Experience List Projects 21: Rami George

Seen from chest to knee, man in shirt and tie stands behind a cluster of microphones as other men point recorders toward him.

Video still, Rami George, Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993), 2015. HD video, color, sound 5:00 min. Image courtesy the artist © 2020 Rami George.

While the public presentation of List Projects 21: Rami George remains postponed, you can view George’s video essays via the links below and hear from the artist tomorrow, Wednesday, April 1 at 6 PM in a special Zoom panel discussion with Assistant Curator Selby Nimrod and critic Rahel Aima, hosted by Art in America. Stay tuned as we reschedule our public opening to celebrate the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition.

About the Exhibition

In Rami George’s videos and installations, autobiography becomes a form of history writing that complicates official narratives. The artist takes personal and embodied experiences as points of departure to re-appraise enduring civic and social issues, ranging from the legacies of the civil war in Lebanon to familial and queer histories. Considering these various cultural inheritances, George’s work employs found images, media, and texts to present a radiating network of events and relationships that link past to present and individual to collective experience.

About The Artist 

Rami George (b. 1989, Somerville, MA) lives and works in Philadelphia. Their work has been presented in group exhibitions and screenings at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York; Grand Union, Birmingham; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; LUX, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and others. George received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

List Projects 21: Rami George is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Karen & Gregory Arenson, Fotene & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Sara-Ann & Robert Sanders.  Additional support for List Projects 21: Rami George is provided by John Makhoul.  Additional funding for List Projects is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.  

List Projects 21: Rami George Panel Discussion

Wednesday, April 1st at 6 PM EST 

Log on to a Zoom panel hosted by Art in America featuring List Projects 21 artist Rami George in conversation with critic Rahel Aima and List Center Assistant Curator, Selby Nimrod. This discussion will have real-time closed captioning available. 

 

 

A floor monitor shows a black-and-white still of 2 boys in cowboy costumes and 2 men in suits, 1 holds a framed certificate.

Watch | Videos From List Projects 21: Rami George

Untitled (with my father) (2020) extends the artist’s inquiry into the Samaritan Foundation, a new age spiritual cult that was active in the 1990s. George’s mother became engrossed in Samaritan Foundation doctrines and in 1993 took her two children from their home in Somerville, Massachusetts to join the group in a commune in Guthrie, Oklahoma. Based on the transcript of a 2013 conversation the artist recorded with their father, Jonathan, as he recollects the arc of these events, the video surveys the artist’s childhood home, family photographs, personal mail, and legal documents around court proceedings with an even-handed attention to each detail. 

Rami George, "Untitled (with my father)" (2020)

Preview image for the video "Rami George, "Untitled (with my father)" (2020)".

In George’s earlier video essay Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) (2015), an unseen narrator reads a report on the Samaritan Foundation published in an Oklahoma newspaper on that date, while still images of the stories, photographs, and advertisements elsewhere in the day’s paper furnish the visual narrative, presenting the local paper as both an enduring chronicle of events and a banal theater of the everyday.

Rami George, "Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993)" (2015)

Preview image for the video "Rami George, "Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993)" (2015)".