The Armory Show Announces Platform 2021

The Armory Show has announced artists and galleries featured in Platform, one of the core curated sections of the fair dedicated to large-scale artworks installed throughout the halls of the Javits Center, The Armory Show's new permanent home. The 2021 edition of Platform, entitled Can you hear the fault lines breathing?, is curated by Claudia Schmuckli, Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It features works by internationally renowned artists Diana Al-Hadid, Benny Andrews, Julian Charrière, Tau Lewis, Grayson Perry, Michael Rakowitz, Cammie Staros, and Yinka Shonibare CBE.

The artists in the 2021 edition of Platform present a range of positions that, each in their own way, speak to the urgent need to define aesthetic models to effectively tackle divisive issues of social injustice, cultural identity, and global relations. The program will feature eight large-scale installations that propose modes of address grounded in research and propelled by empathy that will allow visitors to negotiate the unsettling conditions that define our current reality.

"In a world in the grip of climate change and haunted by biological and social viruses that ae decimating populations and dividing societies, this year's Platform seeks to capture the breadth of the fault lines that currently define our experience of existence," says curator Claudia Schmuckli. "I hope the works featured in Platform offer strategies of overcoming and healing that provoke dialogue about new models of care for the self, each other and the planet we call home. I look forward to seeing these pieces at the Armory Show's new home at the Javits Center, an exciting venue to experience large-scale works and provide space for these conversations."

Presentation details:

Diana Al-Hadid upends a classical aesthetic to create sculptures that teeter between ruin and regeneration, erosion, and growth. Her new work, Self-referential (2021), presented by Galleri Brandstrup (Oslo), marks the culmination of a series of sculptures dedicated to the trope of the female nude in repose. While previous iterations feature a single headless figure in allusion to women's traditional place in art and society, Self-referential merges two bodies into one. Connected at the neck, the stacked figures create an hourglass shape that finally puts this antiquated trope to rest and allows for a new conception of the figure to emerge.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (New York) presents Circle (1973) by Benny Andrews, a haunting monumental painting confronting white myths about Black Americans, in particular men, that have perpetuated racial injustice in the United States. Circle is the third of six works conceived in view of the American Bicentennial in 1976. Afraid that national celebrations would omit voices from the Black community, Andrew's created his "Bicentennial Series" to counter the heroic narrative of white exceptionalism with the trauma of lived experience that is as true today as it was in 1973.

Questioning the validity of the concept of national identity and the nation state is We Are All Astronauts (2011-2021) by French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière. Co-presented by DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM (Berlin) and Sean Kelly (New York), it is an installation composed of world globes stripped clean of their geographic information. Inspired by writing of Buckminster Fuller, each globe features maps from 1890-2011 that have been sanded away. Dust created by the abrasion gently settles beneath the globes, creating new, yet to be defined cartographies for a world in which drawn territories are increasingly rendered unbounded.

Yinka Shonibare CBE's Material (SG) I, presented by James Cohan (New York), is part of a series (or, as the artist calls them, "generations") of wind sculptures that explore the notion of harnessing motion and freezing it in a moment of time. Equating the movement of wind with the movement of people, Shonibare speaks of them as natural metaphors for migration. However, their bright pattern of reds and greens based on the type of Dutch wax textile that has become a signature of the artist's work also connects them to the discourse around the constructed nature of cultural identity and global interdependency that has been at the core of Shonibare's work for decades.

Victoria Miro (London) presents Grayson Perry's Very Large Very Expensive Abstract Painting (2020) inspired by his documentary broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK in September 2020, in which the artist travelled across the US on a custom-built motorbike he designed especially for the journey. Perry spent time with different communities across the US exploring the different political and cultural fault lines in American society today and asking what might be done to overcome these fissures.

Michael Rakowitz is one of several artists who imagine a restorative future through looking at the past. The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Room F, Section 1, Northwest Palace of Nimrud (2019) presented by Jane Lombard Gallery (New York) recreates stone carved panels from a banquet hall in the historic Palace of Nimrud that were destroyed by ISIS or went "missing" in vibrant collages of middle eastern food packaging. While addressing the longstanding conflict within the Middle East, it also aims to engage with a history of the region that goes beyond the prevailing narrative of conflict to create a diasporic historical continuity that points toward a more survivable intersectional future.

While Rakowitz highlights concrete historical events and artifacts in need of cultural preservation, Cammie Staros's fascination with artworks from the Greco-Roman period lies in how those objects have come to represent Western art and civilization. Presented by Shulamit Nazarian, Come to Pass (2021) is a totemic sculpture comprised of stacked hand-built vessels that marry ancient ceramic techniques with modern industrial materials. It is exemplary of the artist's turn to antique vessels as carriers of mythologies of gender, desire, and violence constitutive for the Western imagination, which she reframes in anthropomorphic compositions to reflect on the constructed condition of histories and societies.

Opus (The Ovule) (2020), is part of a series of soft sculptures and environments that define Tau Lewis's utopian universe called T.A.U.B.I.S. Lewis's works originate in the collection of found materials that map the artist's close relations and gesture toward cultural signifiers of community and shared belongings. Lewis describes Opus (The Ovule) as "the power source of consciousness" of a fictional realm defined by abundance, safety, and justice. Presented by Night Gallery (Los Angeles), the work conjures the fantastical and the familiar simultaneously, invoking traditions of the imagination that have been passed through generations.