2015 Triennial: “Surround Audience”

The New Museum’s upcoming triennial is a show that speaks to both the promise and the peril of our relationship with contemporary technology, as envisioned by a new generation of artists. “Surround Audience,” the show’s evocative title, points to the unprecedented velocity with which images of the self are shared, circulated, and reshaped, while also calling to mind a new age of mass surveillance. This tension will play out through an impressively wide range of practices, represented by fifty-one participants; in addition to experiments with more traditional mediums and an ambitious publishing initiative, the exhibition will feature contributions by a comedian, the trend-forecasting group K-Hole, and nightlife impresario Juliana Huxtable, who appears on the museum’s website resplendent in sea-foam-green body paint and long, canary-yellow braids. An image fit for the cover of an Ursula K. Le Guin novel, it likewise suggests a speculative glimpse into a future world.