2015 Triennial: Surround Audience
February 25–May 25, 2015
New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
The New Museum Triennial provides an important platform for an emergent generation of artists that is shaping the discourse of contemporary art. The Triennial’s predictive, rather than retrospective, model embodies the institution’s 37-year commitment to exploring the future of culture through the art of today. This third iteration of the Triennial is titled Surround Audienceand is co-curated by New Museum Curator Lauren Cornell and artist Ryan Trecartin.
Surround Audience explores the effects of an increasingly connected world both on our sense of self and identity as well as on art’s form and larger social role. The exhibition looks at our immediate present, a time when culture has become more porous and encompassing and new considerations about art’s role and potential are surfacing. Artists are responding to these evolving conditions in a number of ways, from calculated appropriations to critical interrogations to surreal or poetic statements.
Featuring 51 artists from over 25 countries, Surround Audience pursues numerous lines of inquiry, including: What are the new visual metaphors for the self and subjecthood when our ability to see and be seen is expanding, as is our desire to manage our self-image and privacy? Is it possible to opt out of, bypass, or retool commercial interests that potentially collude with national and international policy? How are artists striving to embed their works in the world around them through incursions into media and activism? A number of artists in the exhibition are poets, and many more use words in ways that connect the current mobility in language with a mutability in form. The exhibition also gives weight to artists whose practices operate outside of the gallery—such as performance and dance—and to those who test the forums of marketing, comedy, and social media as platforms for art. The building-wide exhibition encompasses a variety of artistic practices, including sound, dance, comedy, poetry, installation, sculpture, painting, video, one online talk show, and an ad campaign.
Residencies, commissions, & new works
Many of the works in the Triennial have been commissioned specifically for the show. In the two years leading up to the exhibition, the New Museum has hosted research and production residencies for both international and local artists: niv Acosta, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Juliana Huxtable, Geumhyung Jeong, Eduardo Navarro, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, and Luke Willis Thompson. Additional new works by Nadim Abbas, Sophia Al-Maria, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Olga Balema, Frank Benson, Sascha Braunig, José León Cerrillo, Onejoon CHE, Tania Pérez Córdova, DIS, Aleksandra Domanović, Casey Jane Ellison, Exterritory, Shadi Habib Allah, Lena Henke, Josh Kline, Eva Koťátková, Oliver Laric, Rachel Lord, Ashland Mines, Avery K. Singer, Martine Syms, and Lisa Tan have also been commissioned or produced for the exhibition.
In addition to works featured in the galleries, the curators selected artists to mobilize sites outside of the Museum, including the means of dispersing information about the exhibition itself. Such projects include the Triennial ad campaign Extended Release (2015), which was conceived and designed by New York artist collective K-HOLE and serves as the group’s contribution to the exhibition. Filmed at the Museum, episodes of Ovation’s “Touching the Art” (2014–15)—a web series by Casey Jane Ellison—focus on themes broached by Surround Audience and will temporarily become an artwork in the exhibition.
Please visit newmuseum.org for a full schedule of performances, public programs, and events related to the Triennial.
Publications
Surround Audience is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue designed by Familiar and copublished by the New Museum and Rizzoli. The catalogue includes full-color, four-page spreads on each of the 51 artists and groups as well interviews between the artist collective DIS and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, artist; Andrew Durbin, writer, and Frank Benson and Juliana Huxtable, artists; Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator, and Basim Magdy, artist; and Sara O’Keeffe, Assistant Curator, and Aslı Çavuşoğlu, artist. The catalogue also include essays by Cornell and Trecartin; Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Brian Droitcour, writer; Alexander Provan, writer and Cofounder, Triple Canopy; and Hito Steyerl, artist.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the New Museum has published a book of poetry, researched and edited by Droitcour. Featuring works by over 69 contributors, including Dodie Bellamy, Mónica de la Torre, Cathy Park Hong, Bhanu Kapil, and Jenny Zhang, with original translations and texts by Triennial artists all interwoven with transcriptions of social-media statuses of many varieties, The Animated Reader: Poetry of Surround Audience offers an expansion of the Triennial’s themes in the medium of poetry.
About the Triennial
The New Museum Triennial was initiated in 2009. The first edition, Younger Than Jesus, was organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Laura Hoptman, and Lauren Cornell. The second Triennial, The Ungovernables, was organized by Eungie Joo in 2012.
The 2015 Triennial is organized by Lauren Cornell, Curator, 2015 Triennial, Museum as Hub, and Digital Projects, and artist Ryan Trecartin, with Sara O’Keeffe and Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curators. The catalogue was overseen by Helga Christoffersen.
Support
Lead Support provided by the Friends of the 2015 Generational Triennial. Full support details can be viewed at newmuseum.org.
About New Museum
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.
