Whitney Biennial 2017

Floor 6

Born 1976 in Seattle, WA
Lives in New York, NY

Leigh Ledare’s Vokzal, filmed in Moscow, uses the sprawling public space outside three adjacent train stations as a rubric for mapping complex group dynamics. The film captures interactions between various individuals passing through, working in, loitering around, or policing this area, linking instances of individual behavior to clear signs of social breakdown. Within this environment, competing ideas of order play out, highlighting social fractures and laying bare a collective predicament. Vokzal suggests a portrait of a society unconsciously shifting among various forms of dependency, fight-or-flight responses, pronounced individualism, and non-differentiation. In the 2017 Biennial, the film is split into three looped 16mm projections and interspersed among other works in three galleries. Within this configuration, an analogy emerges: the projectors are to the three stations, just as viewers are to the film’s subjects.