“Off the Grid: Energy and Exhaustion in Art and Architecture,” examines the conceptualization and representation of energy in the socialist world, in particular the Soviet Union and the GDR, as they intersected with the imaginary of the human body and anxieties about that body’s limited energies. the project specializes in the politics of labor and counterimaginations of rest in Soviet aesthetic practices, as well as the emergence of new materials, technologies, and energy systems, such as electricity, oil drilling, and solar energy. Both supplementing and taxing the human body, these new materials and technologies also threw into sharper relief the question of how the socialist body and the socialist environment should look and function, and how the different bodies occupying the increasingly connected and technologized space–from the Black Sea Coast to Moscow to Baku to Tashkent–might relate to it and to one another.