Enter the Mirror

Enter the Mirror

Enter the Mirror presents works that attempt to reveal truths—hidden, suppressed, or simply ignored—that are difficult or unpleasant to see. Selected works from the MCA Collection, accompanied by key loaned works, invite visitors to reflect on their complicity in certain systems and events, and the darker contradictions, realities, and horrors of the everyday.

Exhibition Enter the Mirror
Date 10.09.2022 - 23.07.2023
Curator Jamillah James
Venue The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (MCA), Bergman Family Gallery
All images Courtesy by the artists and The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago

Artists: Dennis Adams, Edgar Arceneaux, Chris Burden, Anne Collier, Thomas Demand, Willie Doherty, Stan Douglas, Sam Durant, Melvin Edwards, Beatriz Gonzalez, Candida Hofer, Jason Lazarus, Glenn Ligon, Cady Noland, Hirsch Perlman, Adrian Piper, Erika Rothenberg, Doris Salcedo, David Wojnarowicz.

These works grapple with the ways that violence, trauma, corruption, the abuse of power, and historical distortion have shaped the world we inhabit, confronting the histories that many would prefer to forget. Some evoke the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and racism, and the fallacy of a “post-racial” world. Others examine the impact of popular media on the formation and recollection of cultural memory or uncover the failures of systems that are supposed to protect or serve the greater good. Collectively, the works in Enter the Mirror act as signposts, directing us to the seismic potential of discomfort and difficult conversations.

Enter the Mirror is curated by Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator. It is presented in the Bergman Family Gallery on the museum’s second floor.