Join us for an Artist Talk and Opening Reception to celebrate the opening of This Machine Creates Opacities: Robert Fulton, Renée Green, Pierre Huyghe, and Pope.L. 

Artist Pope.L will present an artist talk that touches on his project Corbu Pops, which was originally commissioned for the Carpenter Center’s level 1 space in 2009. Various installation elements of this pivotal work have been restaged for This Machine Creates Opacities. 

Following the conversation, there will be a reception and community dinner in the sunken terrace on Level 1 of the Carpenter Center. The exhibition, This Machine Creates Opacities: Robert Fulton, Renée Green, Pierre Huyghe, and Pope.L, will be on view on Level 3. 

On the occasion of the Carpenter Center’s 60th anniversary, This Machine Creates Opacities restages four major works by artists Robert Fulton, Renée Green, Pierre Huyghe, and Pope.L that examine the ways buildings choreograph, shape, and control social life, learning, and cultural structures. With its title borrowed from statements the artist Pope.L made about navigating the Carpenter Center building upon an invitation to make a new commission, the exhibition reflects on the program, affect, history, and various complexities of Le Corbusier’s iconic architecture. Each one of the included film-based works was created directly in response to the Carpenter Center as an institutional site and explores architecture through the lens of experimental cinematography and the expansive formal, technological possibilities of video installation to excavate a building’s aesthetic and social functions. This Machine Creates Opacities is divided between two floors of the building and presents Pierre Huyghe’s video This is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004), alongside documentation of the performance and sculptural elements from Pope.L’s Corbu Pops (2009) on level 3, while Reality’s Invisible by Robert Fulton (1971), and Renée Green’s Americas: Veritas (2018) are screened on level 1. 

Pope.L (b. 1955, in Newark, NJ) is a Chicago-based visual and performance-theater artist and educator who makes culture out of contraries. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘member: Pope.L 1978–2001’ at the Museum of Modern Art and ‘Choir’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art both in New York in 2019, 'Notations, Holes and Humour' at Modern Art in London in 2021, 'A Maze Zanine, Amaze Zaning, A-Mezzaning, Meza-9' at David Zwirner in New York in 2022, and 'Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures' at 52 Walker in New York in 2023. 

The Artist Talk and Opening Reception for This Machine Creates Opacities is part of ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).