Whitney Biennial 2022: 
Quiet as It’s Kept

Floor 6

Born 1960 in New York, NY
Lives in Brooklyn, NY

This video by Coco Fusco includes footage of the artist traveling by boat around Hart Island, the site of New York’s public cemetery that was operated by the city’s department of corrections until October 1, 2021. Since 1869, prison labor has been used to bury more than a million New Yorkers in mass graves on the island. Many individuals have been buried anonymously—especially during epidemics. Fusco’s video features a meditation she wrote on the conditions of the current pandemic and is performed by poet Pamela Sneed.

Describing the origins of the project, she has explained: “Feeling defenseless made me want to understand how others had responded to being overcome by invisible forces. I began to research how artists of other eras had visualized plagues and epidemics. . . . Death often appeared as a character looming in the sky, disease as a storm. Many peoples of the world toss flowers into the sea in memory of the loved ones they have lost. I left mine for the castaways.”