The museum-wide survey 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage leads the season, joined by solo exhibitions from Nathaniel Mellors, Alexandra Pirici, and Anna Craycroft, and a window installation by Sara Magenheimer.
2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage
February 13–May 27, 2018
Lobby Gallery, Second, Third, and Fourth Floors
Songs for Sabotage brings together works by 26 artists, artist groups, and collectives from 19 countries, the majority of whom are exhibiting in the United States for the first time. The exhibition questions how individuals and collectives might effectively address the relationship of images and culture to the forces that structure our society. Together, these artists propose a kind of propaganda, engaging with new and traditional media to reveal the built systems that construct our reality, images, and truths. These artists are further connected by both their deep engagements with the specificity of local context and a critical examination—and embrace—of the internationalism that links them. Their works range widely in medium and form, including painted allegories for the administration of power, sculptural proposals to renew (and destroy) monuments, and cinematic works that engage the modes of propaganda that influence us more and more each day. Viewed in ensemble, these works provide models for reflecting upon and working against a system that seems doomed to failure. Songs for Sabotage is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Alex Gartenfeld, founding Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, with Francesca Altamura, Curatorial Assistant.
Nathaniel Mellors: Progressive Rocks
February 6–April 15, 2018
South Galleries, Ground Floor
The wryly comical videos, sculptures, and installations of Los Angeles– and Amsterdam-based artist Nathaniel Mellors (b. 1974, Doncaster, UK) employ absurdist satire to critique morality, national identity, religion, and power structures in contemporary society. Conflating narrative tropes and methods from television sitcoms, theater, science fiction, mythology, and anthropology, Mellors writes the scripts for each of his projects, which he also directs, edits, and produces. His raucous films feature a book-eating creature who literally digests a family’s library in Ourhouse (2010–ongoing); a Neanderthal in perpetual free-fall in Neanderthal Container (2014); and two messianic beings, in the form of a cardboard box and a giant egg, who attempt to make sense of a culture that they created millions of years prior in The Aalto Natives (2017, in collaboration with Erkka Nissinen, originally conceived for the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale). For his exhibition at the New Museum, Mellors will create a new environment including video projection and animatronic sculpture. The exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.
Alexandra Pirici: Co-natural
February 6–April 15, 2018
South Galleries, Ground Floor
Alexandra Pirici (b. 1982, Bucharest, Romania) uses performance and choreography to address symbolic manifestations of history through frameworks that define bodily presence in both real and virtual space. Her new project for the New Museum takes the form of an ongoing action with live performers and one holographic performer. The project approaches the concept of presence in an expanded sense, focusing in particular on its increasing dispersion. Presence is revealed in a variety of ways: as physical body; as artificial stand-in, avatar, and ghost, taking on the character of a memorial or monument; as abstraction of the living subject into quantifiable, monetizable data; and as the expanded life of “dead” objects in museum collections. This new work continues Pirici’s recent interrogations into the collective body through choreographies that link different temporal and spatial events in real time. Proposing a distributed occupation of space and time, the work functions as one monstrous, modular organism made of living and digital matter. The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Associate Curator.
Anna Craycroft: Motion into Being
January 17–May 13, 2018
Fifth Floor Gallery and Resource Center
Anna Craycroft (b. 1975, Eugene, OR) is the artist-in-residence during the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s Spring 2018 R&D Season: ANIMATION. Craycroft’s residency includes an exhibition and public programming considering the rights and ethics of personhood. Questions of who and what qualifies as a person have become increasingly contentious as the agency of all beings—from nonhuman animals to corporations to artificial intelligence—has fractured legal and theoretical discourse. To chronicle these controversies, Craycroft has transformed the Fifth Floor Gallery into a site for producing an animated film, which she will develop over the course of the exhibition; visitors physically enter the stage where Craycroft will be shooting new footage every week. Drawing on traditions of folklore and fables, which often use anthropomorphism to narrate moral tales, the animated film—both while in process and in its final form—confronts the physical and philosophical lenses used to construct and qualify personhood. The exhibition is organized by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, and Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator, with Kate Wiener, Education Associate.
Sara Magenheimer: NOON
January 24–April 15, 2018
Storefront Window, Ground Floor
Working across a range of media including video, sound, performance, sculpture, collage, and installation, New York–based artist Sara Magenheimer (b. 1981, Philadelphia, PA) manipulates and defamiliarizes language with bold combinations of image and text. In syncopated progressions of pictures and words, Magenheimer pushes against the bounds of narrative, charting circuitous storylines through vernacular associations that invite individual interpretations. Through unexpected juxtapositions of language, graphic compositions, and idiosyncratic imagery, she reveals how visual and verbal signs mutate and guide manifold pathways to understanding. Magenheimer presents a new video installation in the window of the New Museum’s 231 Bowery building, and a selection of her films are on view as part of the Museum’s ongoing Screens Series. This project is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.