The Queens Museum in New York recently announced the artists and collectives participating in the upcoming Queens International Biennial, Volumes, opening on October 7, 2018. Ryan Kuo (SMACT ’14), who is currently in the Queens Museum’s Studio Program, is bringing his expertise to the online exhibition catalogue, which he as designed and will be continuing to develop.
Kuo, who is known for addressing organizational hierarchies and information architecture in his works, has designed the exhibition website to serve as a virtual 3-D model of the venue that is organized on a 2-D plane. The website is intended to serve as an experiential tool, an extension of the ideas within the exhibition, and as an alternative way to experience the event.
“Taking “volumes” as a cue, the website grid threatens (but fails, thanks to the actual voices and bodies in QI 2018) to visually tabulate the exhibition data within a universal hierarchy,” Kuo said. “The computer tirelessly garbles the text while cutups of the floor plans and animated flythroughs of the virtual galleries give form to truths, half-truths, and algorithmic untruths about the promises of a biennial. The HTML table shaping the grid extends my project Tables of Content that examined containment and white space in web publishing, and is deployed here in the spirit of organizing and indexing material. The artistic aim of the website is to depict an entity, like a museum biennial, that merges art and logistics.”
Since 2002, the Queens International has illuminated the contemporary cultural production taking place in Queens’ communities. Organized by assistant curator at the Queens Museum, Sophia Marisa Lucas, and the New York–based performance artist, Baseera Khan, this year seeks to explore systems of knowledge production in the digital and analog realms. This year’s 43 participating artists and collectives are predominantly female, are representative of several generations, and hail from fifteen different Queens neighborhoods.
