Each year the biennale brings art full throttle into New York's mainstream cultural dialogue. This is the seventy-sixth in the ongoing series of Biennials and Annuals presented by the Whitney since 1932, two years after the Museum was founded. An exhibition in which the Museum gauges the current state of contemporary art in America.
This year the event is curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney, and Jay Sanders, a freelance curator. The curators began working on the research and planning of the show in early December 2010. Fifty-one artists have been selected. The Biennial comprises work - including paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations - from both emerging and established artists. In addition to visual artists, the exhibition includes a select group of filmmakers, choreographers, musicians, and playwrights. These multidisciplinary arts will be presented in a large open space in the Museum's fourth floor galleries.
This year's group is dominated by filmmakers, from Warner Herzog to Vincent Gallo and George Kuchar. Between the 51 participating artists the range is astounding, from Georgia Sagri, an activist for Occupy Artist Space, to Red Krayola, a psychedelic avant-garde rock band from the 1960's to musicians Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, and choreographer Sarah Michelson. Judging by their picks, the curators seem interested in blurring the boundaries of visual art, music, film and culture.
Malinowska's work is marked by obsession taken to logical, or illogical, limits. She spies on musicians, hires people to perform on the subway, and treks to the North Pole. Everything is fair game for this artist whose work ranges from performance to installation to sculpture. The Polish-born New Yorker won a Guggenheim fellowship, masterminded an elaborate fashion show at Performa (which travels to Nottingham Contemporary). Her long-standing interest in the fast-disappearing cultures of Native Americans and Inuits has strongly influenced her work, such as for her video Umanaqtuaq (2007). For her Guggenheim Fellowship project, she traveled to North America, to the indigenous people of Alaska, the Aleutian Archipelago, and the Canadian North, documenting their disappearing languages and cultures, with the intention of producing a new video art and music performance/radio piece.
Joanna Malinowska is a performance, installation and sculpture artist. She received a Bachelor in Fine Arts, with high honors, from Rutgers University in 1998, and a Masters in Fine Arts in sculpture from Yale University in 2001. Beginning in 2002, she has participated regularly in group exhibitions at such venues as Tuckernecker, DUMBO, Canada, and Art in General in New York City; Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland; Kunst Werke in Berlin, Germany; Laznia Contemporary Art Centre in Gdansk, Poland; and biennales and festivals in Vienna and Moscow. Her work In Search of the Miraculous, Continued..., was part of a two-person exhibition at Canada gallery, and was given a solo exhibition at Galeria Okna, Contemporary Art Centre, in Warsaw, the same year. Venetia Kapernekas Gallery in New York featured her work Umanaqtuaq in a solo exhibition in 2007. Recently she showed at NADA Miami Beach with her incessantly tumbling washing machine.
For more information on the artists, other Biennial projects, and the schedule of events will be released in January 2012.
Source: whitney.org