BOSTON, MASS.- The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University will present “Dream States: Video and the Political Imaginary,” a screening program and exhibition that engages the intersection of desire, the unconscious, and political realities. Artists featured in the exhibition include Keren Cytter, T.R. Uthco & Art Farm, Ruth Patir, and The Propeller Group. The exhibition, which opens Sept. 1 and will run through Oct. 14 in the Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery, will be accompanied by artist talks and screenings at SMFA at Tufts.

Accompanying “Dream States” is a selection of performance videos by pioneering artist and curator Martha Wilson. In her performances, Wilson role-plays public figures and creates critical statements about gender, public policy, and art’s political capacity. Located in the gallery spaces in both Medford and in Boston, the screening series “Martha Wilson: Politics and Performance Art Are One and the Same” and consists of key works from Wilson’s “First Ladies” series, as well as her recent piece, “Martha Does Donald”.Through the work of four artists and collectives, “Dream States” examines how the dream-like, scripted form of film is prescient and vital in our current political moment, which often seems to be governed by fictive media. By using the narrative conventions of television and cinema, the artists in “Dream States” delve into a collective desire and unconscious that lurks behind our political state.

The works will be on view as an ongoing screening program in Grossman Gallery. The series begins with a presentation of T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s seminal work “The Eternal Frame” (1975), an early mock documentary in which the spectacle of media is used to restage the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination. Ruth Patir’s “Sleep with Me” (2015) presents a different reflection on presidential politics as she explores the collective dreamscape overlaid onto former president Barack Obama. The Propeller Group, a cross-disciplinary artist collective, imagines a re-branding of contemporary communist ideology and the Apple-inspired media that would ensue in “Television Commercial for Communism” (2011). Lastly, Keren Cytter presents two irreverent works, “Terrorist of Love” (2016) and “Rose Garden” (2014), which both undermine the rules of narrative film and Youtube videos, creating biting social critique.

“Examining the dream-like function of political discourse in our contemporary culture is especially pressing,” said Dina Deitsch, director and chief curator of Tufts University Art Galleries. “The artists in “Dream States” untangle the mutual work of spectacle and the unconscious in the formation of social and political relationships, while complicating how film and video can reveal the latent work of power and control.

“Dream States” is curated by Dina Deitsch and presented by the newly merged Tufts University Art Galleries. The Grossman Gallery on the SMFA at Tufts' Boston campus is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Tuesday from 10 a.m. – 8 p.m., and closed on Sundays and holidays.