Image Credentials: Image Title: Whitney Biennial 2024: A Mirror to the American Soul in “Even Better Than the Real Thing” Source: (sora.chatgpt) Date: May 2025 Attribution: Created by AI-generated imagery (sora.chatgpt), and it does not depict a real-world scene.
By Staff Writer with Agencies
New York, March 2024
The Whitney Biennial, one of the most enduring and closely watched exhibitions of American art, returns in 2024 with an urgent and multilayered theme: “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” In a nation reckoning with its identity, power structures, and social consciousness, the 81st edition of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s signature show does more than survey; it interrogates.
Since its inception in 1932, the Biennial has shaped the trajectory of American art by introducing the public to now-iconic names such as Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons. But as debates intensify over what constitutes “American art,” the Biennial itself has become a cultural battleground. With this year’s curators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, steering the show, the 2024 Biennial explores a question both simple and seismic: What is real?
Set against the backdrop of a rapidly shifting social landscape, the exhibition confronts themes like colonialism, gender, race, environmental crisis, artificial intelligence, and identity. Rather than offering a singular vision, the Biennial is a kaleidoscope of voices—71 artists and collectives—who use art to probe the fragile definitions of truth, reality, and American identity.
A centerpiece of the exhibition is Diane Severin Nguyen’s In Her Time (Iris’s Version), a haunting video installation that juxtaposes a stylized, pink-hued room with the brutal history of the Nanjing Massacre. The dissonance between setting and content forces viewers to question how narratives are shaped across generations.
Clarissa Tossin’s film Before the Volcanoes Sing, in collaboration with Maya artists and poets, reclaims Indigenous storytelling through a modern lens, shifting attention from exoticized portrayals to authentic cultural memory. Equally powerful is Sharon Hayes’ Ricerche: four, a video series exploring sexuality and gender presented in an informal setting meant to evoke shifting norms of communal space in American society.
British artist Isaac Julien offers a powerful critique of cultural gatekeeping with Once Again… (Statues Never Die), a five-screen film installation that weaves together Black modernism, queer identity, and art world elitism. His work invites viewers to contemplate the invisible structures that define art history and who gets to shape it.
Socially charged installations continue throughout the museum. Carmen Winant’s The Last Safe Abortion is composed of 2,500 photographs documenting the labor behind abortion care, making the invisible visible. Demian DinéYazhi’s neon light installation, We Must Stop Imagining Apocalypse/genocide + We Must Imagine Liberation, sits in stark view of the Hudson River, its message echoing both inside the museum and onto the street, subtly displaying the phrase “Free Palestine” through flickering lights.
The exhibit also embraces the ephemeral: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s amber sculpture Paloma Blanca Deja Volar disintegrates over time, evoking how trauma and memory shift within the body. In Nikita Gale’s TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME), a self-playing keyboard evokes the idea that even machines are haunted by the human presence.
Despite concerns about institutional “safety,” the 2024 Biennial is anything but risk-averse. It brings discomfort, challenges preconceptions, and invites reflection, sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly. As the museum states, “society is at a critical inflection point,” and the works included reflect a collective plea for consciousness in the face of crisis.
But does this cultural mirror catalyze transformation, or merely offer a momentary escape into aestheticized protest? That’s left up to the viewer. The exhibition is not prescriptive; it offers space, stories, and questions, but resists providing conclusions.
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” activist Cesar A. Cruz once said. The Whitney Biennial 2024 takes this to heart, delivering a show that refuses to be passive. It is not just a survey of American art; it is a reflection of American society at its most raw, complicated, and compelling.
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