Artist Discussion with Every Ocean Hughes

List Projects 33: Every Ocean Hughes features One Big Bag (2021) is a 40-minute single channel video.

The video uses the “mobile corpse kit”—a bag filled with everyday objects doulas use to care for the newly dead—as both the visual structure and narrative driver of the video. With a matter-of-fact demeanor and intense physicality the performer guides the viewer into the largely uncharted waters of corpse care — practical, political and spiritual. The form of the video creates a tension between the subject matter of dying and the forceful liveness of the performance itself. Exhibiting artist Every Ocean Hughes will be joined by Suelin Chen to discuss the complications and complexities of end-of-life care drawn from themes presented in One Big Bag.

List Center galleries will be open at 5:00 PM.

Every Ocean Hughes (b. 1977, lives and works in Stockholm and New York) is a transdisciplinary artist and writer. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023); Studio Voltaire, London (2022); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); Secession, Vienna (2015); and PARTICIPANT INC., New York (2015). Collaboration has been a central part of her practice: She was editor and cofounder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective LTTR, has written lyrics for several bands (The Knife, Colin Self, JD Samson & MEN), and has done costume design. Hughes’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Kadist, Paris/San Francisco, among others. For over ten years, Hughes has taught art in Europe and the US and works as a coach for artists and creative producers as West Street Coaching.

Suelin Chen is an entrepreneur and healthcare executive who was the founder/CEO of the largest website for end-of-life planning in the world (Cake), which has been visited by over 100 million people and was recently acquired by the second largest funeral company in the US. She is now doing corporate and commercial strategy for healthcare companies. She earned her BS and PhD from MIT, where she worked on medical technology and was also a visitor, intern (and, later, an advisory board member) of the List Visual Arts Center.

5:00–6:00 PM - MIT List Visual Art Center open
6:00–7:00 PM - Artist Discussion in ACT Cube

This program is in collaboration with MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT).

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