Sissel Tolaas: RE_________
September 16–December 30, 2022
In the course of a single day, each of us breathes in and out around 24,000 times. With each breath, irresistible signals are sent straight to the brain—including smells, which in a matter of nanoseconds trigger emotions and memories, stirring up the subconscious in turn.
For Norwegian-born Sissel Tolaas, smell is a vital yet often overlooked tool for communication, and one she has been exploring through her work for more than three decades. She has devoted her research-based artistic practice to the olfactory rather than the visual or the auditory, thereby appealing to a different type of sensory experience with her projects. As Tolaas has noted, “My nose is more advanced than my eyes.”
The exhibition RE_________, as in remember, reveal, revive, regrowth, etc., is the largest presentation to date of Tolaas’s work. It exemplifies the breadth of her complex yet highly direct and intuitive artistic practice. All of the works on display are site-specific, developed or reworked especially for this exhibition. The ICA’s architecture, its physical setting, and geographical context are all closely scrutinized, raising questions large and small in the process: What is change? What is hidden beneath the building’s surface? How do scared people smell? How do we capture a single breath? What smells characterize a nation?
For more information on the exhibition, click here.
Past Exhibitions
RAW Académie at ICA: Infrastructure
March 16–May 22, 2022
Based in Dakar, Senegal, RAW Académie is a residential program for the research and study of artistic and curatorial practice and thought that is rooted in the question: “How do we learn from each other?” For the ninth session of its Académie, RAW will relocate its staff and organization to Philadelphia in an experiment in institutional exchange, alternative pedagogy, and hospitality. The session, Infrastructure, is directed by artist, curator, activist, and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant.
Using the public art museum as both a point of connection and departure from art’s current infrastructure, and situated at ICA, Session 9 fellows will engage with and begin to answer these questions as they envision and conceive of an infrastructure that supports and expands the level and degree to which artists pursue a perpetual need to create and create anew. A structure that diversifies the ways and means for making artists more self-sufficient in meeting their living and creative needs, drawing on knowledge born from the artists and their works themselves. An infrastructure that can exist as creative hubs within local communities and that expands ongoing access and direct engagement with art as a natural, daily part of life.”
For more information on the exhibition, click here.
Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation
September 17–December 30, 2021.
A pivotal influence on contemporary art for over fifty years, Ulysses Jenkins (born 1946 Los Angeles, lives Los Angeles) has produced video and media work that conjures vibrant expressions of how image, sound, and cultural iconography inform representation. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing and elegiac soundtracks Jenkins pulls together various strands of thought to interrogate questions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history, and the power of the state.
The exhibition is co-curated by Meg Onli, ICA Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator and Erin Christovale, Associate Curator, Hammer Museum at UCLA, where the exhibition will travel this winter, February 6–May 15, 2022.
For more information on the exhibit, click here.
Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful
Feb. 26 – May 9, 2021
Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful—the title drawn from a work on view in this gallery—surveys the visual artist Jessica Vaughn’s new and recent work. In this exhibition, she examines late twentieth- and twenty-first-century office culture, the promise of malleability and universality of modular architecture, and marginalized workers who have been rendered invisible in these spaces. Vaughn transforms and repurposes employee training videos, career exploration tools, government occupational reports, and lighting fixtures in ways that urge us to reconsider the systems that shape the places where we work.
Our Primary Focus Is To Be Successful is organized by Meg Onli, Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication to be released in summer 2021.
For more information on the exhibition, click here.
Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal
Sep. 25, 2020 – Jan. 24, 2021
This exhibition gathered the many-layered and multi-faceted work of Milford Graves, exploring the practices and predilections of this extraordinary “jazz mind.” Click below to begin your virtual tour, featuring curator notes, recordings, performances, and more.
Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal was on view at ICA Philadelphia from September 25, 2020 to January 24, 2021, and was organized by Mark Christman, Artistic Director, Ars Nova Workshop, with Anthony Elms, Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator, ICA. Curatorial support provided by Jake Meginsky.
For more information on the exhibition, click here.