CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Hans Op de Beeck’s film Staging Silence (2) (2013). Op de Beeck works in sculpture, installations, video, photography, animated films, drawing, painting, and writing. His works show the viewer non-existent, but identifiable places, moments, and characters that appear to have been taken from everyday life. Thematically his work concentrates on our laborious and problematic relationship with time, space, and each other resulting from globalization and the changes to our living environment brought about by developments in media, automation, and technology.

Op de Beeck’s film Staging Silence (2) is based around abstract, archetypal settings that lingered in the memory of the artist as the common denominator of the many similar public places he has experienced. These memory images are disproportionate mixtures of concrete information and fantasies, and in this film they materialize before the viewer’s eyes through anonymous tinkering and improvising hands. Arms and hands appear and disappear at random, manipulating everyday objects into miniaturized, artificially lit environments. The on-camera construction and de-construction of these environments lends the film a narrative weight that emphasizes the uncanny quality of spaces committed to memory. The film is accompanied by a score which, inspired by the images themselves, has been composed and performed by composer-musician Serge Lacroix.

Hans Op de Beeck (b.1969) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium where he has developed his career through international exhibitions over the past ten years. Recent solo exhibitions include Hans Op de Beeck: Sea of Tranquility, Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL and FRAC Paca, Marseille, France (2013); The Settlement, Emscherkunst, Essen, Germany (2013); and Hans Op de Beeck: Parade, De Warande, Turnhout, Belgium (2013). He recently completed a permanent installation at Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp, Belgium. Op de Beeck has also shown widely in group shows, including recent exhibitions at institutions including Museo d’Arte Moderna de Bologna; Frieze London; Royal Museums of Fine Arts Belgium; Klaipeda Art Center, Lithuania; SH Contemporary, Shanghai; Galerie Cédric Bacqueville, Lille, France; and Staedtische Galerie Nordhorn, Germany.

Hans Op de Beeck: Staging Silence (2) is curated by List Director Paul C. Ha.