New Museum announce 4 solo shows for Summer, opening June 29th, 2023. “Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” spotlights the artist’s large-scale, multimedia installations and sculptures created from the 1990s to today exploring issues of identity, race, gender, and social justice (Second Floor); “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance” features new and recent work across film, sculpture, and installation alongside archival materials questioning established historical narratives in Vietnam and other formerly colonized countries (Third Floor); “Mire Lee: Black Sun” comprises a site-specific installation of new animatronic sculptures fusing the technological with the corporeal (Fourth Floor); and “Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot” reimagines the biblical story of Eve and Lilith through a newly commissioned painting and a sculpture created from the artist’s own body (Lobby Gallery). The summer 2023 exhibition program furthers the New Museum’s commitment to advancing critical dialogue about new art and new ideas through experimental commissions and benchmark exhibitions.
“Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” June 29th–September 17th, 2023 New Museum Second Floor
“My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” will be the most comprehensive exhibition to date by Pepón Osorio (b. 1955, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA), featuring selected works from the 1990s to today. Known for his provocative, sweeping, multimedia installations, Osorio creates fantastical scenes inspired by everyday environments—from home interiors to barbershops to classrooms—that advance critical discussions on topics such as identity, race, gender, and social justice. Informed by his background in theater and performance as well as his experiences as a child services case worker and professor, Osorio’s richly textured sculptures and installations are deeply invested in political, social, and cultural issues affecting Latinx and working class communities in the United States. Installed on the New Museum’s Second Floor, the exhibition will focus on the elaborate environments that Osorio has been creating since the early 1990s, often developed through long-term collaborations with the individuals in the neighborhoods where they were first shown. “My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” will also premiere a new work, Convalescence (2023), which focuses on the difficulties of navigating the US healthcare system and the multiplicity of pathways toward healing.
The exhibition will feature five of Osorio’s large-scale installations, the earliest of which, Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) (1993), included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, reflects on the social impact of Hollywood’s violent representations of Latinx people, depicting what appears to be the aftermath of a murder in an apartment of a Puerto Rican family in New York City. Other large-scale multimedia installations from the 1990s include En la Barbería No se Llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop) (1994), originally installed in an abandoned barbershop in New Haven, CT, which tackles gender performativity and the perpetuation of machismo; and Badge of Honor (1995), first shown in a storefront in Newark, New Jersey, which investigates the effects of mass incarceration through an intimate conversation between a teenager and his imprisoned father. The exhibition will also include Osorio’s recent project reForm (2014–17), created in collaboration with students and community members in response to a city-ordained shuttering of a Philadelphia school, and Osorio’s new work, Convalescence. Alongside these five installations, the exhibition will also include several sculptural works such as My Beating Heart (2000), a six-foot-tall anatomical heart adorned with a crepe paper technique traditionally used to make piñatas, outfitted with speakers resounding the artist’s own heartbeat.
This exhibition will provide an opportunity to experience Osorio’s new and most iconic projects together for the first time, demonstrating the distinctive ways in which he creates encompassing environments that illustrate personal stories and reveal crucial societal concerns. “My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” addresses themes that resonate throughout Osorio’s practice, including the simultaneous resilience and fragility of human life, the values and desires that propel humanity, and the fundamental urgency to better care for one another.
“Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente” is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator, and Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow. A fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum accompanies the exhibition and includes an interview with the artist by Norton and Mosqueira; a conversation between Osorio and Rita Indiana; and texts by Robert Blackson, Ramón Rivera-Servera, and Guadalupe Rosales.
“Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance”, June 29th–September 17th, 2023 New Museum Third Floor
Developing projects through collaborative community engagement and extensive archival research, Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Saigon, Vietnam; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City) utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight unofficial and suppressed histories. Interweaving the factual and the speculative and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen re-works dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war, and displacement.
Nguyen’s New Museum presentation is the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition, following several international presentations at the Berlin Biennale, Dakar Biennale, Aichi Triennale, Manifesta 14 (all 2022) and the 2019 Sharjah Biennial, among others. Installed in the New Museum’s Third Floor galleries, “Tuan Andrew Ngyuen: Radiant Remembrance” showcases a new film and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), alongside works from the artist’s broader practice.
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019) and Nguyen’s newest project consider the legacy of tirailleurs, soldiers from former French colonial territories—Senegal and Morocco, respectively—enlisted to combat Viet Minh anticolonial uprisings during the First Indochina War (1946–1954). Made in collaboration with their descendants, both films employ letter writing as a method for developing imagined dialogues with their deceased ancestors, reflecting on themes of estrangement, exile, and repatriation. Exploring the psychic and physical inheritances of war, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) is a fictional narrative centered on the people of Quang Tri on the North Central Coast of Vietnam, one of the most heavily bombed areas during the American War (known in the United States as the Vietnam War).
Through his interest in animism and material memory, the affective and historical charge embedded into objects, Nguyen’s installations and sculptural practice coincide with and expand on the themes explored in his film. Alongside The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, whose protagonist is the possible reincarnation of the sculptor Alexander Calder, the exhibition will include a series of small- and large-scale mobiles crafted from repurposed artillery shells and bomb metal. The Specter of Ancestors Becoming will be accompanied by archival materials generously shared by the Vietnamese-Senegalese descendants of the tirailleurs sénégalais, through an ongoing partnership with Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal. Nguyen’s latest film project will be shown within a new installation that includes architectural renderings and a pair of embroideries related to the history of Moroccan defectors of the First Indochina War.
Drawing together conceptual threads from across the Global South via the interconnected histories of Vietnam, Senegal, Morocco, France, and the United States, “Radiant Remembrance” sparks a dialogue on inherited memory and testimony as forms of resistance and empowerment.
“Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance” is curated by Vivian Crockett, Curator, with Ian Wallace, Curatorial Assistant, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum. The catalogue includes a conversation between the artist and Vivian Crockett and texts by Zoe Butt, Eungie Joo, Catherine Quan Damman, and Christopher Myers.
“Mire Lee: Black Sun” June 29th–September 17th, 2023 New Museum Fourth Floor
The New Museum will present the first American solo museum exhibition of the work of Mire Lee (b. 1988, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works between Seoul and Amsterdam, Netherlands). Installed in the New Museum’s Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition will debut a site-specific installation featuring a variety of new sculptures. Composed of materials including low-tech motors, pumping systems, steel rods, and PVC hoses filled with grease, glycerin, silicone, clay slip, and oil, Lee’s animatronic sculptures operate both like living organisms and biological machines. Drawing references from architecture, horror, pornography, and cybernetics, and evoking bodily functions and environmental decay, Lee offers an intuitive means to describe properties that exist between the realms of the technological and the corporeal: tenderness, desire, abjection, anxiety, and revulsion, among other states.
Titled after the Bulgarian-French feminist and semiotician Julia Kristeva’s 1987 book Black Sun—a study of depression and melancholia—Lee’s installation debuts a new body of kinetic sculptures housed in an architectural environment specially designed for the New Museum. Led by concerns of space, atmosphere, and materials, including fabric, steel, and clay, the tactile qualities of Lee’s newest work suggest emotional voids and psychological tensions. In recent exhibitions, Lee has created ambitious environments that create profoundly physical experiences for viewers. The dry and rattling mechanistic atmosphere of “Look, I’m a fountain of filth raving mad with love” at ZOLLAMTMMK, MMK Frankfurt (2022) was created through the use of abrasive mediums often found at construction sites, including cement, resin, steel, and plaster. In other projects, such as “The Milk of Dreams,” 59th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2022) and “Is it morning for you yet?” 58th Carnegie International (2022), Lee presents sculptures that variously spurt, drip, and ooze mysterious viscous liquids or that occupy and transform their enclosures. At the 2022 Busan Biennale, Lee’s monumental sculpture Landscape with Many Holes: Skins of Youngdo Sea was fabricated by draping acrylic mesh across scaffolding, creating a carcass-like structure resembling ripped flesh. For Lee, the process of creating these objects is way of evoking human biology and working through its psychosocial entanglements.
This exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator, and Madeline Weisburg, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum, including a conversation between the artist and Gary Carrion-Murayari as well as texts by Wong Binghao, Florentina Holzinger, and Madeline Weisburg.
“Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot” June 29th–September 17th, 2023 New Museum Lobby Gallery
For their first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Wynnie Mynerva will develop a site-specific installation for the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery. Through a gallery-spanning painting—the largest ever exhibited at the New Museum—alongside a sculptural element created from the artist’s own body, Mynerva will reimagine the Biblical origin story of Eve to envision a gender expansive future.
Born in 1992 in Villa El Salvador on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, Mynerva grew up in an environment where violence based on gender, sexuality, race, and social class was extremely prevalent. Responding to both their traumas and desires, Mynerva creates cathartic visions of revenge and emancipation—representations of a world in which sexual dissidence would be praised as powerful political action. Their large-scale, colorful paintings depict bodies that hover on the edge of abstraction, refusing to be categorized, consumed, or controlled, and their radical performances and body modifications posit sexual transgression as a path to social transformation.
For their New Museum exhibition, Mynerva will create a site-specific painting more than 70 ft. in length alongside a sculpture made from their own rib, which they have had surgically extracted for this purpose. Inspired by the Biblical stories of Eve and Lilith, the artist reimagines the foundational story of all Abrahamic religions—that God created Adam, the first man, from clay, and then created his wife Eve from Adam’s rib. Mynerva retools this narrative which has been used for millennia to justify arbitrary gender designations by inserting Lilith, an ancestral female figure from Mesopotamian and Judaic mythologies who has been referred to as the first she-demon or first woman. In their site-specific painting, Mynerva will depict an encounter between Eve and Lilith, which the artist proposes as the first insubordinate alliance between feminized bodies. The work represents a scene in which Eve gives Lilith the lowest rib from her own body, commonly called the “Adam’s rib,” as a token of their bond. Drawing on their practice of body modification, Mynerva will also present a sculptural element created from their own Adam’s rib, forming a fossil-like relic that acts as proof of this encounter between Eve and Lilith. Foregrounding the need to reexamine longstanding narratives, “The Original Riot” offers a joyful rejection of patriarchy and gender binarism.
“Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot” is curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, ISLAA Curatorial Fellow.
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