Judith Barry’s work spans a range of media and crosses disciplines, including installation and project-based research, architecture/exhibition design, film/video, performance art/dance, sculpture, photography, and digital media. Her exhibition at Lumiar Cité constitutes the international premiere of her two-channel immersive installation All the light that’s ours to see, for which the artist appropriates the story of a New York video rental chain store, the infamous Mondo Kim's, and the quest to find a home for 55,000 video tapes and films after it closed. The video rental market generated a transformation in audience viewing conventions that departed from the tradition of a collective experience shared by strangers in the darkness of the cinema and shifted into new domestic uses and spatial typologies – including video games, and evolving social media. This radical change of where we watch and engage with moving images and, consequently, of our sharing and collective experience, gave way to new forms of spatialisation inherent to digital media.

A palimpsest of images, presented across two screens, explores how ways of viewing, dating back to medieval times and evolving into our present in a variety of environments, produces different social experiences. Various architectural spaces are represented: from anatomy theatres to libraries and archives, from conventional theatre architecture to churches and the optical illusion of the trompe-l'œil, from factories designed for the performance of new types of labour to museums, from movie palaces to panoramas, from cabinets of curiosities (Kunstkammer) to Renaissance and Baroque painting and their relationship to the development of perspective, sculpture, abstraction, and the moving image. These spaces are explored through a history of technology that considers the relation of older forms to cybernetics, robotics, the Internet, augmented and virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. This visual journey allows the viewer to travel through historical moments and simultaneously question social changes and the relationships between media and our ever-changing habits of consumption. The work is an elegiac meditation on our behaviour as audiences and on how we are being transformed by the evolution of new technologies and forms of media.

Judith Barry lives and works in New York. She has exhibited internationally and been included in numerous exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennale, Carnegie International, Documenta, Nagoya Biennale, São Paolo Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Sydney Biennale, Venice Biennale(s) of Art and Architecture, and the Whitney Biennale. A survey of her work travelled in Europe and was most recently shown at the Berardo Museum, Lisbon, in 2010. Public Fantasy, a collection of Barry’s essays, was published by the ICA in London (1991). Other publications include Projections: mise en abyme (1997), The Study for the Mirror and Garden (2003) and Judith Barry: body without limits (2009). Her awards include the Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts, (2000) and the Best Pavilion and Audience Award at the 8th Cairo Biennale (2001). Currently, she is Director and Professor of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology Cambridge, MA.

The exhibition was designed by the US architect Ken Saylor.

This artwork was produced with the generous support of CAST – Arts at MIT (US), ACT Faculty Project Fund at MIT (US), the donors to the 2018 McDermott Award Gala, hosted by the Council for the Arts at MIT (US), HOME (UK), Film and Video Umbrella (UK), Maumaus / Lumiar Cité, Ministry of Culture / Directorate-General of the Arts (Portugal), Audain Visual Artist in Residency (Simon Fraser University, Canada) and private foundations in Europe and the USA.

Covid-19: Maximum four visitors in the gallery at any time. Face masks are compulsory. The usual opening event will not take place.