Exhibition view: Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2025. Photo: Dario Lasagni
Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up
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Flare-Up brings together artist duo Goldin+Senneby’s recent works exploring illness, ecology, and the shifting metaphors through which both are understood.
The exhibition references the experience of living with the autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis (MS), which is often described with militaristic language: a body “at war” with itself.
Pine resin, a protective toxin critical to trees’ immune systems, is central to several of these works. The scale of Resin Pond (2025), for example, evokes an immune response in excess—an uncanny echo of autoimmunity. Crying Pine (2025) features a loblolly pine that was bioengineered to over- produce resin as a renewable fuel, a modification that has left the tree vulnerable to its own defenses.
In Swallowimage (2025), antique paintings of disease and cure are inoculated with a fungus once thought to grant eternal youth and later patented as a pharmaceutical treatment for MS. Starfish and Citrus Thorn (2021) revisits the nineteenth-century experiments that first defined “immunity” as a biological condition, tracing its origins back to the Roman legal term immunitas, meaning “exemption from duty.” Their Lego Pedometer Cheating Machines (2019), which replicate DIY builds posted on patient forums, circumvent insurance companies’ imposed tracking of health data. The novel-in- progress Flare-Up, written with Katie Kitamura, threads together the stories of a pine with a supercharged immune system and a character seeking experimental treatments. In After Landscape (2024–ongoing), the artists work with a conservator to recreate climate protesters’ iconoclastic attacks on landscape paintings.
Across the works in Flare-Up, the immune system, like the economy or the climate, is never self-contained. It is always entangled—with technology, with narrative, and with the precarious infrastructures of life.
Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up is organized by Accelerator, Stockholm University, and curated by Richard Julin, Artistic Director, Accelerator. It is produced in partnership with MIT List Visual Arts Center. This presentation is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, with Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant.
Goldin+Senneby (est. 2004, Stockholm) explores how economic structures shape our society. In recent years, their practice has increasingly focused on issues of illness, care, and accessibility. They have exhibited at biennials in São Paulo, Istanbul, and Gwangju and held solo exhibitions at The Power Plant, Toronto; Kadist, Paris; and e-flux, New York. Goldin+Senneby’s works are included in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Sponsors
Major support for Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up is provided by Teiger Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Audrey & James Foster and Cynthia & John Reed.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Executive Vice Provost at MIT, Hashim Sarkis and the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the Mass Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Board Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
