Leslie Thornton - Begin Again, Again


Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again
October 22, 2021—February 13, 2022

The relationship between technology, power, and violence has been an enduring concern for Leslie Thornton, and has fueled much of her work in film and video over the past five decades. Engaging these themes within a focused survey, her List Center exhibition marks the artist’s first US solo museum exhibition and largest presentation to date, with over a dozen works ranging from 1975 to the present. Thornton’s early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions as a student in the 1970s fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. The exhibition’s title, Begin Again, Again—borrowed from a line in her decades-long magnum opus Peggy and Fred in Hell (1983–2015)—alludes to human-made cycles of destruction and renewal as well the hallmarks of Thornton’s practice: an accumulation and repetition of images and language and a radically open-ended approach to observing, processing, and understanding.

Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the List Center and Kunstverein Nürnberg are co-publishing the artist’s first monograph with Sternberg Press, scheduled for release in spring 2022.