MATTER(S) MATTER(S):
Bridging Research in the Arts and Sciences

Exhibition at the Broad Art Museum
OCTOBER 27TH, 2018 – MARCH 3RD, 2019

This exhibition brings together new and recent projects by participants in the BRIDGE Artist-in-Residence Program at Michigan State University— a three-year-long initiative connecting international, cutting-edge artists with faculty and students across the university’s many colleges. With their shared interests in materiality and topical issues—the dual “matters” invoked in the exhibition title—the artists and their collaborators address a wide range of phenomena through interdisciplinary approaches to research, experimentation, and knowledge production. The exhibition thus reveals an “epistemological turn” in the arts and sciences, focusing on how knowledge is produced and how the process of production inflects meaning and interpretation. This major presentation highlights the incredible resources the university has to offer, and how artists and scientists work together to imagine the future, today.

Featured artists include Art Orienté Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin), Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, Tagny Duff, HeHe (Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen), Zbigniew Oksiuta, Kuai Shen, Stelarc, and Sissel Tolaas.

MATTER(S) matter(s): Bridging Research in the Arts and Sciences is co-curated by Steven L. Bridges, Associate Curator, and Jens Hauser, Guest Curator and MSU Distinguished Affiliated Faculty. Support for this exhibition is provided by the MSU College of Arts and Letters, MSU BRIDGE Artist-in-Residency Program, Science Gallery Detroit, Goethe-Institut Chicago, and the Eli and Edythe Broad endowed exhibitions fund.


Bridge is a collaboration of the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, the College of Arts and Letters, the Lyman Briggs College of Science, the Abrams Planetarium and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum

intermedia research within the ‘epistemological turn’

where art is no longer only concerned with the production of forms and narratives

alternative knowledge production

informed techno-scientific critique

questioning of the materials and technical media that shape our world views

Call for artists to engage in creative research bridging scientific inquiry, the arts and the humanities