Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston is organizing the first US museum survey of the work of Charles Atlas. Charles Atlas: About Time takes a comprehensive look at over 50 years of Atlas' creative output, spanning his “dance for camera” videos done with the choreographer Merce Cunningham to his collaborations with younger artists.

Jeffrey de Blois, Mannion Family Curator at ICA Boston, has selected Atlas' most representative works and arranged them as an immersive experience, creating a space that is hemmed in by monumental multi-channel installations. These installations consist of more than 125 smaller, single-channel pieces which Atlas "explodes" into novel configurations and juxtapositions. Atlas' work explores themes of performance, portraiture, gender and sexuality.

The 12 videos in Atlas’ Personalities, here previewed in a single grid, will be presented in the exhibition as part of a new installation. © Charles Atlas, Personalities, 2024.

Apart from earlier works Atlas has created a new sculptural video installation titled Personalities. This new work is composed of a dozen videos of short durations, each of which visually encapsulates one person or a handful of people, drawing out their idiosyncratic qualities and setting them into a choreographed ensemble that allows viewers a dynamic engagement with the content. In a display of recursive self-reference Atlas utilizes his own videos as found footage for this project, recontextualizing them and providing them a “physicality” not present in their previous iterations.

Charles Atlas is a pioneering moving image artist who began a legendary collaboration with Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York which birthed the genre of “media dance”, which revolutionized how dance is composed for the camera lens. His work with Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Leigh Bowery, Marina Abramović, Rashaun Mitchell, Silas Riener and many others set the tone for how performances are visualized on screen. Atlas' works have been featured at Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and many other important institutions.

Charles Atlas: About Time opens on October 10, 2024. Atlas will appear at ICA Boston on March 6, 2025 for an Artist’s Voice conversation with De Blois. For more about this exhibition and other events at ICA Boston check their site. Atlas is represented by Luhring Augustine in New York.

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