48 Artists to Join The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023
The Second edition will focus on creating contact zones to exchange immigrant experiences.
Joiri Minaya, Container #4 (2020). Photograph. 60 x 40 inches. Courtesy the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.
The Immigrant Artist Biennial announced the lineup and themes of its second edition, which will run from September this year through January 2024.
The artist-run biennial, which centres the work and experiences of immigrant and exiled artists, will present 48 artists across 7 institutions in New York and New Jersey. Venues include EFA Project Space, Artists Alliance, and Brooklyn Museum.
The show's overarching titular theme, Contact Zone, references the term coined by American cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt to describe the spaces where cultures clash and merge.
'It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organisational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content—that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home,' said Katherine Adams, one of three co-curators leading this year's biennial.
While the number of participating artists has dropped from 65 in 2020, the biennial's scope has broadened to encompass exiled and nomadic artists displaced by ongoing conflicts.
'This year, TIAB is as relevant, if not more urgent, as ever,' said the Biennial's founding director Katya Grokhovsky, referring to the war raging in her native Ukraine.
Four Ukrainian artists will be presenting work, including immigrant diaspora artists Slinko, Kathie Halfin, and Maya Hayuk, and transient artist in exile Maria Kulikovska who fled occupied Ukraine in 2022.
The lineup—which encompasses some 35 nationalities—also includes Tehran-born Ala Dehghan who was awarded the Delfina Foundation's Magic of Persia Residency in 2010, and whose 'Holy Rotation' paintings (2021–2022) featured at Contemporary Istanbul in 2022.
Mexico-born painter Felipe Baeza, who featured in the 59th Venice Biennale exhibition Milk of Dreams, will also feature in the biennial, as well as Ethiopian abstractionist Tariku Shiferaw, and Sinaloa-born New York sculptor Raul de Lara, who will be creating a new work.
Current students and recent MFA graduates from Yale, Columbia, and Hunter College will also take part.
'Through the curatorial framework the term "immigrant" transcends geographic borders,' explained co-curator Anna Mikaela Ekstrand.
Fellow curator Bianca Abdi-Boragi added that through the Contact Zone theme, the outcome is the product of the participants and 'how they relate to and dialogue with each other.' —[O]
