About

A special screening of Leigh Ledare's latest movie 'The Task' will start at 4pm, followed by a conversation between the artist and the curator Lisa Long. Ledare filmed The Task during a three-day Group Relations Conference — a socialpsychology method developed by London’s Tavistock Institute — that the artist organized in Chicago. In addition to directing the film crew, Ledare assembled the 28 participants and secured the collaboration of 10 psychologists trained in the method. During a sequence of small and large group meetings, the group studies its own self-made social structure — an abstract “task” that allows participants to examine the identities, roles, desires, and biases individuals import into the group, as well as conscious and unconscious group dynamics.

Leigh Ledare in conversation with Lisa Long, independent curator currently working with Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf/Berlin. Leigh Ledare creates work that raises questions of agency, intimacy and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension, his interventions putting in tension the realities of social constructions and the projective assumptions that surround them. Major solo projects include The Plot at The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2017); The Here and the Now curated by Christian Jankowski, Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016); Leigh Ledare, et al. curated by Elena Filipovic, Kunsthal Charlottenberg, Copenhagen (2013) and WIELS, Brussels (2012) among others. His work is part of the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Lisa Long is an independent curator and writer based in the Rhineland, Germany. She received an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a B.A. in Art History and Musicology from the University of Cologne. Having worked for various non-profit art spaces and institutions in the U.S., Germany, and Austria, Long is currently curating a year-long program of exhibitions, performances, and screenings at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf and Berlin.