The installation Laurel Nakadate: Say You Love Me will feature a selection of videos by the artist, filmmaker, and photographer Laurel Nakadate, whose work pushes the boundaries of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and vulnerability. In videos such as Happy Birthday, she performs a Lolita-like role in a series of sometimes unsettling fictional vignettes with mostly white, middle-aged men she meets through chance encounters. In others, including Good Morning Sunshine, she continues to exploit the unsavory yet titillating nature of interactions between older men and girls by voicing the role of a predator. Nakadate is always in control, whether in front of or behind the camera; yet her intention is not to make fun of her collaborators. Her videos are complicated but ultimately empathetic meditations on loneliness and longing.

Curated by Michelle Lamunière, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Assistant Curator of Photography, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums.

The exhibition and opening are presented in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums and are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer Jr. Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums. The M. Victor Leventritt Fund was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. The purpose of the fund is to present outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities.

Laurel Nakadate

Nakadate was born in Austin, Texas, and raised in Ames, Iowa. She received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in 1998, and received her MFA from Yale University in 2001. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely, a 10- year retrospective, was recently on view at New York’s MoMA PS1. The artist’s first feature-length film Stay the Same Never Change premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. The Wolf Knife, from 2010, earned nominations for a 2010 Gotham Independent Film Award and a 2011 Independent Spirit Award, and will have its Boston premiere at the Harvard Film Archive, on Nov 18, 2011.