The 2022 Whitney Museum Biennial Show
The curators of the Whitney began preparing the 2022 Museum Biennial show before the pandemic started, but as the pandemic continued they decided to allow the Biennial to reflect what was going on during the pandemic. The curators choose to describe the exhibit as follows:
“The spaces here contrast significantly, acknowledging the acute polarity of our society. One floor is a labyrinth, a dark space of containment: another is a clearing, open and light filled.”
This perfectly describes how the spaces were designed. The curators also chose to not have a unifying, theme but included many artworks that talked about climate change, death, and race, often in the context of questioning the meaning of what it is to be American.
The first floor of the Biennial was light and airy and made use of unconventional curating techniques, such as geometric structures that held up the various artworks and that managed to divide up the room while still allowing for the space to feel open and allow for people to move freely and throughout the room. This floor mainly contained a lot of large-scale paintings, sculpture, and installation-style artwork. The other main floor was mainly painted with matte black paint and was divided into smaller rooms, this floor contained many sound and video installations. Overall, both spaces worked well together and were able to give the Whitney Museum Biennial show a contrasting yet cohesive feeling.
One of the artworks that stood out to me the most was a sound installation entitled Silent Choir, by Raven Chacon. This installation was made up of two main components; one was a bottle with a cork that represents the last breath of Thomas Edison. This bottle was in a glass case on the center of one of the walls. The other part of the installation was a recording of a humming sound that the artist recorded from Backwater Bridge between the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and Bismarck, North Dakota. This northeast corner of the reservation became the location of a ten-month standoff during 2016 to 2017. The standoff was protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline which would have jeopardized the Hunkpapa Lakota’s primary water source and in the process destroyed sacred sites and cultural belonging that belonged to this tribe. This issue brought together tribal members, Water Protectors and environmentalists to protest the construction of the pipeline. The artist Raven Chacon recorded the female leaders of the tribe leading hundreds of protestors in a silent confrontation of the North Dakota state police and pipeline security officers who were stationed on the bridge. Chacon describes the audio in the following:
"An audio capture of dense silence, the field recording holds power: it instills in the listener knowledge of the women's action and their sonic resistance."
I found that this sound installation was one of the most powerful artworks I saw at the Biennial because of how it allowed for the viewer to come to their own conclusions about what the installation was about, and that the audience, faced with a mystery, could choose to find out its true meaning only if they elected to read the wall text. In this way, the piece only becomes complete when it engages the listener intellectually and emotionally. I felt that Raven was able to say such much with this piece simply by combing two objects that are simple in their nature, both of which were sound and breath that had managed to be bottled up. By combining the bottle of the last breath of the Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, sound recording, and mass communication together with the recording of silence, this artwork is able to represent many things, such as the loss of important people and the losses faced by indigenous tribes. It also implicates big corporations and our government’s role in global warming and the devastation of a sacred environment. It accomplishes this while also being able to represent how sometimes silence is more powerful than words.
