Whitney Biennial chooses a 'dissonant choir' of artists to explore turbulent times

The last time the Whitney Biennial took place, in 2022, its production was extended by a year due to the Covid pandemic, and curators had to plan the exhibition and meet with artists during virtual visits via Zoom.

In preparation for the 2024 Biennial – the latest version of the historic exhibition of American contemporary art, which opens on March 20 – the organizers of this edition, the curators of the Whitney Museum, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, set out. They made about 200 studio visits throughout the country and beyond. They attended dozens of exhibitions and art events, from the German mega-show Documenta 15 to Carnegie International in Pittsburgh.

So this cycle has been more normal in a way. But the normal ends here. The drastic phase of the pandemic, with its associated restrictions, may be over. But the landscape left in its wake is a panorama of widening crises – and for artists, like everyone else, a period of great uncertainty and fear as the US elections approach.

As they walked around, Iles and Onli said in a joint interview at the museum, they felt environmental pressures everywhere, whether they smelled smoke from the wildfires blowing across Los Angeles' freeways — a reflection of excessive land use and climate change — or from the first by women and LGBTQ artists, the effect of the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the spread of laws that undermine bodily autonomy.

“We understand that we are in a turbulent period, which will lead to another turbulent period,” Onli said. To create an exhibition under these circumstances, she said, “the show had to be politically charged.”

On Thursday, the museum announced the names of artists who will participate in the Biennale, entitled 'Even better than the real thing.” It is relatively compact, with 69 artists and two collectives spread across the gallery exhibition, its associated film and performance programs – and the world map: twenty of the artists, many filmmakers, live or work outside the United States.

For Iles and Onli, the focus is less on the state of American art than on America itself in a raw, vulnerable time. They were drawn to artists who explored how people carried and processed the wounds of society in their bodies and minds – and the creative regeneration this brought about.

As for the title, it's a kind of multi-pronged response to the culture wars over what's “real” – from the rise of artificial intelligence to attempts to impose social and physical conformity. “There's a kind of strange playfulness to it,” Onli said of the offering – a tongue-in-cheek humor that emphasizes: “Of course we're even better than the real thing!”

The group is diverse, just like recent biennials. There are two deceased artists: the Jamaican-born, architecturally inspired painter Mavis Pusey, who died in 2019 at the age of 90, and the filmmaker Edward Owens, who died in 2010. There are five eldest, born between 1941 and 1944: the pioneering feminist artists Maria Kelly and Harmony Hammond; celebrated black abstract painters Mary Lovelace O'Neal and Susanne Jackson; and the trans sculptor and performer Pippa Garner. Otherwise, the exhibition is younger: 17 of the 42 artists in the main galleries were born in the 1980s, and nine of them in the 1990s.

Not surprisingly, New York City is well represented, with thirteen artists living here in its galleries and seven in its film and performance programs. A total of twelve artists are based in Los Angeles. Four, it turns out, live in New Mexico: Hammond, who moved there in the 1980s; indigenous artists Rose B. Simpson and Cannupa Hanska Luger; and the painter Maya Ruznicborn in Bosnia and influenced by mysticism and psychoanalysis.

The film and performance programs — organized by the invited curators asinnajaq, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Zakary DruckerGreg de Cuir, Jr. and Taja Wang – includes works by Southeast Asian filmmakers grappling with America's broad cultural and political reach, and by indigenous filmmakers of Sami, Inuit, Mongolian, and Native American descent who seek exchanges beyond colonial borders.

Few artists are celebrities or market stars. Perhaps the most prominent is director Isaac Julien, whose lavish five-screen installation “Once Again… (Statues Never Die)” premiered at the Barnes Foundation in 2022. The installation explored issues surrounding African artifacts in Western collections and will be new Debut in York at the Whitney.

In short telephone interviews, several artists described the work they will present.

The artist P. Staff, based in Los Angeles and London, has one of the more spectacular, shocking works: “Afferent Nerves,” a large installation in which viewers walk under electrified mesh, out of reach but “somewhat audibly” crackling. The area is bathed in a yellow neon light. The intention, the artist said, is to create a sense of “choreographed danger” that increases the visitor's awareness of the art, and perhaps their own sense of safety.

The New York-based sculptor Jesus Fan makes disturbing work in a different register: he had a CT scan made of his body, then 3D printed various organs and cut out and sanded the resulting shapes. The inspiration is a type of tree in Hong Kong, where Fan grew up, that is aggressively cut down or infected by fungi to yield a prized incense.

The sculptures are part of a series “Locations of injuries', in which Fan explores how organisms, while experiencing trauma, can generate 'something meaningful, a kind of regeneration that takes place in the formation of the scar', which he links to the human condition.

The Philadelphia-based artist Karyn Olivier, known for her work responding to historic monuments and public art—most recently in Newark Airport's Terminal A—shows her “more intimate, tranquil sculptures.” In one, 'How Many Ways Can You Disappear', she includes tangles of fishing nets, rope and buoys; another is made from washed-up driftwood and discarded clothing fragments.

Olivier said she feels like she is processing the upheavals and losses of the pandemic period. “They are almost a metaphorical attempt at a solution,” says the Trinidadian-born artist – rich in allusions to migration, displacement and her Caribbean heritage.

Some messages are more blunt. Luger, a native of North Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation, and a resident of New Mexico, installs a full-size teepee – upside down. “It's a signal that the path we're on as a species has been reversed,” he said.

In “The last safe abortion,” the artist Carmen Winant from Columbus, Ohio – who describes himself as a “lapsed photographer” who works with collages and installations – offers a perspective on the lives of abortion care workers in the Midwest, based on thousands of snapshots, largely taken from clinics. The views are of everyday work: meetings, desk work, answering phones. “It's not about abortion on an ideological level at 30,000 feet,” Winant said. “It's about the people who make it possible.”

The post-Roe climate has raised the stakes for Winant, whose projects also spotlight maternity care and domestic violence providers. Some of the clinics where she photographed have closed. “I've always felt ambivalent about what art can do in terms of political impact and effectiveness,” she said. “But as I worked on this project, I felt more and more that this was my duty.”

For the older artists at the Biennale, it is certainly welcome if recognition comes late. “This is not something I ever expected at my age,” said Jackson, who led a well-known but short-lived black artist space in Los Angeles in the late 1960s and now lives in Savannah, Georgia.

The research includes her hanging abstract acrylic paintings without stretcher frames. “They are living structures that are pure paint,” she said, inviting viewers to a kind of dance.

Hammond, a figure from New York's feminist scene in the 1970s, was on view at the Whitney but was long overlooked by the Biennale. “I just kept working,” she said from her home in Galisteo, NM

Her recent work includes paintings with thick layers, sometimes with straps, rings or duvet covers, with spots and crevices reminiscent of women's bodies, childbirth and wounds. In the colors that seep through the layers, Hammond says, she evokes “voices that have been hidden beneath the surface and are asserting themselves.”

While organizing their show, Onli and Iles brought in a number of artists as partners in the process, breaking with the secrecy that often accompanies biennial preparations.

One was YYYYJerome Ellis, an artist and performer in Norfolk, Virginia, whose work (and name) explores the condition of stuttering. Working with four other people who stutter, Ellis led the development of a text-driven billboard overlooking Gansevoort Street in Spanish, Mandarin and English, in which the disfluencies in stuttering – repetitions, prolonged sounds, blocks or pauses – are represented by typographic symbols.

Ellis will also produce a score for the Biennale, the format of which will be determined once the exhibition is installed.

The Berlin artist and choreographer Liga Lewis presents in its galleries a dance-based film installation, 'A Plot A Scandal' – featuring philosopher John Locke, Cuban anti-slavery revolutionary José Antonio Aponte, and Lewis' own maternal ancestors in the Dominican Republic. It was Lewis who coined a metaphor that the curators found inspiring to describe their Biennale: a 'dissonant chorus'.

As they installed the research, the curators said they strive to create a show that breathes and flows while honoring that dissonance. “What does it mean as a viewer to be in the middle of that chorus,” Iles said, “both listening and seeing?”