If the Whitney Biennial takes the temperature of American art—and of the society that produces it—the cacophony of fragments, relics and semi-fictional or dystopian allusions in this edition captures the fractured sense of reality and dissociation defining the present moment, as the great narratives that once structured collective meaning appear increasingly distorted or dissolved. As if, in the irremediable unraveling and collapse of systems once perceived as stable—ideological, political, economic—all that remains is to contemplate the fragments and relics of a civilization approaching its own exhaustion. Hovering between horror and hallucination, this Biennial reflects an image of America, both for itself and for the world, defined by uncertainty, fragmentation and a shifting sense of reality and humanity.
Yet the response offered here is nothing overtly revolutionary or explicitly political. In an age of heightened scrutiny and institutional caution enforcing political correctness, artists—particularly in the U.S.—have learned to evoke contemporary tensions through indirect routes, working through allegory and symbolic displacement. As consensus culture becomes increasingly strained by systemic breakdown, the 2026 Whitney Biennial simply allows the collective shadows to emerge. The main gesture seems to be to acknowledge and show the fracture, the wound and the failure—and, from there, playfully engage with the self-created dystopia that follows or retreat into the intimacy of the private sphere, where space can still be carved out for care, kinship and personal connection despite the forces unraveling everything around us.
This year’s Whitney Biennial offers both paths, depending on where one begins. Starting on the sixth floor, Michelle Lopez’s immersive meditation on human-made disaster—presented in the form of a planetarium—immediately set the tone of the entire Biennial for me with its terrestrial system imploding and crumbling just above our heads. Its title, Pandemonium, also feels uncannily apt for describing everyday reality, particularly since the beginning of the year, amid a relentless news cycle of U.S. politics and rising geopolitical tensions offering little respite. News and images from around the world have never been more readily available than in today’s environment of information and data oversaturation, yet the world—and, by extension, human behavior—seems increasingly illegible, recalling Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality, in which representations begin to precede and reshape the real. Displayed on a circular screen overhead, this chaotic rumbling mix of animated imagery and swirling newspaper clippings becomes a destructive storm that perfectly reflects media overload, disinformation and environmental collapse.
In a climate where the question of “Americanness”—and what it even means to call something “American”—is becoming increasingly pressing as well as delicate, curating the eighty-second edition of the Biennial is a task few would eagerly take on. Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer have largely avoided overt political statements, and the same is true of most of the works on view. Yet a significant shift is already embedded in the intergenerational and international selection of 56 artists, duos and collectives, reflecting the idea of a “Greater United States.” Moving beyond the identity politics that dominated many recent institutional shows in the U.S., there is a clear effort here to widen the perspective and examine deeper historical layers of collective trauma that contributed to the by now widely acknowledged—and even instrumentalized—“uncertain, bitter and divided state of the nation.”
Artists from regions shaped by the global reach of U.S. power—from Afghanistan and Iraq to the Philippines and Vietnam, passing through Hawai‘i—bring this American art biennial into confrontation with the enduring consequences of U.S. imperialism. Their presence feels particularly resonant as new geopolitical tensions escalate during the very days of the exhibition’s opening, repeating many of the dynamics these artworks quietly bear witness to. Many works function almost like symptoms that echo an original trauma while revealing the prolonged malaise it has left behind, part of a historical process that seems suspended in time and space, with unresolved histories.
Right at the entrance, the grotesquely surreal paintings and more intimate, spontaneous drawings by Ali Eyal evoke the anxieties of war through the lens of childhood memory. The artist returns to a final moment of innocence, when his mother took him and his sisters to Baghdad’s largest amusement park shortly before the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003. Yet the specters of war creeps silently into the scene, emerging through shadows with an ominous presence of death. The entire composition shares a hallucinatory distortion recalling Goya’s The Disasters of War, suspended somewhere between nightmare and documentary.
War—the violence of our time—is often presented through this strategy of distortion, as if the trauma of systemic violence had ruptured perception itself and with it the very fabric of reality. This dynamic is particularly evident in Aziz Hazara’s Moon Sightings, where war imagery is abstracted through technological vision. These uncanny, vivid green and purple images derive from retinal scans and biometric data extracted from night-vision goggles often abandoned in conflict zones. Hazara examines the supply chains and afterlives of surveillance technologies produced during military occupations.
Yet the real question is probably: which reality are we looking at? Technological systems and mass media have inevitably altered the way we perceive the world. The technological dysmorphia and dystopia emerging from the increasingly volatile ambiguity between the physical and the digital—reshaping the way we orient ourselves, organize experience and process reality—becomes another recurring thread throughout the Biennial.
Similar dynamics unfold in Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s video installation Until We Became Fire and Fire Us, in which the artists explore the fluid narrative space opened by digital media. Drawing on fragments of footage related to the Gaza conflict, they reframe the spectral absence imposed by war imagery, transforming it into a layered assemblage of storytelling and sound. Through this process, the work almost alchemically converts the rhythms of destruction into more poetic, abstract and expansive narratives—reclaiming through the digital not only agency over images shaped by censorship or propaganda but also the possibility of resistance, life and creation in the face of tragedy.
Meanwhile, just in front of Hazara’s dazzling composition, a line of screens presents the digital abstract compositions of pioneering Palestinian-born, Tribeca-based artist Samia Halaby. Developed through early self-taught computer programming, these kinetic works transform streams of data into mesmerizing constellations of color and movement, revealing the underlying structure of contemporary images: strings of code and numbers that increasingly shape our unstable and malleable sense of reality.
Beyond Halaby, fully digital art has a limited presence in the Biennial, with the main exception of Leo Castaneda’s interactive simulation of a fictional ecosystem. Drawing on video game aesthetics and 3D modeling techniques, the Colombian-born, Miami-based artist incorporates paintings by his grandmother, Maria Thereza Negreiro, to construct a fantastical landscape of Colombian and Brazilian environments infused with Latin American surrealism. Visitors navigate this digital terrain—where myth and technology merge—attempting, like video game protagonists, to alter the course of a looming cataclysmic explosion or simply play within it.
Instead, it is more often a digital-physical mash-up and reshuffling—and the reorganization of the body within that space—that prevails throughout the exhibition, sometimes taking distinctly dystopian turns. Gabriela Ruiz’s centrifugal multimedia installation offers perhaps the most dramatic interpretation of this body-mind dysmorphia. Combining sculpture, surveillance footage and video projections, her Homo Machina takes the form of a life-size digital console functioning as a self-portrait. The work reflects the continuous negotiation between physical and digital identities as bodies increasingly perform within algorithmically driven systems that regulate visibility, labor and control.
On the fifth floor, Cooper Jacoby takes this inquiry further with works that explore how technological progress—and now A.I.—has reshaped not only our relationship to the body but also notions of intelligence and memory. Reused intercom systems activated through A.I. models trained on social media posts of deceased individuals begin to speak through simulated memories. Inspired by his discovery that insurance companies increasingly calculate one’s “biological age” through predictive algorithms, Jacoby’s installations Mutual Life (40.4 years) (2026) and Estate (January 21, 2016) (2024) force viewers into a confrontation—quite literally, as their reflective surfaces draw one into the work—with one of the most unsettling questions of our time: how artificial intelligence might replicate, simulate or even prolong aspects of human consciousness beyond the limits of the body itself.
Disjointed bodies and interrupted ecosystems reveal the fracture
The idea of disjointed, fractured, endlessly malleable bodies—dysmorphed and dismembered—recurs throughout the show, at times revealing in that very queerness the possibility of new forms of relation and collective becoming.
A particularly theatrical moment unfolds in the installation by Korean artist Young Joon Kwak, where an ensemble of fragments drawn from individual bodies expands and blends into a kaleidoscopic immersive environment, gradually coalescing into a collective body in space—much like the way individual presences dissolve into a shared rhythm when everyone moves together on a dance floor. Composed of casts taken from members of the artist’s queer and trans community in L.A. and paired with a musical score, the work unfolds as an ephemeral choreography that invites viewers to see themselves reflected in its mirrored surfaces. In doing so, it dissolves the boundaries between spectator and artwork, between the individual and the collective, turning the room into a rotating constellation of bodies—an ephemeral choreography of presence hinting at the possibility of an alternative, autonomous community suspended outside the usual societal dynamics.
This impulse to heal the fracture between the individual and the collective through a transpersonal embodied experience resurfaces elsewhere in the exhibition. A striking example is Malcolm Peacock’s installation Five of them were hers, and she carved shelters with windows into the backs of their skulls (2024), which reimagines a coastal redwood tree the artist encountered during repeated trips to the Pacific Northwest. Impressively composed of roughly 3,500 hand-braided strands completed over 10 months, the sculpture incorporates excerpts from the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X across its surface, weaving histories of struggle and resilience into a monumental yet deliberately constructed vision that seeks to reconnect the personal, the collective and the ancestral with the land. As Peacock has explained, the work also reflects on his relationship to the “Great Outdoors,” a social and ancestral infrastructure that has historically maintained a lack of Black presence. By using the labor-intensive braiding technique—known as a protective style—that he learned from his mother to interpret a redwood tree, whose strength depends on unseen interconnections, the artist raises questions about safety, protection, growth and the necessity of spiritual kinship when navigating unfamiliar environments.
The same power of kinship through shared struggle is also celebrated by the eccentric improvised altars of the self-described “street queen” Agosto Machado. On these shrines, collected objects and memorabilia honor the queer community that sustained him during the AIDS crisis, memorializing a network of care built in the face of loss. Because, as Lewis Mehl-Madrona reminds us, beyond any technique, it is relationships that heal.
Nour Mobarak’s visceral painterly embodiments appear to engage in a similar attempt to reconnect the self to a broader whole but from a far more primordial perspective. Hanging on the wall, these multicolored—often viscerally hued—three-dimensional plasmatic forms were created by casting the artist’s pregnant body in resin and mycelium. At once corporeal and otherworldly, these biomorphic surfaces collapse figuration and abstraction, body and image, presenting the body as both instrument and vehicle. A sound work recorded with a microphone placed inside the vaginal canal brings us even more viscerally into this reality, capturing the internal and external rhythms of life and celebrating a gestational creativity that weaves together the intimate, the biological and the collective pulse of existence. Reattuning to this embodied awareness can open space for greater presence, allowing interrupted relations to begin cohering again and activating the body’s own self-healing potential—perhaps the first step toward restoring a broader network of human and non-human relations.
In the same room, Andrea Fraser presents new, unexpectedly figurative works that seem to resonate quietly with Mobarak’s installation, their colors and tonal values subtly echoing one another across the space. That fragile harmony, however, is unsettled by the presence of seemingly lifeless grey sculptural embodiments of sleeping toddlers, which introduce a quiet dissonance. Their suspended stillness leaves the viewer caught between the shadow of tragedy and the innocence of the oneiric realm—a space where reality might still be imagined otherwise, perhaps even more truthfully than in the world outside.
When broken systems push relationality back to the self
This withdrawal and retreat into the personal sphere also recurs throughout the show, as if when the larger infrastructures fail, the only way to recover a form of authentic relationality is to begin again from the self—revisiting individual shadows and traumas while rediscovering a renewed acceptance of the other.
Particularly striking in this regard is the work of the young artist Taína H. Cruz, who mobilizes a kind of visual muscle memory to evoke childhood experiences shaped not only by personal recollection but also by the circulating imagery of contemporary visual culture. Pairing cartoon-like animations and drawings with strikingly empathetic hyperrealistic paintings, Cruz reflects a generation for whom images—edited, filtered and endlessly redistributed—have become the primary terrain through which both the world and the self are experienced.
Echoes of childhood trauma surface elsewhere on the floor in the haunting handcrafted toy suspended within Precious Okoyomon’s installation. Nearby, a more hopeful register emerges in Emilie Louise Gossiaux’s colorful ensemble of toy-like sculptures and delicate drawings—the first work encountered when beginning from the fifth floor, setting a completely different tone, at least at first glance. With just a few spontaneous lines and playful figures, Gossiaux stages narratives of human-animal relations that celebrate kinship and symbiotic interconnection grounded in reciprocal empathy and trust. Yet despite their apparent naiveté and lyricism, these images carry a quiet melancholy. As poet Ocean Vuong notes in conversation with the artist in the catalogue, the works appear infused with an elegiac awareness of the Anthropocene—its fragility rooted in the growing disconnection between humans, other species and the natural world. Beneath their lightness lies the suggestion of a deeper loss: the erosion of a transpersonal empathy that once bound humans to the living world. In an era marked by isolation and alienation, animals may remain among the last mediators of that lost relational bond capable of transcending the selfish opportunism of human systems.
When ecosystems fracture and infrastructures begin to crack
This fracture, with any original or ancestral sense of interspecies relationality, resurfaces throughout the exhibition, where interrupted ecosystems and strained infrastructures mirror the disjunction unfolding in the individual body and psyche.
While the Biennial’s usual spectacle of monumental immersive installations is notably restrained in this edition, Colombian artist Oswaldo Maciá’s Requiem for the Insects stands out as a poetically and symbolically powerful exception. Set against paintings loosely modeled on eighteenth-century naturalists’ field sketches, Maciá constructs a multisensory environment that evokes the growing silence left by the disappearance of insect life. Visitors are enveloped in a sonic composition unfolding across 16 audio channels from glass megaphones spiraling down from the ceiling, only to be abruptly punctuated by the sharp sound of shattering glass—an unsettling reminder of the now seemingly irreparable rupture between humanity and nature, as any once-symbiotic ecological balance appears already broken.
In the next gallery, facing the Hudson River, Sarah M. Rodriguez’s aluminum casts of natural objects attempt to reattune viewers to a nonhuman temporal register. Beginning with elements such as seed pods—forms that hold the promise of latent growth—Rodriguez’s practice deliberately follows the slower rhythms of ecological time, offering a quiet counterpoint to accelerated overproduction and resource extraction.
This tension between the circular rhythms of natural systems and the human-forced acceleration that disrupts them—along with the vital interdependence linking these processes—finds a striking representation in Akira Ikezoe’s diagrammatic paintings of interspecies material and energetic exchange. His compositions unfold as imagined circular systems in which different forces—solar energy, nuclear power and organic matter—circulate according to their own speculative logic. While Ikezoe does not frame his practice as explicitly political, his work inevitably absorbs the historical anxieties of its context, having grown up in a Japan still marked by the trauma of nuclear catastrophe. Yet his whimsical diagrams of frogs or humanoid figures bustling within these circuits retain the playful dimension of fables and allegories, quietly registering the tension between natural cycles and the technological forces that increasingly distort them.
On the same floor, Erin Jane Nelson’s ceramic ensembles similarly expose the instability and fragmentation that define the Anthropocene, suggesting not so much scattered remnants of an ecosystem as the growing impossibility of representing nature as a coherent whole. Hovering somewhere between artifact and organism, glass elements and found materials—evoking shells, roots, insects and other organic traces—merge into tactile compositions that foreground processes of growth, decay and transformation, pointing toward the fragile and increasingly interrupted symbiotic infrastructures that once sustained ecological balance.
Meanwhile, Sula Bermudez-Silverman stages a tense dialogue between delicate hand-blown glass forms and rusted iron animal traps. The biomorphic shapes evoke bodies compressed within imposed structures, their fragile equilibrium suggesting a latent violence quietly embedded in the precarious balance between organic forms and the artificial mechanisms designed to capture or destroy them.
Almost hidden within the museum’s staircase, System’s Void by Sung Tieu reveals the invisible code-based infrastructures quietly shaping contemporary life. Signals from Hazardous Gas Systems monitoring fracking wells across the U.S. are amplified through a large pipe in the museum’s central staircase and accompanied by projections of chemical classification codes. Normally confined to technical infrastructures that remain imperceptible to the public, Tieu’s installation translates these warning data into vibration and sound—frequencies of environmental risk momentarily made tangible.
This tension—produced by the pressure and opacity of the structures of power and the infrastructures that contain them—runs throughout the exhibition, recalling systems we mostly notice only when they stop working and begin to fracture. Between disarmament and unease, if the Biennial’s “feral” works, as Guerrero describes them, succeed in making viewers feel something, it is the sensation of infrastructures approaching their limits. The exhibition traces the legacies of empire and the political, social, legal, technological and energetic systems that organize contemporary life even as many of these structures begin to reveal their cracks.
Reclaiming ancestral traces in the remnants
Most of the artists here seem to be engaging precisely with the remains of this historical fracture, contemplating what survives when any sense of individual, ancestral or collective continuity has been disrupted. In this sense, the works often appear less concerned with proposing solutions than with acknowledging this condition, engaging with it as a necessary process of self-awareness and consciousness—an attempt to recognize one’s own place within the collective trauma field as the first step toward lessening the accumulated burden of suffering and intergenerational trauma.
Perhaps this is why Raven Halfmoon’s totemic presences appear almost alchemically transformed under the pressure of the present atmosphere. Drawing on the coil technique her ancestors, the Caddo people, have employed for thousands of years, the artist channels this traditional knowledge into sculptural forms that seem to liquefy and expand, embodying a presence at once ancient and newly reactivated.
Trying to weave together a lost connection with the ancestral and a distant past, with all its painful threads, the works of Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien unfold a layered visual history of the Philippines and its complex colonial entanglements. In works such as Social Volcano (heavy clouds) and Flame Garden (bruised), organic local materials—beeswax, abaca pulp, bagasse (sugarcane fiber), banana stalk, cilantro, coconut, cogon grass, fennel, algae and seashells—symbiotically blend with delicate watercolors. Emerging from the artists’ research into resistance movements in the Philippines, particularly those connected to farming and land rights, these collages bear witness, in their very materiality, to the Philippines as an agricultural country and to the realities this has historically entailed: food insecurity, landlessness and social inequality. The colonial past reappears as both ghost and enduring presence within a now-syncretic visual language: an ex voto emerges in one work while a larger altarpiece draws on the format of devotional Catholic retablos to reflect more than a century of U.S. colonial involvement alongside Filipino worker and peasant resistance. Scenes range from a 1901 uprising during the Philippine-American War to the 2025 crash of a U.S. spy plane that killed a water buffalo in a rural province. Handmade processes themselves become a form of resistance to cultural and identitarian erasure, even as they acknowledge identities that are now deeply hybrid.
This form of “ancestral resourcing”—a creative reappropriation and resignification of the few remaining traces of identity and tradition—also appears in Teresa Baker’s abstract assemblages of fragmented textiles that evoke expansive natural landscapes. A related impulse emerges in Kimowan Metchewais’s photographs, which perform what the artist describes as a “self-made Native imagery,” operating between the abstract and the poetic as rituals intended to reactivate a connection with the ancestral.
From these works emerges a dominant poetics of relics—remnants, detritus, what remains after successive forces of occupation, extraction and destruction have passed. This condition becomes particularly evident in Kainoa Gruspe’s fragments of rock, stone and plant matter gathered from landscapes reshaped by military bases, golf courses and resort developments in Hawai‘i. The artist “rescues” these materials and transforms them into sculptural doorstops that anchor his paintings—objects that metaphorically hold the door open to future actions while simultaneously confronting the extractive relationship between the U.S. and Hawai‘i and the erasure of its original heritage.
This poetics of remnants, however, also raises a broader question. The prevalence of works constructed from poor or repurposed elements—often visibly fragile or improvised in their material execution—may operate symbolically, but it also points to the conditions under which artists in the U.S. are now working. In many cases, the reliance on such materials seems less a purely aesthetic decision than a reflection of the economic realities shaping artistic production today, where the rising costs of space, fabrication and labor increasingly constrain the scale of artistic ambition.
It is understandable that in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the present, the grand utopian gestures of earlier avant-gardes feel difficult to sustain. Yet this aspect—strikingly absent from many other reviews so far, even though writing about a Biennial should also involve examining the material conditions of art making—points to deeper economic and sociological tensions embedded in the American cultural system itself: the widening gap between cultural and financial capital, the growing precariousness of artistic labor and perhaps not least the gradual disappearance of artisanal infrastructures capable of supporting more complex production. Something that artists in many parts of Europe and Asia can still obviate, relying on locally embedded traditions of craft and technical knowledge—forms of collective expertise that continue to sustain materially ambitious practices.
Confronting the shadow of the present
What becomes increasingly clear is that the roughness—and sometimes outright ugliness—of many works in the Biennial deliberately brings to the surface a host of demons haunting the present moment. Several pieces evoke a dark emotional register closer to the Gothic grotesque where social anxieties and historical violence resurface in distorted, unsettling forms.
This attack on the specters of the American dream and its model is visible in works such as Ignacio Gatica’s Sanhattan—which draws on the financial district of Santiago, Chile, built shortly after Augusto Pinochet’s violent U.S.-backed dictatorship and intentionally designed to resemble Manhattan—but it emerges even more explicitly in Satan in America and Other Invisible Evils: Experiments / Experimentos de escultura pública (Public Sculpture: Demon, Splay) (2026) by Isabelle Frances McGuire. Drawing on the imagery of the Salem witch trials, the installation’s three burning witch bodies conjure a vision of persecution and paranoia that feels uncannily contemporary. The title itself says enough, suggesting a nation perpetually haunted by the invisible forces it has historically tried to suppress or exile.
In the same days I was reflecting on this Biennial and writing this review, I happened to finish reading Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal Our Trauma—and Our World by Thomas Hübl. Its title alone could almost serve as a fitting subtitle for the exhibition. Hübl’s work focuses on collective trauma and its transmission through societies, insisting that trauma is never purely individual but stored within the social body itself. Historical events—wars, slavery, genocide and colonization—leave unprocessed emotional residues that become embedded in institutions, cultural narratives and patterns of interpersonal behavior. When these wounds remain unacknowledged, trauma repeats across generations through cycles of violence, denial and fragmentation. As Hübl writes, “Not to address the hidden wounds of the collective human body is to place our planet further in peril and the survival of our own species at grave risk.”
To simultaneously feel and witness these wounds—first as individuals and then within a shared collective process—may be the only way to begin integrating and metabolizing at least some portion of this accumulated trauma energy. Confronting the ruins becomes a conscious first step in the long process of healing.
There is, of course, much more to say and process about this Biennial, which requires multiple visits. Yet the key is that by grounding itself around the notion of relationality, the exhibition succeeds in openly exposing—making us feel and witness—the chaotic disorientation and fragmented nature of an America confronting its own meaning and contradictions barely 250 years after its founding, as much as the broader Western systems upon which it was built.
What emerges is a portrait of a civilization living amid systemic fracture where bodies, ecosystems, infrastructures and historical narratives all register the same broken condition. And all the attempts at kinship and healing throughout the Biennial ultimately reveal unresolved—and perhaps unresolvable—tensions between its many parts: fragments of a fractured American narrative that can no longer be reconciled into a single image but persist instead as scattered relics. Yet this deep sense of disorientation that many feel today—personally, nationally and globally, as if estranged from the very systems that organize our lives—is precisely what demands a new level of human collaboration and reattunement.
As Hübl suggests, trauma freezes and fragments past and present experience, storing and continuously reviving parts of life in the shadows until they can safely return to consciousness. Healing requires what he describes as a “liquification” of trauma across three intertwined dimensions—the individual, the ancestral and the collective—all of which seem to be activated simultaneously throughout the Biennial.
And yet it may be precisely within this moment of historical fracture and implosion that the possibility of reinvention and regeneration emerges. Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena) on the terrace becomes a powerful statement of this hope. Created after the Eaton Fire in California in January 2025 destroyed the artist’s home and studio, the work reconstructs the chimney that remained standing after the fire, rebuilt in luminous glass brick alongside the walkway that once led to the house. Echoing the ancient mythic insight that every origin story also carries within it a story of ruin—and vice versa—the fire itself, even in its devastation, opens a cathartic space from which something entirely new might begin, suggesting that destruction may become the precondition for renewal. In this sense, the ruins of the present moment that the artists are creatively engaging with might already resemble what German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin once described as the debris of progress.
