MFA Photography 2015 Alumni Qiren Hu Featured in Queens Museum 2018 Biennial

Hailing from fifteen neighborhoods and representing several generations, the majority of the featured artists are women. The institution also launched the exhibition’s website, which will serve as an alternative way to experience the event.

The subtitle Volumes encompasses many historical and current meanings of the word. Artists respond to the entire museum and select Queens Library branches, questioning and expanding systems of knowledge production and their effects on how we become and order who we are. What aspects of the past are constructed within and because of libraries and museums? What limits and possibilities do they present spatially, temporally, and virtually, today? Artists in QI 2018 are working through abstraction, chance operations, the transformation of found materials, and the construction of new archives along with other strategies to pose profound and multiple questions about centuries- or decades- old human systems, algorithmically-generated realities, and possibilities for selfhood.

While Volumes marks an expansive presence in both the Queens Museum and Queens Library branches, its interventions are largely non-monumental, positioned rather for speculation and dialog with these sites, its publics, and beyond. Together, they form a complex array of contemporary artistic thought and conversation with which the visitor is invited to engage.