The widely anticipated, pandemic-delayed 2022 edition of the Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept, is actually quite noisy in its delivery. One thing that viewers will be struck by in the exhibition’s 80th edition is how prominently video work is featured throughout.
The biennial is trying to make sense of all the world has collectively experienced over the last two years while also reflecting many of the new realities people are living in today. Although there are competing soundscapes within the exhibition’s galleries, as well as other works, video is a focal point.
The medium of video art historically has proved difficult for viewers to engage with fully, especially in the context of such large group exhibitions, given the particular viewing constraints it entails and the pieces’ often-demanding lengths. It requires a viewer to sit and engage with it over a longer period of time, ideally in a setting that facilitates sustained concentration. With Quiet as It’s Kept, co-curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards seem to be aiming to usher in a new era for the medium by putting it front and centre, but the larger messages of some of these works and others are sadly lost due to the curatorial execution. Much of the show is hard to navigate due to the volume of works and the layout of the museum’s fifth and sixth floors. The exhibition is meant to serve as a commentary on a specific social moment, but there are elements within it that seem to fall to the wayside.
A video installation in the museum’s lobby gallery by Moved by the Motion (a collective co-founded by artists Wu Tsang and Tosh Basco) sets the tone for the entire show. The beautifully shot EXTRACTS (2022), made up of scenes and extra footage from the collective’s feature film MOBY DICK; or, The Whale (2022), is a career undertaking. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick (1851) has served as the basis of countless artistic projects over the last two centuries and it has been reimagined by Tsang, Basco and their collaborators. This is helping to give it new life and also setting the stage for some of the larger issues the biennial is raising
