First US solo museum exhibition for Swedish artist duo Goldin+Senneby at MIT

The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents the first US solo museum exhibition by Stockholm-based artist duo Goldin+Senneby. The critically acclaimed exhibition, organized by Accelerator, the contemporary art gallery of Stockholm University, will be adapted for the List Center and will be on view from October 24, 2025 to March 15, 2026.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from the artists’ experience of living with the autoimmune condition multiple sclerosis (MS). When Jakob Senneby had his first flare-ups, doctors told him he had an “overactive immune system” and a “body at war with itself.”

Though he could never quite identify with these descriptions, several of the works on view extend these metaphors using pine resin, a product of trees’ immune systems. Flare-Up also alludes to the flammable nature of a genetically engineered pine, which was modified to overproduce resin in the hope of creating a renewable alternative to fossil fuels. 

A collaborative novel by writer Katie Kitamura, with whom Goldin+Senneby have worked since 2018, also features in the exhibition. Commissioned and edited by Triple Canopy, the novel-in-progress consists of two parts set in parallel versions of the same world: one centers a mysterious pine tree with a supercharged immune system, while the other follows a stranger whose identity and biological coherence are called into question as he seeks treatment for his illness. Excerpts from the novel are bound in a takeaway booklet that visitors encounter alongside other works that probe entanglements and contradictions across ecology, biology and medicine. 

Resin Pond (2025), a glassy amber pool of pine resin, appears to flood the gallery space, forcing visitors around its perimeter. As part of their research, Goldin+Senneby received USDA permits for the “contained” release of two loblolly pine trees that had been bioengineered by a Florida lab to overproduce resin. In Crying Pine (2025), one of these trees is encased in a block of pine resin and is illuminated from behind, giving a quasi-spiritual quality to this biological specimen while visualizing a tree subsumed by its “overactive immune system.” Although its bioengineering originates in a desire for reducing fossil fuel dependence, if we follow the militaristic metaphors used for autoimmune diseases, this life form has been designed to be paradoxically both hyper-fortified and perpetually in a state of “war” with itself.

Their After Landscape series (2024–ongoing) employs “climate frames,” the encasements museums use to protect artworks from both environmental conditions and environmental activists who target high-profile artworks in their protest actions. For these works, Goldin+Senneby invited a painting conservator to recreate past climate actions targeting paintings with landscape motifs, some of which the conservator first encountered in his professional capacity. The artists interpret the actions, which have rarely reached the paintings themselves, as attacks on the very frame of how we see (and construct) nature. These empty frames serve as reminders of a planet under threat, but also recontextualize the protestor’s iconoclastic actions within the genre of landscape painting. 

Reflecting on images and care while looking to the past, their Swallowimage works reinterpret 17th to 19th-century oil paintings depicting scenes of death, disease, or healing. The artists reverse these antique canvases and inoculate the unpainted side with the immunosuppressive fungus Isaria sinclairii. This parasitic fungus has been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine as a potion for eternal youth, and its active substance was patented in the 1990s by a pharmaceutical company that developed the first pill for treating MS. Borrowing its title from German 18th-century “Schluckbildchen”––devotional portraits of saints that the faithful would ingest for healing––Swallowimage considers how modern-day treatments exist relative to images, and faith. 

In their Triple Canopy essay “Regions of Interest,” for example, Goldin+Senneby expand on how MS pharmaceutical research privileges MRI scans of “white spots”––narrowly focusing on what their drugs measurably effect––while avoiding studies that would consider whether their medications actually slow the onset of permanent disability (which would undermine the value of their product). Other pieces draw connections between Goldin+Senneby’s longtime explorations of the capitalist dynamics and labor precarity and their recent focus on experiences of illness and disability. Their Lego Pedometer Cheating Machines (2019), for instance, are DIY devices made to cheat a smartphone’s pedometer to meet health insurance companies’ requirements for “shared” health data and activity goals. 

“Goldin+Senneby’s work emerges from deep consideration of the absurd and impersonal forces, from economics to law, that shape our lives,” Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, said. “Their recent work around immunity and biopharma, which was initiated in part through a 2018 research visit to MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, is of special relevance in the context of the Institute and Kendall Square as a global hub for biotech and pharmaceutical firms.”

Goldin+Senneby: Flare-Up is organized by Accelerator, Stockholm University, where it was curated by Richard Julin, Artistic Director, Accelerator, and produced in partnership with MIT List Visual Arts Center. Its presentation at the List Center is organized by Natalie Bell, Chief Curator, with Zach Ngin, Curatorial Assistant, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

ABOUT GOLDIN+SENNEBY

Goldin+Senneby (est. 2004, Stockholm) explores how economic structures shape our society. In recent years, their practice has increasingly focused on issues of illness, care, and accessibility.

ABOUT MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER

The List Visual Arts Center is a creative laboratory that provides artists with a space to freely experiment and push existing boundaries. As the contemporary art museum at MIT, the List Center presents a dynamic program of six to nine special exhibitions in its galleries annually, including a program of evolving site-specific work by emerging artists known as List Projects (now at “List Projects 32”), as well as a broad range of educational programs, events, and scholarly publications.

Beyond the full slate of special exhibitions and projects it presents each year, the List Center maintains and adds to MIT’s Permanent Collection, a collection of more than fifty site-specific artworks throughout the campus; commissions new works through the MIT Percent-for-Art program; oversees the loan of artwork for the campus (in the President’s House, labs, and administrative offices); and oversees the Student Loan Art Program, which lends approximately seven hundred works of art annually to MIT undergraduate and graduate students.