CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- With Civic Floor, the MIT List Visual Arts Center is presenting the US debut of recently co-commissioned works by German-Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu. Tieu employs sculpture, drawing, sound, video, and installation to examine a wide range of subjects in which social or political power is articulated through sensory and psychological realms. Perception is a key node in Tieu’s work as she elaborates the often alienating effects of sound, architecture, design, and language. Working across various media, Tieu crafts a spatial narrative in each of her exhibitions that reflects her research into bureaucratic systems and their affective spaces as well as her lived experience with them.

At the List Center, Tieu’s exhibition Civic Floor presents a suite of abstract steel sculptures imposing in substance and weight, which reference spaces designed for detention and require the viewer’s aerial perspective. A new series of tablet-like plaster reliefs, derived from asylum petitions, relate the activities of administration and the raw material of architecture (i.e. plaster walls) while making clear, in bounded square millimeters, the narrow parameters within which an asylum-seeker’s persuasive story might exist. With these objects, as well as in a new ambient sound piece, Tieu invites viewers to consider space and its allowances—in formal, sculptural terms that entreat the histories of Minimalism, and in socio-political terms that echo to the title’s invocation of citizenship and the rights it confers.

Sung Tieu: Civic Floor is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator

LEX BROWN: CARNELIAN

Spanning video, sculpture, drawing, writing, performance, and the podcast 1-800-POWERS, Lex Brown’s incisive artworks confront pressing social conditions of our time, from gentrification and greenwashing to police violence, but do so through an irreverent and sometimes jarring use of humor. Steeped in satire and slapstick, her works borrow the visual tropes and intonations of pop culture, social media, and corporate branding.

As a central performer in her videos and performance works, Brown mimics and lampoons these sources in order to illuminate the absurdities, contradictions, and exploitative designs of late-capitalism and its social constructs. Brown also savvily observes how our relationships to various media—both as consumers and, increasingly, “users” and content producers (all subject to the invisible sway of algorithms)—contours our lived experience. In past installations, for example, Brown utilized motion sensors to cue videos and illuminate drawings in response to a spectator’s path through the exhibition, viewers have accessed sound installations by telephone, and the artist’s poetry has scrolled on the monitors of closed-circuit televisions.

The List Center exhibition is the Philadelphia-based artist’s first museum solo presentation and debuts Brown’s multi-channel video installation Carnelian (2023) alongside a group of new paintings.

Lex Brown: Carnelian is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.