MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up, a research-driven exhibition that threads together illness, biotechnology, and political economy while situating those concerns in the biopharma corridor surrounding the museum. Developed from a project initiated at Accelerator, the contemporary art venue at Stockholm University, the List Center iteration gathers large-scale installations, framed reconstructions, and text-based works to examine how metaphors of immunity shape bodies, forests, and markets. The exhibition treats immunity not only as a medical concept but as a framework that organizes ecological and economic life.
Illness as structure; resin as method
The exhibition draws on the artists’ direct encounter with multiple sclerosis (MS) and with medical language that casts the immune system as an army—“overactive,” “self-attacking,” “defensive.” Rather than adopting those tropes wholesale, Goldin+Senneby materialize and interrogate them through pine resin, the sticky exudate produced when a tree seals its wounds. Resin appears here as substance, symbol, and speculative fuel, allowing the duo to think across human and more-than-human bodies. By using resin as both metaphor and material, the artists link personal vulnerability to wider questions of environmental management.
A strand of the project also considers genetically engineered pines designed to overproduce resin for energy applications, aligning the rhetoric of immune fortification with industrial extraction and environmental risk. The same logic that seeks to strengthen a body can become a recipe for resource exploitation.
A double narrative: fiction and the clinic
A collaboration with novelist Katie Kitamura, commissioned and edited by Triple Canopy, introduces a braided narrative that mirrors the exhibition’s split attention to organism and individual. Printed excerpts, available in a takeaway booklet, unfold along two lines: one follows a pine whose immune response has been pushed into overdrive; the other follows a man navigating treatment while his sense of identity thins and frays. The twin narratives test how metaphor migrates between medical discourse and everyday life, shaping what bodies are asked to endure.
Works that stage containment, leakage, and risk
Among the anchor pieces, Resin Pond transforms the gallery into a shallow, glassy basin whose amber surface quietly blocks direct passage. Visitors skirt the perimeter, encountering their own reflection in a material associated with sealing cuts and holding fossils in suspension. The work’s formal containment sits in tension with the unruly implications of excess flow, echoing the immune system’s paradox: a mechanism meant to protect that can also overwhelm. The installation turns movement itself into an argument about thresholds, protection, and overflow.
In Crying Pine, the artists present a bioengineered loblolly pine developed to overproduce resin, a trait linked to renewable fuel research. The specimen—authorized for controlled display under regulatory permits—appears encased and backlit, a laboratory object rendered both luminous and precarious. The tree reads as a being engulfed by its own hyper-functioning defenses, a living corollary to autoimmune flare-ups. What looks like fortification appears, up close, as a condition of strain and exposure.
Reframing landscapes and protest
With After Landscape, Goldin+Senneby turn to the museum apparatus itself. The series restages historical protest actions that targeted landscape paintings, but does so through “climate frames,” the sealed enclosures conservation departments use to stabilize temperature and humidity—and, increasingly, to deter interventions. Reconstructed as empty frames, these objects collapse depiction and protection: the frame becomes both the literal edge of the image and a symbol of the institutional priorities that determine what is kept safe and how. By channeling activist gestures through conservation technology, the work reframes landscape as a managed system rather than a neutral view.
Pharmacology, devotion, and the backs of paintings
The Swallowimage works reverse historic oil paintings that depict scenes of death, disease, and care, exposing the raw canvas typically hidden from view. Onto these surfaces the artists introduce the immunosuppressive fungus Isaria sinclairii, long associated with longevity tonics and later implicated in the development of modern therapies for MS. The title nods to Schluckbildchen—small devotional images once swallowed as folk medicine—linking contemporary pharmacology to older practices in which images and ingestion intertwined. By situating an active organism on the verso, the series suggests that belief, ritual, and biochemistry continue to operate from the margins of the picture plane.
Imaging, metrics, and the market
An essay developed with Triple Canopy forms a textual spine for the exhibition, probing how biomedical images circulate as evidence and as currency. It reflects on the prominence of MRI “white spots” in MS research—lesions that are easily counted and visualized—and on how such countable effects can become benchmarks for therapeutic value. When visibility becomes the primary measure, clinical priorities can drift toward what is easy to quantify rather than what most affects daily life. The artists raise a systemic question: when the most visible metrics align neatly with commercial narratives, what forms of progression or relief remain unmeasured? The point is not to adjudicate efficacy but to show how ways of seeing shape what counts as care.
Bodies as data; compliance as performance
The exhibition also returns to Goldin+Senneby’s longstanding interest in labor and finance through small, almost mischievous machines. Lego Pedometer Cheating Machines—household rigs that gently jiggle a smartphone to inflate its step count—highlight the gamification of “wellness.” As health programs increasingly incentivize or require activity data, these devices make visible the performative labor of compliance: time, motion, and domestic space enlisted to produce numbers that satisfy an external rubric. The humor is dry, but the claim is clear: when metrics become mandates, bodies are optimized to meet dashboards.
Curatorial context and institutional exchange
For the List Center, Chief Curator Natalie Bell positions Flare-Up as an inquiry into the legal and economic infrastructures that channel clinical and ecological life. The museum’s location—adjacent to laboratories, venture capital firms, and pharmaceutical offices—sharpens the show’s insistence that artistic research belongs alongside scientific research, not as an illustration but as a pressure test on its metaphors and incentives. The project itself is a trans-institutional collaboration: originally curated by Richard Julin at Accelerator, it arrives at MIT in a newly scaled and site-aware form, organized at the List by Bell with Curatorial Assistant Zach Ngin. The passage between a university gallery in Stockholm and a university museum in Cambridge mirrors the exhibition’s movement between clinic, forest, and marketplace.
What “Flare-Up” ultimately proposes
Across its parts, Flare-Up advances a clear proposition: immunity is not only a medical concept but also a political and ecological one. The resin that seals a wound can be harvested as fuel. The frame that protects a picture can neutralize a message. The image that proves a diagnosis can also anchor a value chain. By staging these entanglements with a steady, analytic tone, the artists show how protection shades into extraction, visibility into monetization, and care into control.
The exhibition’s restraint is part of its argument. Rather than announce conclusions, it composes a field of relations: a pond you cannot cross; a tree that exudes too much; a frame that protects by enclosing; a painting that heals from the back; an essay that follows images as they pass from clinic to market. In each case, the work asks viewers to notice the systems—technical, legal, and economic—that determine what counts as a wound, a cure, a landscape, or a metric, and to consider how those determinations travel between bodies and institutions.
Exhibition details
Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up
Exhibition dates: October 24, 2025 – March 15, 2026.
Venue: Hayden Gallery, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Bldg. E15-109, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.
