk.

"“Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form,” a major group show curated by Natalie Bell and Ramona Ngin at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and coinciding with its fortieth anniversary. Here, investigations of student debt, labor precarity, and worker alienation-often implicating the art institution itself-are pursued through a preponderance of bureaucratic operations. Posted at the entrance to the exhibition, Ghislaine Leung's Budgets, 2025, is a vinyl spreadsheet detailing the exhibition's itemized costs, which totaled $271,859."

"Elsewhere, several projects utilize contractual agreements as prompts for performances or prerequisites for interactions with artworks. Blondell Cummings's spellbinding video Chicken Soup, 1989, turns to the reproductive and domestic care work of Black women as a source for choreographed movement, while Leung's Maintenance, 2025, is comprised of a simple prompt: “The exhibition space is left as it is.” The resulting work contains traces of previous shows, including unpatched holes and vinyl shavings untouched by custodial staff and installers-a gesture that draws our attention to the invisible labor of arts workers by accentuating their absence."

"Heavily contextualized by dense wall labels, segments of the exhibition risk unfolding like a spatialized bibliography, reducing artworks to citations in a curatorial argument. Yet this tendency is mostly balanced by works emphasizing the affective and interpolative dimensions of labor. See, for instance, Sophia Giovannitti's Confession Prototype 1, 2025, a racy recorded lec"

Read at Artforum