Queens
International
Queens
Museum April 10 – July 31 2016
The Queens
Museum Biennial is a good show. The pieces in the exhibit successfully address
topics like physical territory, migration, artistic transgression, linguistic
and ideological divisions, digital and human interfaces, and prescriptive
narratives of the past, present, and future.
A Third Space by Kerry Downey
is an animation that explores tactile interaction with people, histories,
objects, and spaces through the fluidity of colors, shapes and gestures. The
video shows paper collages and drawings that derive from the physical
confrontation of materials: ink and water mixing within time, pieces of paper
moving with wind, while stories of obsession form an audible narrative.
The Iranian
artist Shadi Haroumi shows a video called The
Lightest of Stones. It was shot in an isolated mountain pumice quarry in
Iranian Kurdistan. The men in the film critique the sanctions against Iran;
they talk about labor, ISIS, dragons and Jennifer Lopez, while the artist is
showed digging into a rocky wall with her bare hands in an impossible attempt to
make a path through the mountain.
The British
artist Freya Powell created Omniscience
and Oblivion. A sound piece, it explores the way individual memories can
speak to shared experiences. For the project, Powell created an online audio
archive where participants anonymously shared one memory they would like to
keep forever and one they would like to forget. Individuals were recorded
reading a stranger’s memory, mediating and reconstructing as ideas disconnected
from the people they once belonged.
The
Biennial shows the work of artists working or living in Queens. Compared to
other shows like Greater New York at MoMA PS1, it seems to have more cultural
diversity. The works in the exhibition are politically engaged and address the
theme of the show very coherently. The exhibition design is minimal, it has
problems with works being too far apart inside the Museum, but that does not
interfere in the overall good quality of the Biennial.
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ReplyDeleteI appreciate how you use the works to illustrate the most important facet of the Queens International … the borough of Queens! It's an interesting place. That being said, I wish your piece wove your ideas about Queens through the whole piece. I came away with the sentiment that each paragraph was a sort of mini-essay within itself. Perhaps your piece is actually too structured and I think your ideas on Queens could bring everything together. Your analysis of each piece is not too far off from your Queens analysis in the last paragraph, so simply being more explicit might help (it also might not). I would, at least, move your last paragraph to the first, using it as a "jumping off" point.
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