Assembly 2024: Horizon Scanning
Displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlingon, VACo curated with Blair Murphy, Curator of Exhibitions, MoCA Arlington
September 28, 2024 - January 26, 2025
In a time of multiple, overlapping, and seemingly perpetual crises, the 2024 iteration of MoCA Arlington's national biennial brings together artists whose work can help us grapple with our tumultuous present by offering strategies to navigate and reimagine the future. The exhibition assembles thirteen artists and one artist collective hailing from 14 states representing a range of art-making approaches including painting, drawing, film and video, sculpture, animation, and community organizing. While eclectic in their materials and processes, these artists are unified in creating work that contends with our unstable social and political climate. Throughout their varied practices, they interrogate prevailing cultural narratives, established power hierarchies, and under-considered histories.
“Horizon Scanning”, the exhibition’s subtitle, is an analytical forecasting tool used by government agencies, futurists, and policy-makers to predict future threats and opportunities. This forecasting tool is typically employed by large institutions to uphold their own authority and maintain the status quo. Assembly 2024, on the other hand, borrows the term to argue that artists and their creative practices are integral to helping us collectively envision new futures and strategies to realize them.
The exhibition loosely structures these future-making strategies into three categories. Through Infiltration, artists undermine institutions by appropriating the lexicons that maintain their authority and critiquing the canons of knowledge that empower them. Adaptation confronts the inequities and troubling histories of our current reality by innovating new ways to contend with them while Speculation offers the possibility for some artists to envision the world and ways of living they want to see.
Launched in 2019, Assembly, MoCA Arlington's biennial exhibition series, highlights material and conceptual trends among contemporary artists. Since 2022, the exhibition has had a national focus, showcasing artists from across the United States who are working at the forefront of contemporary art.
Participating Artists: Nyame O. Brown, Everything is Collective, Allegra Hangen, Elisa Harkins, Marnie Ellen Hertzler, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, Cesar Lopez, Jovencio de la Paz, Kenya (Robinson), Benjy Russell, Shelby Shadwell, Keith Tolch, Lily Xie, and X
Cesar Lopez
Infiltration
Through subversive tactics, the artists in this section challenge institutions that regulate identity, govern resources, and control our understanding of art and visual consumption. They toy with the bodies of knowledge and bureaucratic structures that form the foundations of powerful institutions such as art history, colonialism, and the United States government. They hijack institutional lexicons and aesthetics, stealthily disrupt historical precedents, and withhold their own identities to evade tokenization. Some of them co-opt technological systems and aesthetics, to contend with and humanize technology's dramatic restructuring of contemporary life. They create work that welcomes the contradictory impulse towards both legibility and invisibility, towards both being seen and embracing the subversive potential of unknowability. By resisting legibility and meddling with institutional structures, they reclaim agency in the face of institutions’ drive to essentialize, control, and commodify.
Left: Keith Tolch Right: Jovencio De La Paz
Sculpture to right: Cesar Lopez
Allegra Hangen
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Everything is Collective
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Left Keith Tolch Right Jovencio De La Paz
Everything is Collective
Left Keith Tolch Right Jovencio De La Paz
Kenya (Robinson)
Adaptation
The artists in this section examine ongoing injustices and crises, creatively contending with them to chart alternate futures. By preserving and uplifting underrepresented histories and reframing contentious debates, they strategically build on our existing flawed institutions and knowledge in order to propel us into a more inclusive, stable future. Some of these artists examine the histories of marginalized groups while others take on the energy crisis and its environmental consequences. In both cases, these artists are clear-eyed about the necessity of navigating the world as it exists, proposing adaptive responses to difficult realities in order to reinvigorate hardened discourses and reanimate stagnant historical narratives.
Kenya (Robinson) details
Left: Elisa Harkins Right: X
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Shelby Shadewell
Marnie Ellen Hertzler
Speculation
These artists embrace a sense of wonder and imagination to envision new futures discarding the limitations of the status quo and the restrictions of pragmatism. This section builds on the legacies of Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurity, and queer utopias. These speculative traditions are rooted in the liberatory potential of collectivity and imagination in the face of social and economic barriers to prosperity. Through the world-building possibilities of art making, these artists create new frameworks for belonging, propose new possibilities for human flourishing, and remind us that the future is not beholden to the present.
Installation detail Benjy Russell
Left: Jesús Hilario-Reyes
Right: Jesús Hilario-Reyes Detail shot
Nyame Brown
Benjy Russell
Lily Xie