Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin on Curating the Whitney Biennial

NEW YORK—Perhaps because it comes around only every other year, the art world never seems to tire of the Whitney Biennial. Each time, anticipation about which artists might—or might not—be included eventually gives way to a genuine excitement about how the show will look and what it’s going to mean, and, eventually, all too often, to critical disappointment.

The Biennial draws the art-world glitterati, a vast press, and huge audiences, and everyone seems to have an opinion not only on the individual works in the show, but on how it functions as a whole. Like Britain’s Turner Prize, it is the rare contemporary art phenomenon that much of the general public knows something about. The Whitney should be congratulated on its tradition of putting on the show so many people love to hate.

This edition’s curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, both permanent Whitney employees, have been particularly provocative: Not only have they filled the Whitney’s own Marcel Breuer building with a whole range of sculpture, installation, photography, video, and film (and even a few paintings), they have also expanded their exhibition to the Park Avenue Armory, where they’ve installed additional installations, video, and performance, on view through March 23.

The day before this year’s Biennial opened to the public, ARTINFO asked Huldisch and Momin a few questions about their experiences.

Henriette, Shamin, in organizing this Biennial did you start out with a concept or theme?

HH: No, not at all. It was very important for us to start with the art, and to allow threads and sensibilities to emerge from what we were seeing. When you’re looking at so much work in such a concentrated fashion, things become clear more rapidly than you would imagine.

There’s a lot of performance and work with performative elements in the show. Did you go looking for that?

SMM: No. It was very important for us to be responsive to what we were seeing, rather than going out there and looking for particular things. It was just something that was so prevalent among artists that it felt like it needed to be addressed.

How did using the Park Avenue Armory come about?

HH: Last spring when were talking about this kind of work, we were struggling with how we could present it at the Whitney, which really doesn’t have the space. The Art Production Fund had realized a project with Aaron Young at the Armory, and they came to us and suggested expanding the Biennial there.

Back in the Breuer building, you’ve constructed quite a lot of small rooms, like the one that houses paintings by Karen Kilimnik. I got the sense that some artists wanted to reproduce the feel of a small commercial gallery space.

HH: That is certainly not what we were trying to achieve, or what those artists were aiming for. To some extent those discreet spaces were necessary. For Rachel Harrison, for example, that’s a new body of work that had to be seen together as far as she was concerned. And Karen was very specific. She requested a room of a certain scale to give it a domestic feel, and she installed it with a chandelier and four paintings. But she thinks of it as an installation; the whole room is a single project. To her mind, the paintings wouldn’t work just interspersed through the gallery space.

I understand that in addition to you two, Donna De Salvo [Whitney chief curator and associate director for programs] oversaw the curatorial process, and you worked with three advisors. Why is that?

SMM: We spoke with all of our colleagues and with artists all along the way, but we also thought it might be nice to have a few folks that we could go back to a few times and have a conversation with about the artists we were interested in and the ideas that we were beginning to frame out, and get their feedback and ideas.

But the final decisions were yours?

SMM: Yes. We did curate the show.

You are awfully young. Is there a mentoring system to groom the latest Biennial curators?

HH: You could say that, in the sense that the Whitney is very good at promoting people up through the ranks. I started as an intern eight years ago, and Shamim used to be a curatorial assistant and has been here 12 years.