They Come to Us Without a Word

On the occasion of the 56th Venice Biennale, Joan Jonas conceived a multilayered complex of works, incorporating video, drawings, objects, and sound across the five galleries of the US Pavilion.

From her beginnings in 1960s New York, Joan Jonas has been a pioneer of video, performance, and multimedia art. Her innovative practice has left an indelible mark on these art forms. They Come to Us Without a Word is an expansive installation that incorporates multiple components, including projected videos, drawings, and objects. Each section of the Pavilion represents a particular creature (bees, fish), object (mirror), force (wind), or place (homeroom). Recited fragments of ghost stories sourced from the oral tradition of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, form a continuous narrative linking one room to the next. As Jonas says, “We are haunted, the rooms are haunted.” Inspired, in part, by the work of Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, the exhibition continues Jonas’s work with literature, narrative, and themes of spirituality, nature, and image-making.

Jonas developed the video works in her installation in New York in the winter of 2015, during a series of workshops she facilitated with children, ranging in age from five to sixteen, performing against video backdrops of landscapes shot by Jonas, mostly in Nova Scotia and New York. The work They Come to Us Without a Word (2015; which lends the exhibition its title) is animated by a soundtrack designed by the artist, using excerpts of music by Jason Moran and songs by the Norwegian Sami singer Ánde Somby. 

Mirrors appear across the Pavilion in myriad forms, pointing to Jonas’s long-standing investigations into image-making and the exhibition’s central theme of haunting. Free-standing, rippled mirrors, handcrafted in Murano, are placed in each room alongside the artist’s distinctive drawings, kite sculptures, and props from her videos. Similar mirrors cover the panels of the Pavilion’s rotunda, where Venetian crystal hangs on a chandelier-like structure suspended from the center of the ceiling. Jonas’s moving-image works, the Giardini outside the Pavilion, and visitors are all reflected in the abundance of glassy surfaces, creating a rich dialogue between artwork, environment, and the public. 

They Come to Us Without a Word is commissioned by MIT List Visual Arts Center and curated by Paul C. Ha and Ute Meta Bauer.

Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York, NY, USA) is an acclaimed multimedia artist whose work encompasses video, performance, installation, sound, text, and drawing. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s, and her experiments and productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s continue to be crucial to the development of many contemporary art genres, from performance and video to conceptual art and theater. Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.

Joan Jonas is a New York native and continues to live and work in New York City. She received a BA in Art History from Mount Holyoke College in 1958, studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and received an MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University in 1965. Jonas has taught at MIT since 1998 and is currently Professor Emerita in the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology within the School of Architecture and Planning.

The recipient of numerous honors and awards (including the prestigious Kyoto Prize in 2018), Jonas has had major solo exhibitions at institutions such as: the Drawing Center, New York (2024); the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (2024); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2022); Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York (2021); Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (2020); Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2020); Kyoto City University of Arts, Japan, organized by Inamori Foundation (2019); Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2019); Tate Modern, London, UK (2018); and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2017); among many others.