We are delighted to announce that Mary Kelly is included in Whitney Biennial 2024, ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’.
For Whitney Biennial 2024, Kelly presents ‘Lacunae’, the first section of a new six-part body of work, evoking the incremental sense of loss that shapes the subjectivity of later life, a subject that is too often ignored. She describes how the new work loops back to Post-Partum Document as a kind of bookend to her life’s work and as a witness to the evolving politics of her generation of feminists.
For more than six decades, Mary Kelly’s project-based practice has addressed questions of sexuality, identity, and historical memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations. Her most ambitious and influential artwork, Post-Partum Document (1973-79), presented at the ICA London in 1976, caused outrage in the tabloid media due to its display of ‘dirty nappies’. The various parts of Post-Partum Document, a six-year diaristic exploration of the mother and child relationship, are held in the collections of Tate, London; Arts Council Collection, UK; Art Gallery of Ontario; Kunsthaus Zürich; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
Kelly has previously been included in the 1991 and 2004 editions of the Whitney Biennial.
The Biennial is curated by Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, and Meg Onli, Curator at Large, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes. The performance program is organised by Iles and Onli, with guest curator Taja Cheek. The film program is organised by Iles and Onli, with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker.
