Cornell Biennial 2020—Swarm: Ecology, Digitality, Sociality

The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) announces the theme and invitational artists for the 4th Cornell Biennial, 2020, Swarm: Ecology, Digitality, Sociality. Curated by CCA Director, Timothy Murray, the 2020 Cornell Biennial will feature staggered artworks, installations, and performances across the Cornell University campus, from March through December in Ithaca, New York. 

Swarm: Ecology, Digitality, Sociality will feature artistic environments that provoke university-wide conversation about multitude, motion, sound, migration, and threat, while reflecting on precarity in an age of technological abundance.

In image, movement, and assemblage, Swarm lies at the core of the artistic and design process, whether through the assemblage and casting of materials, the combinatory of data, the imaging of ecology, the profusion of sound, the flight of drones or the performance of multitude. The plenitude of swarm, as well as its peril, traverses the divides of performance, art, sound, architecture, design, ecology, biology, and information. 

While swarming invokes the movement of bees, birds, and drones, swarms migrate in insecurity, abound in protest, infest in virus, and multiply in celebration. Biennial projects will ponder physical force and magnificence, ecological hazard, robotic motion, bursts of data, abundance of sound, density of artistic form, promise of the crowd or threat of the multitude. Artistic approaches to networks, swarms, and multitudes will summon the natural and social, touch the technological and the political, while conjuring traumatic pasts and utopic futures. Swarm: precarity & potentiality.

Invitational artists: Laurie Anderson/Hsin-Chien Huang (US/Taiwan), Xu Bing (China), Ken Feingold (US), Maria Hupfield (Wasauksing First Nation/Canada), Sara Jimenez (US/Canada), Kyungwon Moon/Joonho Jeon (South Korea), Sam Van Aken (US), Wendy S. Walters (US).

Cornell Biennial curatorial committee: Ellen Avril (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art), Renate Ferro (Art), Denise Green (Fiber Science & Apparel Design), Annie Lewandowski (Music), Karen Pinkus (Romance Studies/Comparative Literature), Jolene Rickard (American Indian and Indigenous Studies/Art/History of Art), Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (English), Lauren van Haaften-Schick (History of Art), Amy Villarejo (Performing and Media Arts/Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity), Sasa Zivkovic (Architecture).  

About Cornell Council for the Arts
The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) is a university-wide cultural organization that provides a platform for the creation of and public discourse on the contemporary arts on campus. Through our annual grant program, exhibitions, public talks, artist residencies, special projects and student awards, the CCA promotes interdisciplinary, collaborative, and experimental artistic forms in order to inspire innovative and challenging projects by students, faculty, departments and programs from all disciplines.