For our Winter/Spring 2025 season, Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) are pleased to present two exhibitions examining the dynamic relationship connecting time-based practice, performance, and their radical capacity for transformation.

On January 16, 2025, TUAG / Medford will open Impossible Music, a survey of the sonic vanguard that brings together sculptures, sounds, scores, video, and live performances to explore the radical, interdisciplinary potential of conceptual and experimental music.

First organized by ICA Pittsburgh (formerly Miller ICA), Impossible Music is curated by Forge Project Executive Director and Chief Curator Candice Hopkins and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon and organized at TUAG by Dina Deitsch.

Opening January 29 in Boston, an archive and/or a repertoire explores the liminal spaces that emerge between archives and ephemeral new media. Featuring the Mobius, Inc. Records—the administrative archive of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group—this exhibition serves as a local laboratory, delving into materials from Mobius’ experimental performances, new media projects, sound works, dances, and installations.

Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD with assistance from TUAG Graduate Research Fellow Wenxuan Xue (Tufts University PhD Candidate in Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies) in dialogue with Mobius founder Marilyn Arsem, who also founded the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), the exhibition poses a challenge to the legacy of the material archive while also activating the collective imaginary of the repertoire—gestures, spoken word, movement, dance, sounds—that might otherwise be lost, erased, or forgotten.

Impossible Music calls attention to the transformative power of sound as a tool for social change, innovation, and empowerment. From the banned to the bombastic, this exhibition highlights the work of visionary artists who pushed music forward, defying norms and piloting new forms of expression. 

Featuring work across mediums by boundary-defying composers, artists, and collectives including Terry Adkins, Black Quantum Futurism, Nikita Gale, Sarah Hennies, Tom Johnson, Conlon Nancarrow, Aki Onda, Christine Sun Kim, and C. Spencer Yeh. Shown together, the works in the exhibition address the complexity of music and moments in human history that led to the creation of new sounds, including the sound of resistance.

Read the full press release here.

Featuring the Mobius, Inc. Records —the administrative archive of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group—an archive and/or a repertoire serves as a local laboratory, delving into materials from Mobius’ experimental performances, new media projects, sound works, dances, and installations alongside embodied contributions from Mobius Artists Group members, new commissions by Lani Asunción and Forbes Graham, as well as work by artists Aki Sasamoto and Takahiro Yamamoto.

Currently housed in Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), the Mobius, Inc. Records contains organizational records, photographs, and video documentation from c. 1968 to 2009, chronicling the early work of individual members and the artist-run organization founded by artist Marilyn Arsem, who also founded the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), where she taught for over a quarter century.

Read the full press release here.