A Crisis of Context

Much has been written about the proliferation of biennials and their function, first and foremost, to map specific localities onto the imaginary terrain of global contemporary art.* One challenge that biennials face is the balance they attempt to strike between a conceptually coherent group show and a roster of artists who signal the zeitgeist. This challenge is exacerbated when one considers that a diversity of backgrounds represented in such exhibitions implies a multiplicity of histories and systems of signification. Can an exhibition function as explicator of global multiplicity, or is it destined to fail?

As artists who attempt to navigate the many potential contexts that frame our artwork, we find ourselves internalizing this challenge. We are caught in the crosscurrent of wanting to participate in such exhibitions, while simultaneously worrying that our work may lose the contextual markers that maintain its legibility. This contextualization is performed by didactic wall labels that often displace the problem of interpretation onto the problem of comparison. Exhibition viewers look back and forth between description and object, attempting to determine whether or not their cold read of the artwork corresponds with the official account.

Several artists in this exhibition successfully draw attention to this predicament. In Shadi Harouni’s video, The Lightest of Stones (2015), we find ourselves watching a group of ex-quarrymen in Kurdistan as they observe and discuss the odd activity of a young woman, back to camera, carefully scouring the face of a cliff and displacing stones that tumble onto her. I was drawn to this piece by its performance of opacity, finding camaraderie with an audience elsewhere in my encounter with this threshold of comprehension.

In the video Golden Hours: Live Streaming Sunset (2016) by Magali Duzant, this elsewhere remains a promise that lies beyond an ever-postponed horizon. Like tourists on an airplane that never lands, the video cuts from sunset to sunset live-streamed from a series of eight cameras positioned around the world. The artwork points to the dislocation of the exhibition as site—this video could be shown anywhere—and in so doing forces us to reflect on the crisis of context brought on by the biennial.

While the global imaginary of the art world projects a continuity of geography affirmed by the movement of artists from Seoul to Marrakesh to Kassel and gallerists from Dubai to Hong Kong to Basel, the unequal access to safe space is made apparent today by a new record in the number of refugees. Mark Tribe’s topographic fragments, Plein Air (2014), point to this double-edge of the dislocated eye. From its aerial vantage, duty-free tourism is indistinguishable from a drone’s camera that trains its crosshairs on some unsuspecting target. These photographic prints are read as specific sites, until the wall label reveals that they are in fact digitally constructed non-sites.

Unlike the aforementioned artworks, Mariam Ghani’s The Garden of Forked Tongues (2016) takes an approach that naturalizes the museological context and its technologies of explication. Her map visualizes statistics about people living in Queens who speak languages on the brink of extinction. Ghani’s mural functions as a visual aid that one refers to while reading her essay provided in a fold-out. Although it is a special commission programmatically separate from Queens International 2016, it is born out of the predicament of biennial as site. A poetic exercise in data visualization that scrupulously accounts for the local and global, this piece remains unchallenging in its conviction to remain legible.

*Preziosi, Donald et al. “The Crystalline Veil and the Phallomorphic Imaginary,” The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø. (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010).