WHEN: 

From 26 September to 13 February 2022. 

WHERE: 

Queens Musuem – New York (USA).

The Queens Museum is undertaking a Year of Uncertainty (YoU), a framework for strengthening connections among the Museum, our communities, and constituents, focused on creating new possibilities for culture, kinship, and mutual support. Centered around themes of Care, Repair, Play, Justice, and The Future, this program responds to hyperlocal and international states of precarity that have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the crises of inaction and unaccountability toward racial justice and xenophobia, climate reparations, and income disparity.

These public-facing presentations are scheduled to unfold and evolve over the course of three phases:

I. October 2021 — Participate & Build invites visitors to join the co-creation of projects in progress through public programming.

II. November-December 2021 — Engage & Experience highlights exhibitions and activations in their further developed state.

III. January 2022 — Synthesize & Reflect concludes the year of collective research and collaboration in an intensive public assembly, leading to new, flexible, working methods that will help us sustain and grow our commitments to culture, accessibility, and equity.

In this presentation, artist Mo Kong takes us into the not-so-distant future, introducing New Yorkool®️, a fictional Asian immigrant-owned consulting firm that offers survival solutions to Americans, post-ecological collapse. Emerging among the eerily familiar circumstances of environmental disaster and unprecedented economic and trade isolation, New Yorkool®️ capitalizes on vulnerable populations suffering from a lack of basic resources. Here in New York, residents are experiencing the hottest winter in history, and have limited access to locally produced fresh foods. New Yorkool®️ fulfills demand with its new-found methods, and In the process exploits and illuminates the most basic insecurities of our systems, and the ravaging inequities that emerge from their failures.

Showcasing these innovations is a central sculpture that will grow over the course of the exhibition timeframe. The work functions in part as a display case, and in part as a place to “rest”. Hardly relaxing, it follows the form of two overlapping graph lines that chart the rates of global natural disasters and international trade from 2009-2020, which are revealed to be nearly in sync. Its contents and the surrounding installation incorporate narrative, branding, and sculpture, with purchased, found, and cultivated organic matter. Scent is particularly highlighted, drawing from research on the history of xenophobia and culturally-linked odors. Together this multisensory experience reveals the dystopian intersection of capital, climate change and biopiracy, global migration, and self-identification that marks our present as much as our imminent future.