The 48 artists who comprise the biennial hail from 35+ countries and use storytelling, embodied memory, and projections of diasporic futures to navigate conflict and straddle multiple political terrains through group exhibitions, solo presentations, and public programs at EFA Project Space, NARS Foundation, Accent Sisters, Alchemy Gallery, at Artists Alliance, Wendy's Subway, and Brooklyn Museum—all venues in New York and New Jersey. Expanding
on the first 2020 biennial’s concepts. the curators Bianca Abdi-Boragi, Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, and Katherine Adams describe that their aim with the biennial is “to voice immigrant experiences to build solidarity.”
Having emigrated from Odesa in the ‘90s, TIAB’s founder and artistic director Katya Grokhovsky has a personal interest to build informative dialog and support surrounding Ukrainian art, fighting Russia’s invasion, and more complicatedly, the future. She is an active advocate and frequent speaker for Ukraine in New York. As a critic, Ekstrand has written about the Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale, interviewed The Anti-War Coalition for Cultbytes and Artspiel, and interviewed Julia Beliaeva for Artslooker, among others. About the biennial’s engagement with Ukraine she says, “it was necessary to respond to the time by extending the biennial’s conceptual framework to include artists operating beyond the borders of the U.S., especially Ukrainian artists—the ongoing war prompted us to question what it means to live in exile and its effects on art making.”
The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone artist list
Slinko
Emilio Rojas
Erika DeFreitas
Pritika Chowdhry
Maria Kulikovska
Rafael Yaluff
Golnar Adili
Keli Safia Maksud
Mila Panic
Jovencio de la Paz
Marcelo Brodsky
Nida Sinnokrot
Young Joo Lee
Kathie Halfin
Carlos Franco
Masha Vlasova
Umber Majeed
Keren Anavy
Sanié Bokharie
Sa’dia Rehman
Magdalena Dukiewicz
Jonathan Ojekunle
Bonam Kim
Mia Enell
Coralina Rodriguez-Meyer
Ala Dehghan
Felipe Baeza
Leila Seyedzadeh
Francesco Simeti
Nicholas Oh & Ayoung Justine Yu
Jamie Martinez
Raul de Lara
Joiri Minaya
Selva Aparicio
Lilian Shtereva
Nyugen Smith
Anina Major
Tariku Shiferaw
Dominique Duroseau
Anna Ting Möller
Linnéa Gad
Alexander Si
Maya Hayuk
Juna Skënderi
Ana Armengod
Neema Githere
and Christopher Unpezverde Núñez.
The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone will take place in New York and New Jersey from September to December 2023. Follow updates on TIAB’s Instagram.
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