Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, MN
October 4, 2007 – February 17, 2008
[Originally published in Art Papers (January/February) 2008: 46-47]
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Adding that little s to the end of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World accomplishes one very important thing: it cuts through the novel’s dystopic vision of the future by offering up multiple worlds that are yet-to-be. Or as the exhibition’s co-curator Doryun Chong puts it, “innumerable terra incognitae […] to be discovered with all sense of indignation and wonderment, curiosity and solemnity” [Walker Art Center; October 4, 2007—February 17, 2008]. This slight, yet productive, supplement is only the first political gesture in a massive group show of seventy works by twenty-four artists from sixteen countries. Here, the politics is not the polemical, election-season variety that we’re used to. Stepping into the refreshing air just outside of party platforms and political manifestos, the works speak as their own individual worlds or worldviews. What’s more, they are installed, with few exceptions, so that you pass through one work into the next. Against the grain of multiculturalism’s unifying and generalizing glosses, they present the world as ever-fractured and irresolvable, continually negotiated but not impossible to imagine without conflict.