Whitney Biennial 2024 Is Bigger Than Ever

The Whitney Museum of American Art announces the addition of five curators to help lead the film and performance program for the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Co-organizers Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli have invited Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Taja Cheek, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker to join them in developing a Biennial that goes beyond the Museum’s traditional in-gallery presentation to showcase the latest creativity and innovation in art, film, performance, and sound. 

For the first time in Whitney Biennial history, audiences will be able to enjoy elements of the Biennial film program online, as well as during special screenings at the Museum. Artists and curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker will select filmmakers who highlight a breadth of expression through moving images today. American experimentalist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and curator Taja Cheek will select a group of artists and develop a performance and sound series in the Museum’s galleries and theater space that represents the forefront of contemporary experimental performance and sound.  

“The Whitny Biennial always champions the creativity, talent, passion, and vision of our time.” said Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director. “The strength of this edition is highlighted by the visionary curatorial talent of Chrissie and Meg and the incredible collaborators they have invited to broaden the show’s perspectives and amplify its vitality.”

“As we build the 2024 Whitney Biennial, we are fortunate to be shaping the film and performance program in concert with the unique voices of asinnajaq, Greg, Korakrit, Taja, and Zackary,” said Whitney curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli. “Film, sound, and performance are such significant mediums for both of us, and we look forward to sharing with our audiences an incredibly robust film program that raises questions about the porousness of boundaries and identities, along with a thoughtful curation of live performance that offers a sensorial experience centered around embodiment. Each film and performance program is deeply interwoven with the ideas coursing throughout the exhibition, articulating many of its themes in cinematic and musical form.” 

Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing opens March 20, 2024, and is the eighty-first edition of the Museum’s landmark exhibition series, the longest-running survey of American art. A constellation of the most relevant art and ideas of our time, the Whitney Biennial is a showcase of contemporary artists working across media and disciplines, representing evolving notions of American art.

ABOUT THE CURATORS 

Film Program

Korakrit Arunanondchai focuses on the transformative potential of storytelling. With each project, the artist expands his world of interconnected stories through expansive video installations, paintings, sculptures, and performative works. In his work, the idea of collectivity is understood through both the secular and the sacred. A polyphony of storytellers produces a multi-perspectival and non-linear mode of story-telling in Arunanondchai's work.

Born in Bangkok and working primarily between Bangkok and New York, he often works with collaborators to assemble audio and visual materials from various sources. In 2018, Arunanondchai co-founded GHOST:2561, a video and performance art triennial in Bangkok, Thailand.

asinnajaq is from Inukjuak, Nunavik, and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) as a photographer, writer, curator, and filmmaker. She, along with Barbara Fischer, Candice Hopkins, Catherin Crowston, and Jose Drouin Brisbois, was part of the curatorial team that supported Isuma, an artist collective that represented Canada at the 58th Venice Biennale. asinnajaq has also co-created, with Stephern Pushkas, the three-day film festival, Tillitarniit, that celebrates Inuit art and artists. In 2017, she wrote and directed the short sci-fi documentary Three Thousand. She was long-listed for the 2020 Sobey Art Award and co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Winnipeg Art Gallery – Qaumajuq alongside Kablusiak, Krista Ulujuk Zawadski, and Dr. Heather Igloliorte. asinnajaq organized the Flaherty NYC 2022 fall program Let’s all be lichen.

Greg de Cuir Jr is co-founder and artistic director of Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade, Serbia. He has organized programs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Locarno Film Festival, Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Biennale de Lubumbashi, and many other institutions. 

Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, director, and producer who has dedicated her career to telling stories that expand cultural understanding of difference. Drucker is a trans woman and activist based in Los Angeles who often works collaboratively to share narratives about gender-expansive people and women and humanize their communities and struggles. 

Drucker recently directed the Hulu Original documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl and co-directed the Sundance award-winning HBO original documentary The Stroll and the HBO documentary series The Lady and the Dale. She is an Emmy-nominated producer for the docuseries This Is Me and a producer on Golden Globe and Emmy-winning Amazon original series Transparent. She is also a producer on the science fiction film Biosphere, released by IFC Films. Drucker has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Performance Program
 
Taja Cheek, also known professionally as L'Rain, is a curator and musician. She has led performance programs at MoMA PS1, including Sunday sions, an interdisciplinary performance series, and Warm Up, a summer outdoor music series that the museum has hosted since 1998. Prior to her time at MoMA PS1, she worked closely with artists to realize projects at institutions, including Creative Time, Weeksville Heritage Center, and The High Line. She also co-founded a DIY rehearsal and performance space in her neighborhood in Brooklyn that primarily supports independent, improvised, and experimental music. Cheek has previously performed at the Whitney as a part of Kevin Beasley: A view of a landscape. She joined Onyx Collective as a part of Jason Moran’s 2019 solo exhibition performance series and as a member of the ensemble as part of the 2016 perforshake the stars with your song. Under the moniker L'Rain, Cheek is an internationally acclaimed musician whose most recent third album I Killed Your Dog considers what it means to hurt the people you love the most. It earned major praise from the likes of The New York Times, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, and was named Best New Music by Pitchfork.

ABOUT WHITNEY BIENNIAL CO-ORGANIZERS

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is responsible for helping build the Museum’s comprehensive collection of moving image art. Past exhibitions at the Museum include two major thematic surveys of film and video installation, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art (2001) and Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art (2016), and the retrospective Dan Graham: Beyond (2009), co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She was co-curator of the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials and curated the film section of the 2002 Biennial. Recent shows include Mountain/Time (2022), a group exhibition addressing ideas of re-mapping, migration, Black and Indigenous geographies, and conceptualizations of time and knowledge, including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Tourmaline, Kandis Williams, Kahlil Joseph, Clarissa Tossin, Maia Ruth Lee, Arthur Jafa, Anicka Yi, Alan Michelson, Ian Cheng, and Mark Leckey.

Iles is a Graduate Committee member of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, a Curatorial Studies faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, a Visiting Critic in Columbia University’s Fine Art Department, and a board member of the Julia Stoschek Collection. Recently published writing includes “East German Gothic and Black Second Sight: Unheimliche Histories in Stan Douglas’s Der Sandmann” (Das Minsk, Potsdam, 2022) and “Sacred Systems: The Moving Image Works of Korakrit Arunanondchai” (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, and Kunsthalle Hamburg, 2022). 

Meg Onli is Curator-at-Large at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In addition to the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Onli will co-curate the Museum’s highly anticipated 2026 retrospective for Roy Lichtenstein, the first New York retrospective for the artist in more than thirty years, with artist Alex Da Corte and Scott Rothkopf, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum. 

Onli was previously co-director and curator of the Underground Museum. Prior, she was the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA Philadelphia). While at the ICA Philadelphia, Onli curated the exhibitions Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents (2019), Jessica Vaughn: Our Primary Focus is to be Successful (2021), and co-curated the retrospective Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021). Onli is the recipient of a 2012 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital for the Black Visual Archive, a project she founded in 2010 that reviews contemporary Black visual culture. She received a 2014 Graham Foundation Grant and the 2019 Transformation Award from the Leeway Foundation. She was also the inaugural recipient of the Figure Skating Prize, awarded by Virgil Abloh’s Art Space in 2021.

ABOUT THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL

A constellation of the most relevant art and ideas of our time, the Whitney Biennial showcases contemporary artists working across media and disciplines, representing evolving notions of American art. Established by the Museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, in 1932, the Whitney Biennial is the longest-running survey of American art. More than 3,600 artists have participated to date, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Mark Bradford, Alexander Calder, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Raven Chacon, Ellen Gallagher, Jeffrey Gibson, Nan Goldin, Renee Green, Wade Guyton, Rachel Harrison, Jenny Holzer, Edward Hopper, Joan Jonas, Ellsworth Kelly, Mike Kelley, Willem de Kooning, Barbara Kruger, Pope. L, Jacob Lawrence, Carolyn Lazard, Zoe Leonard, Roy Lichtenstein, Glenn Ligon, Agnes Martin, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Julie Mehretu, Sarah Michelson, Joan Mitchell, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Georgia O'Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Laura Owens, Jackson Pollock, Postcommodity, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Martine Syms, Wu Tsang, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and David Wojnarowicz.

The 2024 Whitney Biennial is organized by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. The performance program is organized by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with guest curator Taja Cheek. The film program is organized by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker.

On the cover: Left to right:  Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Taja Cheek, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker

Source: Whitney Museum Press Office