Petrit Halilaj, Lee Bul, Tong Yang-Tze @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - Artists for The Met's 2024 Contemporary Commissions

Artists for The Met's 2024 Contemporary Commissions

Petrit Halilaj, Lee Bul, and Tong Yang-Tze

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

April 29, 2024 - April 8, 2025

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents the artists for the 2024 contemporary commissions. Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj (born 1986, Kostërc, former Yugoslavia) will present a site-specific installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden; South Korean artist Lee Bul (born 1964, Yeongju, based in Seoul) has been commissioned to create four sculptures for the niches of The Met’s Fifth Avenue facade; and Taiwanese artist Tong Yang-Tze (born 1942, Shanghai, based in Taipei) will create two monumental works of Chinese calligraphy for The Met’s Great Hall. The commissions will be the first major project in the United States for both Halilaj and Tong. Lee’s commission for the facade marks her first major project in the U.S. in over 20 years. 

The Roof Garden Commission: Petrit Halilaj will be on view from April 29 through October 27, 2024. The Facade Commission: Lee Bul will be on view from September 12, 2024 through May 27, 2025; and The Great Hall Commission: Tong Yang-Tze will be on view from November 21, 2024 through April 8, 2025.

Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer, said, “It is with great excitement that we announce the artists for the 2024 contemporary commissions. All boundary-pushing in their own right, Petrit Halilaj, Lee Bul, and Tong Yang-Tze will light up the three most prominent locations across the Museum, engaging The Met’s global audience. We look forward to unveiling their commissions in the year ahead.”  

For the Roof Garden Commission—the tenth in the series of site-specific commissions for the outdoor space— Petrit Halilaj will transform the roof with a sprawling sculptural installation. The artist’s work is rooted in his biography, deeply connected to the history of the young country of Kosovo (declared an independent nation in 2008)—and his experience living through the war and conflict in the Balkan region in the 1990s as a child refugee. Halilaj uses art as a critical tool to reflect and investigate identity issues, questions of displacement, the interface of personal and global histories, and queer identities.

With a career that spans four decades, Lee Bul is widely recognized as the preeminent artist from South Korea. She is known for her sophisticated use of both highly industrial and labor-intensive materials, such as fabric, metal, plastic, silicone, porcelain, and glass, incorporating artisanal practices as well as technological advancements into her work. Her sculptures, often evoking bodily forms that are at once classical and futuristic, address the aspirations and disillusions that come with progress. For the Facade Commission, Lee will create four sculptures that combine figurative and abstract elements for the Museum’s historic niches. It will be the fifth in a series of contemporary commissions for The Met’s facade that previously featured work by Wangechi Mutu (2019), Carol Bove (2021) and Hew Locke (2022); the current installation by Nairy Baghramian is on view through May 28, 2024. 

Taipei-based Tong Yang-Tze is one of the most celebrated artists working exclusively in Chinese calligraphy today. Best known for making calligraphy in monumental scale, she will create two new works for The Met’s Great Hall. Tong brings Chinese characters into dialogue with three-dimensional space and pushes the conceptual and compositional boundaries of the art form, while remaining dedicated to calligraphy’s raison d’être as the art of writing. Her project will be the third in the series of commissions for The Met’s Great Hall, that previously featured work by Kent Monkman (2019), and is currently the site of Jacolby Satterwhite’s site-specific multimedia installation, A Metta Prayer; on view through January 7, 2024.

About the Artists

Petrit Halilaj is a Kosovar artist born in 1986 who endured the war in the Balkan region during the 1990s. After a formative period in Italy, where he studied art at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, he moved to Berlin in 2008, where he still lives and has his studio. His projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, and performance. Often incorporating material histories from his native land and manifesting as ambitious spatial installations, his work distills personal relationships, memories, and experiences into sculptural propositions.

Halilaj’s work has steadily gained international recognition over the past few years, with important exhibitions held at TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space, Venice (2023); Tate St Ives (2021); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2020); Paul Klee Zentrum, Berna (2018); Fondazione Merz, Turin (2018), New Museum, New York (2017); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2015); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2015); Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2015). In 2013, he represented his country in the first Kosovo Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2022, he participated in Manifesta 14 held in Pristina, Kosovo. In November 2023, a retrospective of his work opened at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. 

Lee Bul is a formidable leading sculptor of her generation who works across a diverse range of media—from drawing, sculpture, and painting to performance, installation, and video—to examine themes of beauty, desire, corruption, and decay. The Met Facade Commission will be Lee’s first major project in the United States since her solo exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 2002. Lee represented her country in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 and received the prestigious Ho-Am Prize in South Korea in 2019.

Since her breakthrough performance in the late 1980s in Seoul and Tokyo wearing sewn sculptural forms, Lee has been heralded as a pioneer in contemporary sculpture and installation. She is most known for her sculptural figures and landscapes that blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial and are sensuous yet fragmented, forthcoming yet enigmatic. These dramatic constructions critique progress-driven, perfection-obsessed values through transformations of familiar forms. Structurally and visually complex, Lee’s work also explores the aspirations and failures of utopian visions and exposes a sense of vulnerability and melancholy in history. 

Having practiced calligraphy since her youth, Tong Yang-Tze was trained in oil painting in Taiwan (BFA, National Normal University, Taipei, 1966) and the United States (MFA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1970). After a brief stint in graphic design in New York City, she came to prominence in 1980s Taiwan with calligraphy, despite its waning influence in contemporary art. Writing well-known phrases selected from classical Chinese texts and enlarging the characters are her key strategies to connect to the audience. Tong’s calligraphy takes inspiration from the styles of masters in pre-modern China and the scale and compositions of mid-20th-century Western abstract paintings. Her commitment to the written characters is rooted in her belief in its centrality in Chinese cultural identity and calligraphy’s capacity for visual, emotional, and social impact beyond linguistic barriers. Working on the floor, she manipulates the movement and tension in the brushstrokes, the foremost quality in calligraphy. The oversized characters pose physical, formal, and conceptual challenges, while they offer new compositional possibilities and viewing experience. She received the National Cultural Award in 2011, the highest honor of its kind in Taiwan.

These projects are the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

www.metmuseum.org

Sharjah Biennial 15 opens in February 2023 - Thinking Historically in the Present

Sharjah Biennial 15

Thinking Historically in the Present

Opens in February 2023 

Bait Obaid Al Shamsi, Arts Square, Sharjah

Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation

Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) announced that the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial opens in early February 2023, featuring 30 major commissions by artists from around the world. Conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by SAF Director Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (SB15) reflects on Enwezor’s visionary work, which transformed contemporary art and established an ambitious intellectual project that has influenced the evolution of institutions and biennials around the world, including the Sharjah Biennial.

For Enwezor, the contemporary art exhibition provided a means to engage with history, politics and society in our global present. He envisioned the invitation to curate this edition of Sharjah Biennial as a way to reflect on and contribute to the Biennial’s history and that of the overarching Foundation, and their role in addressing the need for institutional models outside of the West that support dialogue and the production and presentation of contemporary art responsive to our times. Enwezor proposed commissioning 30 works for SB15 to celebrate Sharjah Biennial’s 30-year anniversary and to meaningfully activate this critical platform through the development of new productions. 

In line with the framework he established, 30 artists have been invited to embark on major commissions that explore histories that continue to shape our present: John Akomfrah, Kader Attia, Sammy Baloji, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carolina Caycedo, Destiny Deacon, Manthia Diawara, Coco Fusco, Hassan Hajjaj, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Isaac Julien, Amar Kanwar, Bouchra Khalili, Mohammed Ibrahim Mahama, Kerry James Marshall, Steve McQueen, Almagul Menlibayeva, Aline Motta, Wangechi Mutu, Philippe Parreno, Doris Salcedo, Berni Searle, Yinka Shonibare, Vivan Sundaram, Fatimah Tuggar, Hajra Waheed, Barbara Walker, Nari Ward and Carrie Mae Weems. Their new commissions will be featured in the Biennial alongside a selection of works by international artists to be announced in the coming year. 

“These commissioned artists build on Enwezor’s vision that transformed how we understand and engage with contemporary art and its institutions. Although he worked with many of these artists, I felt it was important to include other voices that bring his proposal into our immediate present and leverage the critical role that he believed  the Sharjah Biennial could play in this endeavour,” said SAF Director and SB15 Curator Hoor Al Qasimi. “Reflecting on the relentless devastation of COVID-19 in many parts of the world, as well as the uneven access to vaccines and restrictions to travel still in place, SAF has made the decision to open Sharjah Biennial 15 in 2023. Our goal is to give artists and our audiences the necessary time to tend to what is most urgent around them. We hope to be able to gather in Sharjah once again with renewed energy and appreciation for the way art can bring complex questions into focus.” 

SB15 is being realised by Hoor Al Qasimi as curator in conjunction with the SB15 Working Group, comprised of Tarek Abou El Fetouh (independent curator); Ute Meta Bauer (professor and Founding Director of NTU CCA Singapore); Salah M. Hassan (professor and art historian, Cornell University and Director of The Africa Institute, Sharjah); Chika Okeke-Agulu (professor and art historian, Princeton University); and Octavio Zaya (independent curator, art writer and Executive Director of the Cuban Art Foundation). Al Qasimi and the Working Group are overseeing the development and implementation of the Biennial with an Advisory Committee that includes Sir David Adjaye (architect) and Christine Tohmé (Director, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut). 

SB15 began with the 2021 edition of the March Meeting—an integral part of Enwezor’s plans for SB15—which is the Foundation’s annual convening of artists, curators and art practitioners to explore critical issues in contemporary art through panels, lectures and performances. Held from 12 to 21 March 2021, March Meeting 2021: Unravelling the Present examined the 30-year history of the Sharjah Biennial and the future of the biennial model. All talks and panels from March Meeting 2021, which drew more than 4,000 attendees from around the world, are now available online at: sharjahart.org/march-meeting-2021/programme. The March Meeting Papers, a series of eleven commissioned essays by art historians and scholars chosen through the March Meeting 2021 open call, are also available online at: sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/publications/march-meeting-papers. The 2022 edition of March Meeting will continue these explorations and dialogue in the lead up to SB15.

Additional information on March Meeting 2022 and Sharjah Biennial 15, including the complete artist list, will be announced in the coming months. 

SHARJAH ART FOUNDATION

sharjahart.org