Technologies of Relation

On view at the Musuem of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts (MASSMoCA)

February 21, 2026 - July 25, 2027

Curated by Susan Cross with Meghan Clare Considine

Commissioned work: Reverb, 2024-2026

Eight u’a panels (tapa cloth) fabricated in Samoa by my aunty Makulata Taua in Siutu-Salailua, Samoa. Digital work screen printed on tapa with accompanying text. Screen printed by Artrite.

Images courtesy of the museum, photo credit Kaelan Burkett.

About Technologies of Relation

Responding to the rapidly advancing technologies that are shaping our daily lives and social fabric, the artists in Technologies of Relation examine how we relate to each other, to our devices, and to our future.

These creators see the complexity of our relationships to the digital, avoiding the binary views that frame technology as good or bad, as tool or monster. They embrace how technology can connect us, but also acknowledge how algorithms and A.I. have the tendency to oppress and erase marginalized communities. Artists have been key to identifying the colonialist logic, racism, and violence embedded in and produced by corporate-developed technologies and datasets. Just as crucial as understanding these problematics, this exhibition offers visions of a technological future that is inclusive and liberatory.

Exhibiting artists are: Morehshin Allahyari; Pelenakeke Brown; Taeyoon Choi; Neema Githere; Mashinka Firunts Hakopian with Dahlia Elsayed, Andrew Demirjian, and Danny Snelson; Kite; Lauren Lee McCarthy; Analia Saban; and Roopa Vasudevan.

Working across mediums, addressing technology both with its own tools and through analog means, many of these artists — skilled technologists — choose simpler materials to give shape to their ideas. Their works demystify technology, reminding us that it is neither neutral nor authoritative, or beyond our scope of influence. They bring it closer by relating emerging technologies to the ancient arts of weaving, tattooing, and divination. These artists look to ancestral traditions as models for making technology more accessible, and for ways of imagining (or remembering) how we can employ more ethics and care in the technological sphere.

About ‘Reverb’ installation, 8 panels of u’a (tapa), digital works screen printed on u’a.

These works were created over two years while researching how to make tapa (mullberry bark cloth) at my ancestral knowledge Siutu from my aunt Makulata. Traveling back to Samoa to learn alongside my mother and sister our family knowledges influenced this work. Understanding the technology of the practice of making tapa as well as the archives of patterns that my family have for many many generations. These patterns referencing flora and fauna encouraged me to think about the shapes and patterns in my natural habitat. The 4x patterns are made up using the patterns from the keyboard cap and the scissor switch mechanism enabled in the mac keyboard. My work too, is finding evidence of disabled stories and this work references Mafui’e the god who lives under the surface. The overall structure of my patterns reference my great grandfathers upeti board. This work looks at ancestral technologies (the lau u’a process) and modern technology of the keyboard, our creative technologies and disability.

- Pelenakeke Brown