MIT List Visual Arts Center exhibition explores color's relationship to language and power through five films

The MIT List Visual Arts Center presented 'Narrative Color' from April 19 to May 22, 2016, featuring five films by seven artists that use color to examine language construction and societal power dynamics. Curated by Alise Upitis, the exhibition included KP Brehmer's 1970 film 'Ideale Lanschaft (Ideal Landscape)', which argues color perception is socially learned through German narration and English subtitles. Bernadette Corporation's 'Hell Frozen Over' (2001) explores negation through fashion imagery and semiotician Sylvère Lotringer discussing poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger's 'Rainbow's Gravity' connects color film production at an Agfacolor Neu factory with Nazi concentration camp labor and references Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel 'Gravity's Rainbow'. Works by Derek Jarman and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto were also included. The exhibition challenged traditional narrative structures, presenting color as a tool for deconstructing language and examining historical power impositions. Films were displayed at the Wiesner Building on 20 Ames Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.