İz Öztat at the 2024 ISP Curatorial Exhibition, Not Everything Is Given (09/05/2024)
The Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP) curatorial exhibition, Not Everything Is Given, examines the demand to decipher as a measure of value or the foundation of understanding. Curated by the 2023–24 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows Ella den Elzen, Gervais Marsh, Carlota Ortiz Monasterio, and Alper Turan, the exhibition aims to disturb the expectations from artworks and artists to “demonstrate,” “elucidate,” or ‘’bear witness to’’ the fraught conditions of our world.
The artists in the exhibition circumvent and interrogate the expectations placed on them by overdetermined categories (race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity), re-orienting towards the self and those with shared experiences. Turning to practices of withholding and self-articulation, they complicate histories of past and present genocide, logics of anti-Blackness and settler-colonialism, and gesture to concealed structures of control, including those imposed by the State, the law, and the archive. The exhibition will be on display from May 9 to 24, 2024.
Image: İz Öztat & Zişan, Felaket (Catastrophe), 1923. Ink on paper, 25.5 x 18 cm.