Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1977 in Reading, PA
Lives in New York, NY

Two artworks by Constantina Zavitsanos, All the time and Call to Post (Violet), are combined into one installation composed of blue-violet light, projected captions, and a ramp that plays speech modulated with infrasonics. Each element of this environment works with and against the limits of perception: the color violet is just within the visible light spectrum, while infrasonic sound waves are frequencies below the threshold of audibility, allowing them to be felt as vibrations but not heard. Fragments of partially audible speech captioned by the artist appear on the wall. Just as visitor interaction with the ramp may change the shape of the sound and vibrations, the captions that transcribe them may also become more or less readable as visitors block the projected light.

Zavitsanos seeks to make space for collective acts of sensing and feeling that highlight some joys of the cross-disability community—“Deaf gain vision beyond sight and incapacity as an abundantly shared resource.”