As in previous Biennales, these artists challenge, critique, and subvert the idea of being aligned with the politics and policies of their birth or home countries—indeed, the very idea of representing a country seems somewhat archaic in our multicultural and nomadic world.
60th Venice Biennale
VENICE Various locations An overwhelming number of exhibiting artists have never previously participated in a Biennale, making the show a journey of discovery for visitors. It’s also the first Biennale exhibition with more dead than living artists.
Shilpa Gupta
NEW YORK Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Shilpa Gupta’s recent exhibition of minimal, poetic interventions took on time, space, means of communication, and memory in ways that linger in the heart and mind.
Nairy Baghramian
ZURICH Hauser & Wirth Vulnerability defines these sculptures, and Baghramian forces the viewer to look into details and juggle anomalies of shape and composition for their significance.
Robin Frohardt
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS MASS MoCA The cooler offers skim bag milk to pour over Caps ’n Such cereal topped with blue bag berries. Delight is subsumed by acute nausea. This grotesque place has tricked us into hungering for plastic.
Daniel Giordano
GLENS FALLS, NEW YORK The Hyde Collection Storied objects—including family heirlooms, food, taxidermy, ceramic, trash, human hair, and the work of other artists, among other idiosyncratic treasures—form the basis of Giordano’s work.
Donald Moffett
ROCKLAND, MAINE Center for Maine Contemporary Art The exhibition title, “Nature Cult,” lays out the immense challenge that Moffett has set himself—the development of a new kind of visual language to deal specifically with the issue of climate catastrophe.
George Wyllie
GREENOCK, SCOTLAND The Wyllieum Wyllie described himself as a “scul?tor”—he had a thing about question marks—and believed that asking awkward questions about the world we live in was the artist’s role.
Cathy Wilkes
GLASGOW Hunterian Art Gallery Wilkes’s work looks beyond official validations of war, beyond the monumental and heroic. Instead, she scrutinizes the painful effects of sustained disorder and violent terror on ordinary, everyday lives.
Nick Dong
SAN FRANCISCO Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Yet Dong makes it clear from the outset that a set of guiding principles is meant to enrich the experience of the 11 works in the exhibition, creating an intersection between the spiritual and the corporeal—between what we come to know through our minds and what we absorb through our senses.
