an archive and/or a repertoire explores the liminal spaces that emerge between archives and ephemeral new media. Featuring the Mobius, Inc. Records —the administrative archive of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group—this exhibition serves as a local laboratory, delving into materials from Mobius’ experimental performances, new media projects, sound works, dances, and installations. Currently housed in Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), the Mobius, Inc. Records contains organizational records, photographs, and video documentation from c. 1968 to 2009, chronicling the early work of individual members and the artist-run organization founded by artist Marilyn Arsem, who also founded the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), where she taught for over a quarter century. 
an archive and/or a repertoire questions the boundaries and limits of the archive, through what performance studies scholar Diana Taylor understands as its embodied counterpoint, the repertoire. The exhibition is organized in four research threads that activate a potential remapping of the archive in light of the repertoire—Deep Time, Siting Place, Horizontal Collectivity, and Document / Residue—featuring photos, posters, newsletters, and other physical materials from the Mobius, Inc. Records at TARC. Presented alongside are embodied contributions from Mobius Artists Group members, new commissions and works by group artists Lani Asunción and Forbes Graham, as well as work by artists Aki Sasamoto and Takahiro Yamamoto. Responses to the archive also include oral histories from artists, activists, and cultural workers adjacent to Mobius, video documentation of the group’s early performance works, and ongoing public programming. Altogether, the exhibition components pose a challenge to the legacy of the material archive while also activating the collective imaginary of the repertoire—gestures, spoken word, movement, dance, sounds—that might otherwise be lost, erased, or forgotten.
an archive and/or a repertoire is organized by Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, with assistance from TUAG Graduate Research Fellow Wenxuan Xue (Tufts University PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies), Senior Preparator and Installation Manager David Thacker, and Exhibitions Assistant Meera Chauhan, in dialogue with artist and Mobius founder Marilyn Arsem and participating artists.
Research for an archive and/or repertoire Education Guide was contributed by Wenxuan Xue, TUAG Graduate Research Follow and PhD Candidate in Theater and Performance Studies, Tufts University, and supported by TUAG Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin, Manager of Academic Programs Elizabeth Canter, and Carrie Salazar, SMFA Library Research and Instruction Librarian.
About Mobius Artists Group
Photo credit: Wall Fall Down (and get back up again), performance by Nancy Adams and Slavco Sokolovski. Mobius 25 event, at Mobius, Boston, MA, USA, June 7, 2003. Photo: Bob Raymond.
Mobius is a Boston-based artists’ collective committed to creating original, experimental work in all media.
Mobius, Inc. is an artist-run non-profit, tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization that creates opportunities to generate, shape and test experimental art. Since 1975, Mobius has been a regional and transnational laboratory for supporting and building relationships among fellow artists. Mobius is recognized as one of the seminal alternative artist-run organizations in the US and has presented work involving thousands of artists over the past 40 years. Works created by Mobius members have been presented throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Several notable exchanges with artists from Ireland and the UK, Croatia, Macedonia, Poland, and Taiwan have focused on public sites as incubators for discourse.
About TARC at Tufts University
Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC) is the archives and manuscript repository of Tufts University and is open to the public. TARC’s team of professional archivists provides stewardship for the Tufts University Archives, nearly three hundred manuscript collections, and other permanently valuable physical and digital archival materials. TARC staff also assist Tufts students, faculty, and staff with recordkeeping activities, through records management and digital library services.
Mobius, Inc. Records
This collection contains the records of Mobius, Inc., dating back to its founding in 1975. The records document the administration and activities of the artists group, including its many projects and works. Major projects include Orpheus; Persephone and Hades; annual ArtRages events; and international exchange with artists focused on site-specific works in Macedonia, Croatia, Poland, and Taiwan. Works span a wide range of live performances, new media, and installations created both individually and in collaboration with other Mobius members, and beyond.
Mobius Founder Marilyn Arsem
Photo Credit: Marilyn Arsem, The Remains of Memory II, 2019. mage courtesy of the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival, Salt Lake City Main Public Library, Utah. Photo: Winston Inoway ©2019
Performance artist Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years and has presented her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. Arsem taught performance art for 27 years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, establishing an extensive curriculum in visually based performance. In 1975 Arsem founded an artist collaborative for experimentation, now known as Mobius Artists Group, of which she is still a member. A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was published in 2020 by Intellect Books of the UK.
Key Questions/Questions for Self-Guided Exploration:
- How does performance transfer knowledge, history, identity, memory, and feelings? How is it different from historical archives?
- What is an artist-run organization? How is it different from museum, gallery, and other art institutions?
- How has the Mobius Artists Group engaged with and pushed the boundaries of performance and new media?
- How does the exhibition shape our understanding of Boston in the history of contemporary art?
- Is art political? How does Mobius use art and organizing to negotiate politics of expression?