Queens International 2016

A tradition since 2001, Queens International is the Museum’s biannual exhibition of artists living or working in Queens.  While each iteration has its own curatorial team and vision, what remains constant is the central aim of highlighting and contextualizing the artistic vibrancy of the borough through contemporary cultural productions in all media.

Queens International 2016 characteristically looks to the idea of thresholds, and the way these spaces for transition, contact, and exchange become markers for the complexity of the forces that shape contemporary life. Many of the 35 participating artists, collectives, and partner organizations, use performance-based and site-specific approaches to activate the museum’s architectural and historical context. Ongoing projects in Queens International 2016 include experimental and often participatory events, genre-bending musical concerts, and international collaborations between Queens artists and their global counterparts. The politics of borders and border-crossing are expanded through the exhibition and complementary public programs to include not only the discourse of physical territory and migration, but also the act of transgressing between artistic disciplines, linguistic or ideological divides, digital and human interfaces, and prescriptive narratives of the past, present, and future.

References and source materials used by the artists zoom in and out of visibility from local to global, from micro to macro, and from private to public: the dominance of Western advertising in post-conflict Beirut; the international ubiquity of Mariachi bands; hyper-development in the New York City real estate market; the not-so-anonymous crowdsourced Internet marketplace; and the remixing of artistic identity with a Jazz legend. Queens International 2016navigates these shifts between the assumed binaries and examines the ways in which these systems regulate our bodies and environments.

Queens International 2016 is organized by guest curator Lindsey Berfond and Queens Museum Director of Exhibitions Hitomi Iwasaki.

Participants:

Manal Abu-Shaheen, Vahap Avşa, Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco, Brian Cavalry, Kerry Downey, Magali Duzant, Golnaz Esmaili, Mohammed Fayaz, Kate Gilmore, Jonah, Groeneboer, Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen, Dave Hardy, Sylvia Hardy, Shady Harouni, Banks Archive, Robin Kang, Kristin Lucas, Carl Marin, Eileen Maxson, Melanie McLain, Shane, Mecklenburger, Lawrence Messich, Mike Plunkett, Freya Powell, Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin, Alan Ruiz, Samita Sinha and Brian Chase, Barb Smith, Monika Sziladi, Alina Tenser, Trans-Pecos (with 8 Ball Community, ESP TV, and Chillin Island), Mark Tribe, Sam Vernon, Max Warsh, Jennifer Williams