The eighty-first version of the Whitney Biennial—the longest-running survey of latest artwork in the USA—options seventy-one artists and collectives grappling with a lot of right this moment’s most urgent points. From the beginning we sought to arrange a Biennial that might really feel like being inside a “dissonant refrain,” as taking part artist Ligia Lewis described it, a provocative but intimate expertise of distinct and disparate voices that collectively probe the cracks and fissures of the unfolding second.

The exhibition’s subtitle, “Even Higher Than the Actual Factor,” acknowledges that Synthetic Intelligence is complicating our understanding of what’s actual, and rhetoric round gender and authenticity is getting used politically and legally to perpetuate transphobia and limit bodily autonomy. These developments are a part of an extended historical past of deeming individuals of marginalized race, gender, and talent as subhuman—lower than actual. In making this exhibition, we dedicated to amplifying the voices of artists who’re confronting these legacies, and to offering an area the place troublesome concepts may be engaged and thought of.

This Biennial is a gathering of artists who discover the permeability of the relationships between thoughts and physique, the fluidity of identification, and the rising precariousness of the pure and constructed worlds round us. Whether or not by subversive humor, expressive abstraction, or non-Western types of cosmological considering, to call however a number of of their strategies, these artists show that there are pathways to be discovered, methods of coping and therapeutic to be found, and methods to come back collectively even in a fractured time.

at Whitney Museum of American art, New York
till August 11, 2024