CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art, a group exhibition curated by Henriette Huldisch, brings together works by Andrea Büttner, Sophie Calle, Alejandro Cesarco, Jason Dodge, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Antonia Hirsch, Jill Magid, Park McArthur, Lisa Tan, Erika Vogt, Susanne M. Winterling, and Anicka Yi. The exhibition considers our entangled, intimate relations with and through objects. Originally inspired by ideas of affect, it borrows its title from French philosopher Roland Barthes’s The Neutral, in which he stated that “the inventory of shimmers is of nuances, of states, of changes . . .” The works included variously act as vehicles for affective engagement or transactions of desire between people, or are directly engaged with actions of care, trust, and love. Many objects in the exhibition carry the traces of things we can’t see but have to trust, intuit, or perceive in ways that are not related to vision or hearing.

Artists in the show engage with modes of address and content that are tethered to affect, emotion, or feeling yet at the same eschew sentimentality and expressivity. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Lover Boy), comprised of light blue curtains installed in front of a window, commemorates his own deceased lover, as well as others lost to AIDS. Here and throughout his work, the artist’s formal economy and conceptual rigor conceal depths of desire, anger, and loss.

Park McArthur’s collection of objects reminds us that medical supplies (catheters, gloves), often considered cold and sterile, are employed in the service of intrapersonal care. Objects likewise mediate intimate exchanges in Andrea Büttner’s video Little Things, which depicts an order of Carmelite nuns proudly sharing their crafts within their closed community. Antonia Hirsch’s Object T addresses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response)—a pleasant, tingling sensation that YouTubers aim to reproduce by listening to audio recordings of whispering or sounds made with inanimate objects.

Trust is an integral component of intimacy highlighted in the exhibition. In Alejandro Cesarco’s Fragile Images That Keep Producing Death While Attempting to Preserve Life: Flowers found in crime scenes_001-004, the viewer has to take the artist’s word for the images’ titular sources, no evidence is provided. Sophie Calle’s Secrets is comprised of two safes collected by a couple; both individuals lock away a secret the other doesn’t know. Exchanges of trust and promises occurs between the artist, the couple, and the viewers. Jason Dodge’s Anyone consists of stacks of hotel sheets installed throughout the gallery and exchanged weekly by a laundry service. The items are at once uncomfortably intimate, having presumably been slept on by many different people, and completely anonymous at the same time.

Erika Vogt’s moving image installation Secret Traveler Navigator unfolds like a magic trick or a ritual, as an elliptical narrative in voice-over accompanies a succession of figures in silhouette handling mysterious objects. In her epistolary plea to the archivist of the modernist architect Luis Barragán, Jill Magid has cast herself a jealous third to their exclusive love.

Some works in the exhibition are concerned with shifting demarcations between the human and inhuman, as well as the limits of empathy. Anicka Yi’s series of wall works cast in silicone from animal skin calls to mind goosebumps—an embodied affective response that is not unique to humans. The dinoflagellate in Susanne M. Winterling’s Vertex (Metabolic) has neither eyes nor a central nervous system, raising questions about nonhuman affect. Winterling cites physicist-cum-philosopher Karen Barad, who asks what it means for a molecule to get excited—considering excitement broadly as an intensity of force that originates with an object.

Parsing the links between such formless entities as water, data, pixels, and emotions, Lisa Tan’s video installation Waves, by contrast, attempts to wrestle with a paradox that haunts theories of affect and this exhibition alike: How do you describe or picture something that is not linguistic and that lurks at the edge of consciousness?

An Inventory of Shimmers: Objects of Intimacy in Contemporary Art is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 96-page fully illustrated catalogue published by Prestel/DelMonico in association with the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Edited by Henriette Huldisch, the catalogue features essay contributions by Eugenie Brinkema, Associate Professor, Literature Section, MIT; Johanna Burton, Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum, NY; and Emily Watlington, Curatorial Research Assistant, MIT List Visual Arts Center and graduate student in History Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture, MIT.