CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- List Projects: Narrative Color considers the role color plays in five artists’ films and videos made since 1970. While the works are diverse in content and structure, each has a narrative that uses color in a way that both propels the narrative forward and responds to it. Furthermore, speech—spoken onscreen or by an off-screen narrator—is formative to how these moving image address color within their respective narratives. Significantly, these attributes distinguish these works from the legacy of artists’ films since the 1950s, which largely treat color as something that exists independent of language. The group exhibition features Bernadette Corporation, Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, KP Brehmer, Derek Jarman, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

Two films that engage color in relation to capital and ideology in 20th Century Germany frame the exhibition. KP Brehmer’s Ideale Landschaft (1970) considers how landscapes and their color palates function in bourgeois and socialist conditions; Rainbow’s Gravity (2014) by Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Shroedinger, reflects on how the Agfacolor Neu color film stock operated in Nazi Germany’s ideology and warfare. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Green Card: An American Romance (1982) plays on Hollywood theories of color psychology to form a melodrama about a young Japanese woman whose wish for independence in America leads her to marry an American for a green card. Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993) uses a blackened sound stage, brightly colored costumes, and a green Martian interlocutor to form an a-chronological narrative of the philosopher’s life and writings, while the Bernadette Corporation describes their Hell Frozen Over (2000) as "a fashion film about the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the color white." It juxtaposes takes during a highly stylized fashion shoot with Sylvère Lotringer on a frozen lake lecturing on Mallarmé and the significance of surface.

List Projects: Narrative Color is curated by Alise Upitis, Assistant Curator, Public Art and Exhibitions, MIT List Visual Arts Center.