Daniel Bozhkov

Where traditional institutional critique often dissatisfies with self-congratulatory rhetoric or a failure to engage its audience, Daniel Bozhkov’s project at this museum engulfs the viewer in an eddy of the often entwined and at times competing narratives of art, urbanism, literature, and popular culture. His installation offers a decaying maze: old lockers from the building’s United Nations days, boxes of unused Moby-Dick-themed coloring books, administrative furnishings, and stacked glass bricks from the adjacent (and now closed) ice rink. Puncturing this wasteland of signs are abstracted details—paintings of images from the children’s version of Ahab’s tale and film that closely scans the flowing garments of Michelangelo’s Pietà, 1499, as well as short pedagogical texts.

The installation’s winding path leads to a cube built from the ice-rink bricks and enclosing a life-size replica of the Renaissance master’s sculpture, which has only once left the Vatican—for inclusion in the 1964 World’s Fair, held on these grounds in Flushing Meadows, Queens. A square gap in the protective shell reveals the work in cropped view, accompanied by an invitation for the viewer to touch it. Perhaps a nod to “new institutionalism”––the practice of artists who engage with institutions on a conceptual and an operational level––beyond this gesture the visitor literally, as well as figuratively, encounters the dead end of a white cube. Bozhkov’s project will continue to develop as he works with recent-immigrant residents of Queens as part of the museum’s educational program.