Office Baroque is pleased to announce Leigh Ledare’s second solo exhibition at the gallery on Bloemenhofplein in Brussels. The artist will present two interconnected bodies of work which formed the core of his recent solo exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago. In the gallery’s first room, his film The Task will screen twice daily at 1pm and 3pm; and in the second room, he will present five large scale assemblage works from his related series, Plots.

For the opening on Saturday, November 9th, a special screening of The Task will start at 4pm, followed by a conversation between the artist and Lisa Long, an independent curator currently working with the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf/Berlin.

Ledare’s 2017 film The Task comprises an intervention into a renowned method of experimental social psychology initially developed in the 1950s at London’s Tavistock Institute. Ledare began by staging an immersive three-day Group Relations conference — an intricate feedback apparatus designed to surface and reflect upon unconscious group phenomena—around which he conceived a complex filming structure. In addition to directing the film’s crew, Ledare assembled a diverse group of twenty-eight participants that represented a cross-section of Chicago’s population and secured the collaboration of ten psychologists trained in the method. During a sequence of small and large group encounters, the group enacts a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself — an abstract “task” that allows participants to examine the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics.

Arguably more anthropological than therapeutic, this model hinges on a rigorous scripting of restraints — withholding any clear topic of discussion; adhering to the “here and now”; and recasting the typical dependency relationship between patient/psychologist through the rubric of “authority.” Into this container Ledare introduced an unprecedented modification: the presence of a camera crew and the artist as observers and collaborators. Like sprinkling sand into the machine, this intervention complicates the system by making its members grapple with the effects of external social and technological forces — eliciting contradictory fantasies and fears that influence how the camera is symbolized and used by the group. By throwing into crisis authority and boundaries among all members — including the artist — Ledare calls attention, by analogy, to power structures that govern our relations to one another in a society where we are increasingly both observers and observed.