CCA Biennial 2018: Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival

The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) announces the theme and participants for the 3rd CCA Biennial, 2018, Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival. Curated by CCA Director, Timothy Murray, the 2018 CCA Biennial features Carrie Mae Weems and Xu Bing along with 18 installations and performances across the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York. 

The aim of Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival is to stage artistic environments that might provoke conversation about the persistence of passage, from environments to communities, while emphasizing the challenge of survival in hostile socio-ecological climates. 

Duration lies at the core of conceptual, architectural, and media art, whether through the experience of the ephemeral media of installation, performance, screen, sound, and time-based art or through the representation of the passage of time via creation, migration, memory, and motion. The idea of “duration” thus foregrounds the artistic horizons of both temporality and corporeity, indicating the persistence and continued presence of the material world through which the historical and virtual are experienced in their potentiality. 

Duration can be “short” in its transience, ephemerality, volatility, and perishability. And it can be “long” in its durability, endurance, steadfastness, longevity, and survival. Projects might ponder variations of the temporality of indigenous culture, the morphing of bio and animal, the “long durée” of gradual historical alterations, transitions of global cyber culture, slowness of painting and reading, contemplations of the built environment, the “deep time” of ecology and the volatile encroachment of global warming, or the historical resonance of “passage” with contemporary imperatives of persistence and survival under threatening cultural conditions.

Featured artists
Carrie Mae Weems (US), Featured Invitational Artist, Heave, September 22–November 5.
Xu Bing (China), Professor-at-Large Artist, Character of Characters, August 11–December 23.
Ni’Ja Whitson, Invitational Choreographer, A Meditation on Tongues, September 14–15.
Hans Baumann (Switzerland/US) & Karen Pinkus (US), Atkinson Sustainability Artists, Crystalline Basement, September 23–November 5.
Ruby Chishti (New York/Pakistan), Fabric Designer in Residence, Narratives of memory, October 22–November 3.
Richard Lin (Taiwan, 1933–2011), Painting Relief, August 11–December 23.
Joanna Malinowska & C. T. Jasper (US/Poland), The Emperor’s Canary, September 22–November 5.

Participating Cornell artists and faculty
Madeleine Eggers & Ian Pica Limbaseanu; Kevin Ernste; Kate Greder, with Juan Felipe Beltrán, Yasir H. Ahmed-Braimah, & Josh Strable; Denise Greene; Annie Lewandowski with Katy Payne & Sarah Hennies; Jolene Rickard; Dehanza Rogers; Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei; Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon & Emilie Stark-Menneg; Sasa Zivkovic.

Cornell Biennial Curatorial Committee
Timothy Murray, Cornell Council for the Arts; Ellen Avril, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; Tao Dufour, Architecture; Renate Ferro, Art; Kathy Gleason, Landscape Architecture; Denise Green, Fiber Science and Apparel Design; Salah Hassan, History of Art/Africana Studies; Soo Yon Lee, History of Art; Karen Pinkus, Romance Studies/Comparative Literature; Steve Pond, Music; Amy Villarejo, Performing and Media Arts/Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity.

Launch conference
“Duration / Passage, Persistence, Survival” with talks from Carrie Mae Weems, Xu Bing, and participating artists
September 28–29, Cornell Campus, Ithaca, New York.
Friday, September 28, 4:30–6:30pm, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.
Saturday, September 29, 10–6:30pm, Milstein Hall, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning.

About Cornell Council for the Arts
The Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) is a university-wide cultural organization that provides a platform for the creation of and public discourse on the contemporary arts on campus. Through our annual grant program, exhibitions, public talks, artist residencies, special projects and student awards, the CCA promotes interdisciplinary, collaborative, and experimental artistic forms in order to inspire innovative and challenging projects by students, faculty, departments and programs from all disciplines.