How the Whitney Biennial Artists Are Tackling Today’s Most Resonant Issues

This year’s event represents a wide age range, one that is also reflected in the Whitney curators themselves, with Meg Onli as the newcomer and her partner in the endeavor, Chrissie Iles, as the veteran organizing her third biennial, a record number. “We thought a lot about the dialogue cross-generationally,” says Iles.

Isaac Julien, the British-born, California-based artist and filmmaker, epitomizes the wisdom of experience. He has been acclaimed since his 1989 film, Looking for Langston, and was even knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2022. Julien’s biennial work, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), is a truly immersive, five-screen video installation that takes over a large room and creates a hypnotic effect. Originally commissioned by Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation for its hundredth anniversary and shown at the museum two years ago, the work was inspired by 1920s cultural critic and Harlem Renaissance figure Alain Locke and his connection to Albert C. Barnes, the foundation’s eccentric founder. “They were both Philadelphians, and both contributed to the same magazine,” says Julien. “The lightbulb went off for me.”

Locke and Barnes were contemporaries who both championed modernism and African art. Barnes, despite being best known now for his trove of Matisses and Cézannes, “was a patron of Black artists and he started the ball rolling there,” says Julien. “He was in dialogue with them.” In the artist’s mind, the synergy displayed between the two figures proves that “the mission for inclusion in museums has been a very long story.”

That’s certainly true for the biennial, which has centered on questions of identity and inclusion for decades. “Chrissie and I talk about the ‘dissonant chorus,’ ” says Onli. “What is the space for an individual to exist and also come together in a group?” She adds that there is significant trans representation in the show.

One trans artist, the British-born P. Staff, is reprising a work they showed at Kunsthalle Basel in Basel, Switzerland, last summer, retooled and titled Afferent Nerves. It has pride of place as the opening work for the sixth floor, setting a tone of “precarity,” says Onli. The installation immediately bathes visitors in a yellow light that Staff calls “sunlight gone wrong, toxic and irradiated.” Hanging above is an electrified net, similar to the type used to corral livestock, and you can hear a faint buzzing.

“My background is in performance and dance,” says Staff, who splits their time between London and Los Angeles. “Increasingly I got rid of the performers and made energy and light the active agents.” The artist says the piece “plays into an emotional tenor of this moment, a raw nerve feeling.” They add that it addresses “the suspended feeling between a dissociated state and hypervigilance. I think of that as related to being trans.”

Another of the exhibit’s galvanizing installations is by Torkwase Dyson, who is based in New York’s Hudson Valley. Located outdoors on the fifth-floor terrace, the three-part Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) takes over the space with its mammoth scale, reaching 25 feet tall.

What medium is it? Practically all of them. Three large black shapes set at dramatic angles are hung with paintings on board, and people are encouraged to touch and sit on the architectural portion of the piece. Up close, the surface reveals itself as cracked and rough in places. “I’ve chosen to tackle the collapse of architecture, sculpture, and painting,” Dyson says. “The audience shouldn’t feel there’s a space between those forms anymore.”

Composed of graphite, the work has a dark appearance that makes it part of the artist’s theory of Black compositional thought, which looks at how various spaces are inhabited by Black people, as do her four other works in the show: three assemblages and a video located in a nearby corridor. Dyson says her terrace piece dovetails well with the biennial’s theme. “I took a solid, real thing,” she says, “but then I exploded and expanded it.”