Marissa Lee Benedict and David Ruether
Organizational Fictions. An Artist Talk on Scores for Infrastructures and Bureaucracies
October 27, 2026 6 p.m.
TRACES Rsearch Station, Lutherplatz
Working across video, installation, and performance, Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter create scores that produce encounters between industrial processes, professional grammars, and the human body—arranging what might be described as unlikely meetings between estranged landscapes. Rooted in the legacy of 1960s and 70s US conceptual art but driven by a distinctly contemporary engagement with infrastructure, algorithms, and administrative power, their practice takes professional and technical operations—legal, logistical, architectural—and recasts them as performances, probing the boundaries of what such systems can and cannot absorb. Objects and videos serve as documents of these interventions, which unfold across sites where the built environment, bureaucratic procedure, and psychic spaces overlap. The work begins from a simple proposition and spirals outward, surfacing the mythological dimensions latent in the supposedly mundane, creating instances where the resonances of collective experience can be felt.
In this talk, artist duo Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter will present a selection of their transdisciplinary video and installation-based artworks. In particular, the discussion will revolve around their most recent score-based documented performance Metrica No.5-10, in which professional psychotherapists are invited to interview national and regional archival “psyches" in situ, using digitized administrative records of land management from the 12th-20th centuries as raw material for synthetic memories.
Marissa Lee Benedict (b. 1985, USA) and David Rueter (b. 1978, USA) have worked together as an artist duo since 2014. Benedict holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (US) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Rueter received a BA in Politics from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have exhibited works in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (BR); the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (US); the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale (IT); Msheireb Museums (QT); the Arts Club of Chicago (US); the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (US); P/////AKT (NL); and Contemporary Art Brussels (BE), amongst others. They have received major grants from institutions such as the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (US); the National Endowment for the Arts (US); the Mondriaan Fund (NL); the Lithuanian Council for Culture (LT); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation (US). Their work has been reviewed by publications such as Artforum (US), Revista (BR), and Hyperallergic (US), and have published a book on their collaborative work with artist Daniel de Paula (BR) titled deposition (2018–ongoing), with Mousse Publishing (2023). They have participated in numerous international artistic residencies including Rupert (LT), the Banff Centre (CN), the Jan van Eyck Academie (NL), the Headlands Center for the Arts (US), and Air Berlin Alexanderplatz (DE).
Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter were invited by Mi You as part of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Worlds of Raw Materials—Cultures in Transition”
The event will be held in English.
Images:
Metrica No. 5 (Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter) installation view at Rupert (LT).Photo: Laurynas Skeisgiela
Portraitphoto: Verena Blok.
