Utstilling

Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning

"I'm thrilled to announce The Great Learning, my largest solo exhibition to date, at the List Visual Arts Center, the contemporary art museum at MIT. The exhibition has been curated by Natalie Bell, and brings together a number of works and interventions articulated as one temporal, sonic and spatial composition.

The Great Learning will take place at the museum's Hayden and Reference galleries, designed by architect I.M. Pei, and is titled after the work of Cornelius Cardew, an experimental composer who has influenced me for decades.

We live in a time when contrasting temporalities coexist with an intensity that often feels irreconcilable—media saturation, geological alteration, algorithmic immediacy, 24/7 labour culture, supply chain dynamics, soil depletion, and the relentless spectacle of political cycles. This makes engaging with how time and temporality are understood and experienced a crucial cultural concern, one that lies at the heart of my practice and that shapes The Great Learning. The exhibition brings together multiple overlapping layers that explore this, using objects, light, performativity, references to cinema and the domestic sphere, and harnessing gravity.

Drawing on my background as a composer, I’m inspired by practices where temporal fabrics are built through the entanglement of bodies, sounds, objects, and spaces. The Scratch Orchestra, founded by Cornelius Cardew, is a fitting reference. While some accounts describe the sessions of this collective as little more than waiting for Cardew to arrive (he was famously unpunctual!), I value how their work created a space for possibility—a presence born from the potential for things to happen.

This exhibition also marks a rare and ambitious moment in my practice: the simultaneous installation of several technically complex works that demand meticulous attention to small variables —from the gram-by-gram approach to choreography in the exhibition's title artwork, The Great Learning, to synchronising wall temperatures, layers of material, gravity and magnetism in The Ask, to mobilising massive metallic beams on wheels in Virgo.

Mounting this exhibition is both a technical and logistical feat, one that has taken years to conceive and organise.

A central aspect of the exhibition is the introduction of “Orchestrators,” a group of individuals who engage with and activate the space and artworks. This element has been a focus of research, existing neither as a purely performative dimension nor as a strictly utilitarian presence. Audiences will witness works being moved and intervened with, alongside moments of dynamic action and quiet contemplation throughout the galleries, and throughout the duration of the exhibition.

One of the new works in the exhibition, Deep Rivers, is inspired by the Zumbayllu, a wooden spinning top described in the Peruvian author José María Arguedas' novel Los Ríos Profundos. The Quechua name Zumbayllu, evokes the buzzing of insects and the hum of life in inanimate objects. This toy, common in many Andean countries, suggests that everything carries a sonic dimension—a resonance that connects them to the natural world, as well as to the memories and histories of a place.
Another new work, Great Year, is a single-channel stop-motion animation that traces the moments when both the moon and the sun are visible in the sky above Cambridge during the 23 weeks of the exhibition. This site-specific piece serves as an introduction to the many counterpoints within the show and, inspired by Cornelius Cardew, functions as a score for the Orchestrators, guiding them in engaging with the artworks throughout the exhibition period.

The Great Learning also celebrates 10 years of collaboration with Bart Callebaut, the technical force behind most of these works. Some of my happiest moments have been spent in Bart’s workshop in Belgium, where we experiment, test, and produce works together. Over the years, we’ve navigated challenges of design, research, failure, and adaptation, united by a shared fascination with poetry and invention.

The Great Learning has been produced with the technical direction of Bart Callebaut and the technical support of Tim Lloyd (Manager of Exhibitions at The List). It was made possible with the generous support of the List, Zilberman, Norway's Office of Contemporary Art, and The Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

During my stay in Cambridge, I will also be a guest teacher at the visual arts section of MIT (Art, Culture, Technology). I'm really looking forward to meet students and colleagues there.

I hope you have the chance to visit the exhibition!"

Pedro Gómez-Egaña

Read more about the exhibition here.

Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Professor of Sculpture and Installation, Academy of Fine Art, The Oslo National Academy of the Arts.