With the sixth iteration of Queens International, the Queens Museum’s signature biennial evolves into yet another phase. Taiwan-based Meiya Cheng, the first non-New York-based curator to participate, joins the Museum’s Hitomi Iwasaki on an exhibition emphasizing site-specificity as a collaborative practice between the curators and artists and their surroundings. As one of the inaugural exhibitions in the Museum’s expanded space, Queens International 2013 echoes the institution’s own hyperawareness of its new environs.
Composed of a number of event- and performance-based projects, including many off-site programs, Queens International 2013 is charged with idiosyncratic and unexpected insights and approaches. 29 artists and collaboratives present community engaged experimental programs, investigations into obscure local vernaculars, performances that challenge the new Museum spaces, conventional sculptural objects and audience participatory happenings, the exhibition teems with ambitious artistries that challenge boundaries of media, methods, and concepts in current creative productions and museum practices alike: a guided fishing trip in search of the invasive snakehead, a Queens/Brooklyn border walk, a pickling workshop, a Bulgarian women’s a capella choir, a do-it-yourself/together movie soundtrack performance, an audience participatory DJ performance, workshop group surveillance drone-building workshop, paintings exhibited by way of video and live sound performance, an intercontinental duet concert via Skype, and a disassembled theatrical play taking place simultaneously in multiple locations throughout the Museum spaces.
Parameters are further blurred, crossed, and reconsidered by Cheng’s fresh perspective on the borough of Queens today. Together with Iwasaki, Cheng has intensely surveyed the local artistic environments, and infused Queens International 2013 with artistic and socio-cultural parallels and counterpoints from her native Taiwan to examine how these distant places-Queens and Taiwan-define themselves and are defined by each other? To further explore this dynamic, for the first time, Queens International includes non-Queens artists, in this case a cohort of nine Taiwanese artists. This group of artists attempts to imagine the possibility of a community as the collective imagination of “a place” and belongings, beyond geographical boundaries, societal and cultural divisions, and global conflicts over labor and capital.
Queens International 2013 participants include:
Nobutaka Aozaki; Art & The Commons (David Andersson and Antonio Serna); Kevin Beasley; Jane Benson; Lynley Bernstein; Alberto Borea; Chang Chien-Chi; Michelle Marie Charles; Chen Chieh-jen; Chou Yu-Cheng; Deville Cohen; Bulgarian Collaborative: Joro-Boro, Milena Deleva, Daniela Kostova/Mario Mohan, Vlada Tomova, Tushevs Aerials (Georgi and Nina Tushev), Meglena Zapreva; Jeff Feld; Flux Factory (Douglas Paulson and Christina Vassallo); Richard Garet; Wojciech Gilewicz; Joseph Heathcott; Hsu Chia-Wei; Zeynab Izadyar; Anna K.E.; Theatre 167/ Ari Laura Kreith; Siobhan Landry; Cheon Pyo Lee; Liu Ho-Jang; Luo Jr-shin; Alex White Mazzarella; Florian Meisenberg; Ander Mikalson; Nitin Mukul; Arthur Ou; Queens World Film Festival (Don and Katha Cato); Aida Šehović; Matthew Volz (and Juan Wauters with Carmelle Safdie); Fujui Wang; Kristof Wickman; Jun Yang; Yu Cheng-Ta; and Bryan Zanisnik.
Queens International 2013 is seeking participants!
Queens International 2013 is curated by guest Meiya Cheng and Hitomi Iwasaki, the Queens Museum’s Director of Exhibitions.
more info: http://www.queensmuseum.org/exhibitions/2013/11/09/queens-international-2013-2/
