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Ekene Ijeoma, “Poetic Justice: Art at the same scale society has the capacity to destroy”
Thursday, December 2, 2021 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST
Attending in person: Attendance limited to MIT community members enrolled in Covid Pass. Please bring your MIT ID.
Streaming: This event will be available live on Zoom (mit.zoom.us/j/96579656038).
Founded in the spring of 2019 by artist Ekene Ijeoma, Poetic Justice researches intersectional issues, such as racial and environmental justice, and develops artworks about or with communities. Poetic Justice’s participatory public artworks, including phone and online accessible sound and video streams, have been presented by the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Museum of the City of New York.
Its current projects question, if “Artists need to create on the same scale as society has the capacity to destroy,” as Sherrie Rabinowitz suggested in 1984, then how can we scale social practice through conceptual art and computational design strategies? Ijeoma will share how Poetic Justice has been thinking through this question by developing a series of generative sound and video portraits of linguistic and ethnic diversity in US cities, Black thought and expression in the US (TBA), liberty and equality across multiple countries (TBA), and Black lives lost to COVID-19 in the US (TBA).
Ekene Ijeoma is an artist, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and Director of the Poetic Justice group at MIT Media Lab. Through his lab and studio art practices, Ijeoma researches social inequality across multiple fields to develop communal empathy through sound, video, sculpture, and installation art. Ijeoma’s multimedia practices critique themes such as language, identity, and displacement, and propose values such as belonging and healing. His work has been presented through exhibitions and initiatives at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, Annenberg Space for Photography and The Kennedy Center.
