Always, Already, Haunting, "Disss-co," Haunt

Julie Dash, Minnie Evans, Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Green-Wood Cemetery, shawné michaelain holloway, Nina Howell Starr, Asif Mian, Guadalupe Rosales, Mariana Valencia, Julie Tolentino, The Whitney Archives, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Always, Already, Haunting, "Disss-co," Haunt explores the affective and political potential of haunting against a backdrop of cultural institutions that are ever more eager to represent certain types of "fugitive" bodies. The exhibition understands haunting as a representational illogic, or a way of rejecting the production of convenient and easily read linear narratives that are too often ghosted by particular omissions, absences, and historic violences. Through a focus on collective memory, and alternative archival practices, Always, Already, Haunting, "Disss-co," Haunt lingers alongside those events or bodies who continue to demand attention, foregrounding the inevitability of returns and the necessity of redress. The artists, writers, and curators in this show engage notions of embodiment that complicate the assumed clarity of mourning and rejoicing, presence and absence, and posit the importance of desire and pleasure.

Curated by Nia Nottage, Gwyneth Shanks, and Simon Wu, Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (ISP).