Not Everything Is Given

May 9, 2024–May 24, 2024

A black square centered on a beige paper with decorative borders and Arabic script at the bottom.
A black square centered on a beige paper with decorative borders and Arabic script at the bottom.

Zişan, Felaket (Catastrophe), 1923. Ink on paper, 25.5 x 18 cm. Courtesy of İz Öztat and Zilberman Gallery

2024 ISP Curatorial Exhibition 
ISP, 745 Washington Street
Opening: Thursday, May 9, 6–8 pm

Gallery Hours for ISP: Wednesday–Sunday: 1-6 pm; Closed Monday, Tuesday

The aspirations of language often leave words skirting around the edges of emotions, grasping at their depth. What fuels the demand to decipher as a measure of value or the foundation of understanding? This exhibition disturbs the expectations from artworks and artists to “demonstrate,” “elucidate,” or ‘’bear witness’’ to the fraught conditions of our world. Amid multiple ways of knowing and forms of communication, not everything has to be given or shared.

The artists gathered here circumvent and interrogate the expectations placed on them by overdetermined categories (race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, geography), reorienting towards the self and those with shared experiences. In doing so, they complicate histories of past and present genocide, logics of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, and gesture to concealed structures of control, including those imposed by the State, the law, and the archive. Through practices of withholding and self-articulation, they interrupt linear narratives using forms of coded communication, experimenting with strategies of obscurity and material form while affirming the poetics of mythmaking and fiction and underscoring the fragility of subjecthood. 

As curators, we reckon with the urge to respond to the pervasive and gratuitous violence that is foundational to the world we live in and extends to the history of exhibition-making. Holding these tensions, we suspend the need to comprehend to consider alternative social and political modes.

Wheelchair Accessibility 
ISP has a step free entrance, is wheelchair accessible and has a wheelchair accessible bathroom. 

There is no ticketing required, admission is free.

Whitney Independent Study Program Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Program Fellows

Ella den Elzen
Gervais Marsh
Carlota Ortiz Monasterio
Alper Turan

Artists featured in the 2024 Curatorial Exhibition

Noor Abed
Laakuluk Williamson Bathory
Niloufar Emamifar
Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Aziz Hazara
Joyce Joumaa
BAÇOY KOOP
Diyar Mayil
Shala Miller
İz Öztat
Taqralik Partridge
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Cameron Rowland
Ebun Sodipo
Oraib Toukan
Charisse Pearlina Weston
Zişan

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Generous support for the Independent Study Program is provided by Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo, the Elaine Graham Weitzen Foundation for Fine Art, the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation, the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, and Diane and Robert Moss.

Significant support is provided by The Capital Group Charitable Foundation, Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa, Gloria H. Spivak, and the Whitney Contemporaries through their annual Art Party benefit.

On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

On the Hour projects can contain motion and sound. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled.