SITE Santa Fe Biennial
SITE Santa Fe
1606 Paseo de Peralta
July 9, 2006–January 7, 2007
Curated by Klaus Ottmann
While other biennials present grandiose curatorial themes and ballooning artists’ lists, Ottmann, a New York–based independent curator and scholar, pares down SITE Santa Fe for its sixth installment, enigmatically titled “Still Points of the Turning World,” to approximately forty works (none of which has ever been seen in the United States) by just thirteen international artists, including Jennifer Bartlett, Stephen Dean, Peter Doig, Jonathan Meese, Wangechi Mutu, and Carsten Nicolai. Primarily arranged in separate rooms by artist, the biennial is more than the sum of thirteen solo exhibitions, instead bringing out the works’ shared qualitieslike “intensity,” “visceral presence,” and “experimentation”evident everywhere from Patty Chang’s videos, which explore double-edged desires, to Wolfgang Laib’s organic sculptures, monumental in their simplicity.