I'm a big believer that museums are spaces
in which we come to marvel.
And when audiences are here,
the exhibition becomes like this occasion
for a kind of interrelation,
or an occasion for us to be moved.
The Biennial sort of forms like an assembly, or an ensemble,
or a chorus, for these times.
One of the most important things is to create a platform
for artists to be asking questions they want to ask,
or they want the culture to ask,
or they want this museum or the city of New York
to be asking right now.
We wanted to show the range of ways
in which artists are working.
Who were some of the artists that were thinking
and making in this way,
who were questioning identity using modes of making
that are maybe surprising, that one wouldn't expect,
who were really comfortable
with maybe some lack of certainty
around questions of representation, questions of belonging.
We wanted to be able to show
that fierce sense of criticality and sensitivity
to a kind of radical openness.
Artists are addressing anything from gun violence,
work that deals with mystery,
work that deals with love and loss,
work that obviously deals with the pandemic,
artists who think really closely
about place and dislocation,
artists who think about their families
as a way to really form a personal language
to talk about larger issues in the culture,
artists who deal with mythology as a way
to speak to how past can be rethought in our present moment.
One of the things that we have institutionally
been thinking a lot about
is how do we define what is American?
I think part of working at the Whitney Museum
is to constantly be asking that question.
And it became very clear to us
that there were real questions that were being asked around,
how do we think about the borders of the United States?
For us it was something to work with but also against.
So, it was important for us to make this both about artists
for whom the United States isn't their home.
And for whom the impact of the United States
or the reciprocal relationship between the two countries
is extremely important to understanding both.
Artists are always responding
to the conditions of their lives in some ways.
What we're noticing is that the object
is in fact becoming thicker, denser, more complicated.
It's research-driven.
It's process-oriented.
It's trying to hold and communicate the complexity
of what is being challenged.
What does it mean to create a system around one's self,
meaning life, family, story,
and sort of map that onto a larger world,
and do a really research-driven process
that might look at a whole range of things
in order to come up with your own system of meaning.
There's also this question of what has been,
or what could have been.
Our instinct is both to look forward
but also to look past.
And certain names kept coming up
when we were visiting artists in their studios,
who we started referring to as kind of the ghosts
that haunts those studios,
or haunt us in our thinking.
We thought about who could be certain figures
that we were saying that we could give space
and attention to that they might not have had
during their career,
or might have had a different kind of attention
directed towards them in their lifetime.
David and I were talking a lot about
really wanting to take some ownership
as curators in terms of how the Biennial
could feel like the times in which it's made.
At a time of real change,
frequently the onus is placed on the artist
to demonstrate it, or reflect it in their work.
And we thought,
well, the show actually needs to take on that responsibility
as much as we're asking the artist to do it.
There's sort of this syncopation,
and this evolution into the presentation
that is meant to convey the times in which we live.
So precarious, in flux, unstable, but also dynamic.
Open, engaged, personal.
When you leave, hopefully you'll remember
that you saw the show here.
And you'll remember who you saw it with.