Whitney Biennial 2022: Process as Much as Product
The meditative consideration of the Self and aspects of memory, processing, and conceived notions of our reality are intrinsically linked to reflection on relationships with others and greater cultural behaviours.
In part two of three instalments, MADE IN BED’s Whitney Biennial 2022 series focuses on this second key narrative thread that runs throughout the extensive group show in New York.
Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Lacks Criticality, 2018.
Whilst Awilda Sterling-Duprey explores the body as a means for working through memory’s legacy, the artist also reminds the viewer that this process is always relational and social to others. In the wake of Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico, her 2018 work entitled Lacks Criticality combined exploration of Yoruban dance traditions with a meditation on the force of nature. Through an interplay of the artist’s body, the bodies of her collaborators, and those of the audience, the project aims to speak to the artist’s history through critical relationships between the bodies of all participants. As Sterling-Duprey artfully considers this interplay through participation shared by artists, performers, and audiences, the recognition of shared experience, consideration for Others, and an acknowledgement of shifting realities takes such an intimate understanding to a wider landscape within the Biennial. Following the greatest display of racial inequality protest and activism since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the US, it was not surprising in the least to see themes of multi socio-cultural engagement and consideration explored extensively.
Denyse Thomasos, Displaced Burial/Burial at Gorée, 1993. Acrylic on canvas, 274.3 × 548.6 cm. Image courtesy of the Estate of Denyse Thomasos and Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto.
Denyse Thomasos reflected on her personal history with black culture and politics through abstraction in her painting Displaced Burial/Burial at Goree, employing cross-hatching in black and white to create dimensions of space that recreated the claustrophobic, inhuman conditions of slave ships. For Thomasos, abstraction conveyed the intractable complexity of slavery and the psychological ramifications that displacement, isolation, and confinement then and now continue to exert on people of colour. Similarly, in James Little’s work, he explains that abstraction provides him with self-determination and free will, the modernist tenets free of replication and appropriation that provide a way of improving on the current state. The medium provides a way to self-reflect on personal histories as they relate to brutal injustices of the past, their continued relevance in the present, and what we might be challenged to do differently.
James Little, Stars and Stripes, 2021. Oil and wax on linen. 182.8 x 182.8 cm.
Such reflections on the state of personal culture take a more immediate and diverse role in the life and work of Andrew Roberts, born in Tijuana, Mexico and currently living on the US border. This highly militarized zone is mediated by constant imagery, as NAFTA (the organisation creating a free trade zone between Mexico, Canada, and the US) generated low-resolution offshoots of American cultural objects such as outdated television reruns or preowned video game consoles. The decaying consumer product blended with a violent drug trafficking culture in Tijuana meant the brutality of fact and fiction became indistinguishable. Roberts, as a queer Latino, designs a digitised zombie who represents an undead reality of a being with no belonging, an ostracised character through which the artist explores the structural violence perpetrated through nonhegemonic groups and individuals.
Andrew Roberts, La Horda (The horde) (Detail), 2020. Eight-channel video installation, colour, sound; each channel approx. 3–4 min. Collection of Mauricio Galguera. Image courtesy of the artist and Pequod Co., Mexico City. Photograph by Sergio López.
Coco Fusco explores IRL experience through her reflection on the contemporary pandemic and how artists of other eras respond to global illness and the consequences of death and loss. Her video Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word reflects on metaphors for death such as a character looming in an open sky and disease as a storm. With mass graves opening on Hart Island and prisoners employed to bury the unclaimed victims of COVID-19, these rituals once practised during the Bubonic Plague come full circle and remind us of history’s castaways who continue to be forgotten. History and tradition play a vital role in how these artists build connections with their own heritages, yet drastically inform their identification with culture at present and crucially, how the future could be impacted and our potential to make it bright.
Coco Fusco, Your Eyes Will Be An Empty Word, 2021. HD video, colour, 12 minutes.
Kate Fensterstock
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED