Museum of New York dedicates its biennial to go through the “precarious times” of the pandemic

The Museum Biennale Whitney from New York will open its doors next 6 of April with an exhibition that will try to reflect “the improvised and precarious” reality experienced in the last two years of the pandemic, with the restrictions, the economic inequalities and the protests to demand racial justice, that characterized them.

“We have organized the exhibition to reflect these precarious and improvised times. The biennial serves mainly as a forum for artists and the exhibited works reflect their enigmas, the things that confuse them, the important questions they ask themselves”, assure the curators of the exhibition David Breslin y Adrienne Edwards, it’s a statement.

The exhibition, which was originally scheduled for last year and was postponed due to the pandemic, will be held under the title Quiet as It’s Kept, a colloquial expression that is used to request that what is just or is going to be said not be told (in Spanish it is equivalent to saying ‘no matter how much it is covered up’).

The eighteenth biennial of this American contemporary art museum will feature works by 63 artists and groups from different generations and disciplines and will occupy, mainly, two floors of the institution, built in the New York borough of Manhattan.

According to Breslin and Edwards, exposure does not propose a single theme, but “a series of hunches” as that “abstraction shows an enormous capacity to create, share and, sometimes, to retain meaning”.

They also point to the idea that the research based concept art it can combine “exuberance of ideas and materiality” or that “personal narratives sifted through political, literary and popular cultures can address broader social frameworks”.

For curators, art has the ability to “complicate” the meaning of the concept “American” Addressing physical and psychological boundaries.

In this sense, the biennial will have a space dedicated precisely to the dynamics of the limits of American meaning, with works by artists from the Mexican cities of Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana, as well as Canada and other countries.

And finally, Breslin and Edwards also propose that the “now” can be reimagined “interacting with under-recognized art models and artists we’ve lost.”

For the director of the Alice Prar Brown museum, Adam Weinberg, the works “challenge” the visitor to consider how the realities that confront us “affect our conception of ourselves and of the community”.

“They offer one of the broader and more diverse views of art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years”, concludes Weinberg, quoted in the statement released by the Whitney.