Songs for Sabotage

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Songs for Sabotage

Feb 13 – May 27, 2018

New Museum

Lydia Ourahmane / The Third Choir

Songs for Sabotage, the fourth New Museum Triennial, considers how individuals and collectives around the world might effectively address the connection of images and culture to the forces that structure our society.

Claudia Martínez Garay / The Leftovers (2016)

Together, the artists in Songs for Sabotage propose a kind of propaganda, engaging with new and traditional media in order to reveal the built systems that construct our reality, images, and truths. The exhibition amounts to a call for action, an active engagement, and an interference in political and social structures, and will bring together works across mediums by approximately thirty artists from nineteen countries, the majority of whom are exhibiting in the United States for the first time.

KERNEL: Pegy Zali, Petros Moris, Theodoros Giannakis / Torrent

Songs for Sabotage explores interventions into cities, infrastructures, and the networks of everyday life, proposing objects that might create common experience. The exhibition takes as a given that these structures are linked to the entrenched powers of colonialism and institutionalized racism that magnify inequity. Through their distinct approaches, the artists inSongs for Sabotage offer models for dismantling and replacing the political and economic networks that envelop today’s global youth. Invoking the heightened role of identity in today’s culture, they take on the technological, economic, and material structures that stand in the way of collectivity.

Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude

These artists are further connected by both their deep engagements with the specificity of local context and a critical examination—and embrace—of the internationalism that links them. Their works range widely in medium and form, including painted allegories for the administration of power, sculptural proposals to renew (and destroy) monuments, and cinematic works that engage the modes of propaganda that influence us more and more each day. Viewed as an ensemble, these works provide models for reflecting upon and working against a system that seems doomed to failure.

Violet Dennison

Songs for Sabotage is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator at the New Museum, and Alex Gartenfeld, founding Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, with Francesca Altamura, Curatorial Assistant. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the New Museum and Phaidon Press Limited.

Wilmer Wilson / From My Paper Bag Colored Heart (2012). Photo Matt Dunn

The New Museum Triennial is the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to emerging artists from around the world, providing an important platform for a new generation of artists who are shaping the current discourse of contemporary art and the future of culture.

Manolis D. Lemos / Dusk and Dawn Look Just the Same (still)

ARTIST LIST

Cian Dayrit (b. 1989, Manila, Philippines); Violet Dennison (b. 1989, Bridgeport, CT); Tomm El-Saieh (b. 1984, Port-au-Prince, Haiti); Janiva Ellis (b. 1987, Oakland, CA); Claudia Martínez Garay (b. 1983, Ayacucho, Peru); Haroon Gunn-Salie (b. 1989, Cape Town, South Africa); Matthew Angelo Harrison (b. 1989, Detroit, MI); Tiril Hasselknippe (b. 1984, Arendal, Norway); Inhabitants (founded in 2015, New York, NY, by Pedro Neves Marques and Mariana Silva; KERNEL (founded in 2009, Athens, Greece, by Pegy Zali, Petros Moris, and Theodoros Giannakis; Manolis D. Lemos (b. 1989, Athens, Greece); Zhenya Machneva (b. 1988, Leningrad, Russia); Chemu Ng’ok (b. 1989, Nairobi, Kenya); Gresham Tapiwa Nyaude (b. 1988, Harare, Zimbabwe); Daniela Ortiz (b. 1985, Cusco, Peru); Lydia Ourahmane (b. 1992, Saïda, Algeria); Hardeep Pandhal (b. 1985, Birmingham, UK); Dalton Paula (b. 1982, Brasília, Brazil); Julia Phillips (b. 1985, Hamburg, Germany); Wong Ping (b. 1984, Hong Kong); Anupam Roy (b. 1985, West Bengal, India); Manuel Solano (b. 1987, Mexico City, Mexico); Diamond Stingily (b. 1990, Chicago, IL); Song Ta (b. 1988, Leizhou, China); Wilmer Wilson IV (b. 1989, Richmond, VA); Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu, China).