The 2012 New Museum Triennial

The 2012 New Museum Triennial in New York features thirty-four talented artists, artist groups, and temporary collectives, totaling over fifty participants - born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Many of them have not exhibited in the US before.

The exhibition, entitled ‘The Ungovernables’, takes inspiration from the curious concept of ‘ungovernability’ and its transformation from a pejorative key term employed for describing unruly ‘natives’ to a defiant strategy of self-determination and civil disobedience. It’s meant to suggest both organized and anarchic resistance, carrying a dark humor about the potentials and limitations of this generation.

‘The Ungovernables’ is about the urgencies of a restless generation that came of age after the revolutionary movements of the 1960s-70s. Through orm and materials, works included in it the show explore impermanence and also an engagement with both the present and future. Many of them are provisional, performative and site-specific, reflecting an attitude of resourcefulness.

In Adrián Villar Rojas’s sculpture, monumentality and transience are juxtaposed. Rendered in clay, the work depends on cracks on the surfaces - the object’s inevitable failure, and also that of meaning, as well as the guaranteed transformation of each idea and object back to dust. It’s dust that is repurposed, re-imagined, and then re-formed.

When Danh Võ learnt that the Statue of Liberty is merely a steel armature enveloped by a copper skin, Danh researched the hammering process, which gave her shape. The artist employed craftsmen for replicating skin of the statue for his work.

Julia Dault looks to manipulate materials of modernity like Formica and Plexiglas in unconventional temporal arrangements, which can never be repeated. In the artist’s works, labor is reliant on the conditions of a specific space - her strength to create a work at a particular point of time, and also the uncontrollable accidents that her materials determine.

A new media collective & alternative space, House of Natural Fiber, has combined art and microbiology to teach safe ways to brew homemade fruit wine to locals even while amplifying and sampling the peculiar sounds of the distillation process for composing electronic music.