This World & Nearer Ones rejects the typical biennial model (a “destination” for high-profile personalities and a spectacle with an emphasis on product over process), instead cultivating a cerebral, literary, and contemplative mood.

Artists were selected for their interest in social and architectural environments; engagement with histories that are in formation; and investigation of how truths are told. The selected artists frequently critique our moral, aesthetic, and fiscal systems; the community and private spaces that generate and perpetuate these systems; and the documents and fictions that describe and guide them.

The exhibition engages with the history of park sculpture, in which sites are “beautified.” Here but the works do not “beautify” in the traditional sense, rather they pose new ways of experiencing site. Many of the artworks operate as ideas or moments in time, rather than as objects. Artists were not asked to consider a particular “theme”: rather they were invited to the island and asked to respond to the site. This process was artist-led.

The island is a site in transition, a “no-place” that no one group currently has a claim on. As such, it was ripe for exploration.

Artists seized on the following themes in response to their explorations:

The military and social history of Governors Island: Tue Greenfort, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, Tris Vonna-Michell, Adam Chodzko, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Patti Smith and Jesse Smith, Teresa Margolles, Judi Werthein, Susan Philipsz

Gothic or spiritual/transcendent experiences, bizarre phenomena: Mark Wallinger, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, Klaus Weber, Anthony McCall, Edgar Arceneaux, Susan Philipsz

Traces of displaced action/presenting manifold, uncertain futures: Teresa Margolles, Tercerunquinto, Jill Magid

Travel and time: Lawrence Weiner, Krzysztof Wodizcko, Guido van der Werve

Loss, violence, ruin, and rebirth: Teresa Margolles, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Krzysztof Wodizcko, AA Bronson and Peter Hobbs, Nils Norman

MEDIA CONTACT: Nicholas Weist, nickw@creativetime.org