Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Born 1988 in New York, NY
Lives in Columbus, OH

In Challenger Deep, the camera adopts the perspective of being close to the ground, concentrating on the artist’s hands as she moves through an empty landscape. Dionne Lee searches the site with dowsing rods, ancient tools for finding water, understood to move in response to unseen forces in the environment. Her act suggests that with groundwater diminishing across the globe—just one of many environmental crises challenging human survival—creative or even magical solutions become increasingly necessary. She has explained, “in the end survival seems to come from a marriage of practical knowledge and faith in something unknowable.” In Challenger Deep, the unseen and the unknowable seem to be where we might find the true or the real.

Landscape as an artistic genre has long reflected the position of humans in relationship to the land— but in North America it has typically taken a very broad view, with a distant horizon suggesting both optimism and colonizing force. Lee’s film refuses that convention in favor of a more personal point of view, one that centers Black experiences of survival and the land.