Whitney Biennial 2024
Films and Performances
The 2024 Whitney Biennial includes film and performance programs. Each program is interwoven with the exhibition and articulates many of its themes. Biennial curators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli invited collaborators to curate this portion of the exhibition. The performance program is organized by guest curator Taja Cheek and the film program is organized by guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker.
Speaking in Camouflage: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Film
Organized by guest curator Greg de Cuir Jr., this film features a performed version of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s installation, Too Bright to See (2023–24), which explores the life of Martinican writer and intellectual Suzanne Césaire, one of the most important representatives of Black Surrealism and an essential figure in the Négritude movement. The program includes a live musical performance by Sabine McCalla, who wrote the original music for the film, accompanied by Ajai Combelic.
Friday, April 12, 2024
7 pm
The Long Count
Performance
Organized by guest curator Taja Cheek, Debit performs her album The Long Count. The performance will feature live instrumentation and sounds made by machine-learning synth instruments that have sampled and processed the sounds of Late Postclassic Maya wind instruments.
Saturday, April 27, 2024
7 pm
Sunday, April 28, 2024
7 pm
the land wants you
Film
This film program organized by guest curator asinnajaq opens up dialogues between Indigenous artists based in the United States and Indigenous communities beyond its borders, by bringing together works by Samí, Mongolian, Mapuche, Inuk, and Native American artists that are grounded in place, land stewardship, kinship, care, and belonging.
Friday, May 3, 2024
7 pm
Motor Tapes
Performance
Sarah Hennies presents Motor Tapes, a one-hour work for a large ensemble. Taking its name from neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás’s characterization of the human brain as containing innumerable “tape loops” that run continuously within the mind, Motor Tapes is composed of densely overlapping patterns of sound, with musicians representing synapses that both fire independently and work together to achieve complex activities.
Saturday, June 8, 2024
1 pm, 4 pm
Dear Ghost, if a memory is false does it mean it does not have real consequences?
Film
Guest curator Korakrit Arunanondchai presents films by a group of artists and filmmakers born in Asia for whom storytelling, dreams, animistic beliefs, and metaphors serve as tools to explore their conflicting desires towards the Western idea of modernization.
Friday, June 21, 2024
7 pm
Speaker
Performance
Holland Andrews welcomes audiences to Floor 3 of the Museum in this new performance. In this work Andrews engages harmonic disintegration and language transmutation to solicit the wisdom held inside the body, producing somatic catharsis through sound.
Saturday, June 29, 2024
8 pm
Sunday, June 30, 2024
8 pm
Monday, July 1, 2024
8 pm
Sis, I Don’t Know: Remembrance a Summer Flower, International Portal of Artificial Maximum Results
Film
This film program organized by guest curator Zackary Drucker brings together an intergenerational group of filmmakers whose work explores love, desire, and loss. The program features films by Miranda Haymon, Aron Kantor, Gbenga Komolafe and Tee Park, Nyala Moon, Edward Owens, Penelope Spheeris, and Chanelle Tyson and will be followed by a conversation between Zackary Drucker, Miranda Haymon, Aron Kantor, Nyala Moon, and Chanelle Tyson.
Friday, July 12, 2024
7 pm
Material
Performance
Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, Alex Tatarsky’s live performances organized by guest curator Taja Cheek are highly responsive to venue and audience, careening between scripted sequences and unfettered improvisation. For this performance, Tatarsky, a trained clown, will chew up remnants of past works and spit them out alongside new investigations prompted by thematics they identify throughout the Biennial exhibition.
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Sunday, July 21, 2024
Offerings
Performance
Organized by guest curator Taja Cheek, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Offerings is a series of performances involving sound and text. Ellis will base these performances on the musical score they created for the Biennial, as well as the billboard they created as part of the collective People Who Stutter Create.
August 3-4
8 pm and 9:30 pm
Speaking in Camouflage: Christopher Harris
Film
This film program organized by guest curator Greg de Cuir Jr. explores a body of work by Christopher Harris, one of the most important Black film artists to emerge since the year 2000. Harris’s work expresses a fidelity to the materiality of analog film and a structuring concern for Black peoples and culture, while functioning under the influence of free jazz and other avant-garde musical forms.
Friday, September 20, 2024
7 pm
