July 13–December 18, 2022
114 Central Avenue
Ithaca, New York 14853
United States
Sponsored by the Cornell Council for the Arts and curated by Timothy Murray, the 2022 Cornell Biennial launches July 13, 2022 with the “Futurities, Uncertain” Screen Art Series and Ken Feingold’s new media installation at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York. Biennial exhibitions, installations, and performances by 30 additional artists will rotate on the Cornell Ithaca campus and the Cornell Tech campus in New York City from July through December 2022. The full list of participants, along with the calendar of Biennial events, will be updated in real time at cca.cornell.edu/biennial.
Screen Art Series: “Futurities, Uncertain”
Picket Family Video Gallery, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
The artworks in the Biennial Screen Art Series dwell on the shifting knowledge structures of media art practices that are threatened by stifling technological, capital, and political frameworks. At stake is the continual raising of the political question of media technology while churning its potential from within. This series explores not the future per se, but “futurities, uncertain” as the constructions of multiple world-making practices that might enhance understanding of the ecodigital environment at a time, today, when existence in the future remains open to question.
July 13–August 14
In Madre Drone (2019–20), Patricia Domínguez (Chile) enacts a heroic eco-feminist effort to call nature back to the prior life of a teaming Bolivian rain forest burnt and singed by capitalist greed.
August 17–September 11
In Vitro (2019) is an extraordinarily haunting video by Larissa Sansour (Palestine/Denmark) and Søren Lind (Denmark) that ponders the mixed fortunes of Alia, a young Palestinian clone who survives an eco-apocalypse of oily floods in an underground bunker beneath the Palestinian city of Bethlehem.
September 14–October 16
Gated Commune (2018) by Camel Collective (Anthony Graves [US] and Carla Herrera-Prats [Mexico]) envelops its viewer in the porous zones, ecological shift, and haunting phenomenon of a future in transition.
October 19–November 13
Moon Kyungwon (Korea) and Jeon Joonho (Korea) situate the protagonist of The Ways of Folding Space & Flying (2015) in a gleaming, antiseptic pod of a complex digital interface that floats free of a future Venice inundated by warming seas.
November 16–December 18
In The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (2018) by The Karrabing Film Collective (Australia), only the Indigenous people of Australia have the capacity to survive the future of poisoned lands and rising seascapes that threaten the Europeans who are described as being incapable of existing in these conditions for long periods of time.
Ken Feingold: The Animal, Vegetable, Mineralness of Everything
July 18–October 26
Gussman Entrance Hall, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
An international pioneer of robotic and computer art, Ken Feingold (US) exhibits The Animal, Vegetable, Mineralness of Everything, for the first time on the East Coast since its creation with a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship whose competition portfolios are housed in Cornell Library’s Rose Goldsen Archive for New Media Art. The installation coincides with Feingold’s donation of his personal artistic papers to the Goldsen Archive. In The Animal, Vegetable, Mineralness of Everything, three self-portraits, each possessing an animal, vegetable, or mineral mind, debate the nature of violence with each other, and discuss their futuristic fears – generally their fears about each other. They also wonder about “that thing” before them, as viewers hear how they project their own interior worlds onto it in an attempt to figure out what it really is.
