See & Experience
Gina Osterloh, Blank Athleticism #1, 2007, lightjet digital c-print 42 x 53 inches.
Courtesy the artist, Silverlens, and Higher Pictures.
Set Up Situations
January 17 – April 26, 2026
Set Up Situations brings together artists who use photography not merely as a medium of documentation, but as an active tool—one that intervenes, performs, and provokes. These artists approach photography as action: a gesture, a confrontation, and a collaboration. The exhibition invites viewers to consider the emotional and psychological textures embedded within images—what lies beneath the surface, in the act of looking and being seen.
Photography here becomes a form of personal activism—a space where identity, resistance, and self-representation converge. The works reclaim narratives, question visibility, and open dialogue with the unseen or untold. In this way, Set Up Situations embraces photography as an evolving, performative act, where meaning unfolds in the moment of encounter.
The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from a strategy coined by Japanese visual artist Koki Tanaka, who constructs open-ended situations without predetermined outcomes—emphasizing process, unpredictability, and collective experience.
Curated by Julio Cesar Morales.
Juan Brennar, Pedro de Alvarado #1, 2018, digital photograph, 50 × 40 inches.
Michael Lundgren, The Algaeic Fox, 2006, pigment print, 35 × 43 inches.
Featuring regional, national, and international artists:
Iván Argote, Juan Brenner, Tania Candiani, Liz Cohen, Ana Teresa Fernández, Kristie Hansen, Jim Jocoy, Michael Lundgren, Mariel Miranda, Reynier Leyva Novo, Omar Sosa, Gina Osterloh, Koki Tanaka, and Richard T. Walker.
Set Up Situations and Young Artists for the Planet are made possible through the generous support of Robin Eber, Tracy Flanagan and Rick Trautner, the Baker Family Foundation, and MarinMOCA's Board of Directors. Special thanks to Natasha Boas for initiating this collaboration between Julio César Morales and MarinMOCA and also to Lucie Charkin and MarinMOCA's Teen Leadership Council.
Koki Tanaka, A Haircut by 9 Hairdressers at Once (Second Attempt), 2010, collaboration, video documentation (28 minutes), Meguro, Tokyo; photo courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, and Aoyama.
Set Up Situations Programs:
Teen Takeover Party
Friday, April 24 | 7-10 pm
MarinMOCA: 1210 Fifth Ave. San Rafael
About the Teen Councils exhibition: Organic Connections
Inspired by Japanese visual artist Koki Tanaka, who creates open-ended situations without predetermined outcomes, our exhibition uses photography to document the connections formed as we create art together. Specifically, our exhibit “Organic Connection” explores the landscapes we exist in and how we, as young people, interact and experience nature. With further support from Young Artists for the Planet, an experience and tradition at the museum that connects students with a professional artist to create art that comments on our environment, the Teen Council is working with artist and curator of “Set Up Situations,” Julio Cesar Morales, and artist Gina Osterloh. Like “Set Up Situations,” which uses photography as a way to collect, document, and preserve a moment, we are practicing similar techniques in our own backyards of Marin.
Our goal as the Teen Council is to create a place in our community where young people have a space to create and connect through their love of art. We are taking Julio and Gina’s roots in community-driven art and using photography to interact with our environment, in turn creating third spaces for young people to share and build connections
Join us for a night of art and community for Marin High School students hosted by the Teen Council.
7:00-8:00pm - Organic Connections artists reception, food, music and collaborative art making
*Free and Open to all
8:30-10:00pm drive in movie experience with popcorn and soda
*tickets required
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Magia! New Futures of Photography: A conversation between SFMOMA Photography Curator Shana Lopes and Set Up Situations Curator Julio César Morales
Saturday, April 11, 2026 | 2 pm
MarinMOCA: 1210 Fifth Ave. San Rafael
What is magic? Do we still believe in it? Since its invention, photography has often been described as a magical act. The new medium could fix a fleeting moment in time onto a blank surface. Early viewers experienced photographs with awe as they encountered what felt like an alchemical or otherworldly conjuring.
Today, in our era of information overload, have we lost this sense of wonder, or has magic simply changed forms? Artists across history have engaged photography as a site of illusion, ritual, transformation, and mystery. From experimental darkroom processes to conceptual and performative practices, photography has long operated between the visible and the invisible. Contemporary artists continue to test those boundaries with new technologies and critical perspectives and, in so doing, they reimagine enchantment, belief, and perception.
Magia opens a conversation about this restless, yet enduring relationship between photography and the realm of wonder. It asks how images still hold the power to surprise and transform the way we see.
Live Haircut Performance & Closing Party
Sunday, April 26 | 2pm
MarinMOCA: 1210 Fifth Ave. San Rafael
HCMN is a live performance by Kristie Hansen featuring three invited Bay Area hair stylists who will collaboratively create a single, unique haircut—cutting simultaneously on one participant. The performance will take place at MarinMOCA, where audiences are invited to bear witness to the negotiations, conversations, and moments of drama that unfold throughout the process.
The relationship between cutter and subject is amplified through the live micing of accessories and tools, which are mixed in real time to produce an evolving soundtrack that fills the gallery space.
In 2010, Kristie Hansen collaborated with Japanese artist Koki Tanaka in San Francisco to create Haircut by 9 Hairdressers at Once (Second Attempt) —a haircut performance that helped shape Tanaka’s artistic practice around constructed “set-up situations.” This earlier work also serves as a key inspiration for the exhibition at MarinMOCA.
Participants: Kristie Hansen, Erik Webb, Nelson Loskamp, and Teresa Delgado.
We are currently seeking a volunteer hair model for the performance. Email info@marinmoca.org if interested.
Up Next: The Shape of Thought
Opening May 16 | 3-5pm
Curated by artists Catherine Wagner and Alexandra Bowes, The Shape of Thought brings together six women artists – Jay Defeo, Deborah Lohrke, Sandra Ono, Tressa Pack, Nicole Phungrasamee Fein, and Veronica Ryan – whose practices are rooted in meticulous craft, material acumen, and sustained attention.
Spanning multiple disciplines – sculpture, drawing, photography, and installation – the works in this show unfold through an intimate dialogue between artist and material. Mediums ranging from found objects to carefully woven thread, photographic emulsions to translucent skeins of paint gestate slowly as form, color, language, and physicality take shape through touch, time, and responsiveness. The flotsam of everyday life and the basic elements of studio practice carry memory, reasoning, immediate relevance, and future possibility.
Conceived by esteemed visual artists-turned-curators, The Shape of Thought invites intimate viewing and questions the boundaries between intellectual inquiry and physical experimentation. In works that feel immersive and held in time, personal histories and mnemonic experience emerge through texture, accumulation, and gesture. Positioned at the meeting point of thought and matter, The Shape of Thought reveals how careful, poetic execution allows material to become a vessel for presence and creative intelligence.
