NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art and Hyundai Motor Company present the next Hyundai Terrace Commission by Marina Zurkow. The artwork The River is a Circle will be on view on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace from April 2025 through early 2026.
Shown on a large-scale video wall, The River is a Circle is an animation based on custom software that depicts a complex river ecosystem of fluctuating social and biological groups, such as traveling vessels, schools of fish, and oyster reefs. The animation, accompanied by an installation, offers a split view of the Hudson River, revealing the world above and below the water. Driven by algorithmic probability and real-time climate and tide data from the Hudson River estuary, the software continuously reflects New York City’s current weather conditions.
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This innovative work by Marina Zurkow, in collaboration with James Schmitz and Blake Goble, marks the Museum’s second Hyundai Terrace Commission, a newly imagined annual site-specific installation project supported by Hyundai Motor as part of a multiyear partnership. The 10-year partnership between the Whitney and Hyundai Motor expands a shared commitment to presenting the most relevant art and ideas of our time and opening up discussions for audiences worldwide.
“Marina’s work has consistently engaged with the complexities of ecosystems in a poetic way, and the Whitney Museum’s fifth-floor terrace is a prime location for her site-specific exploration of local waterways and history,” said Whitney Curator of Digital Art Christiane Paul. “Her installation will invite visitors to see the museum in the multilayered context of its environment.”
“We are at a crucial moment in which we must devise an integrated approach to exploring sustainability in the environmental, economic, and social domains,” said DooEun Choi, Art Director of Hyundai Motor Company. “The upcoming Hyundai Terrace Commission will introduce us to an ever-changing ecosystem that our interconnected surroundings generate in real time, triggering us to take collective action for a shared future.”
Marina Zurkow is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections, researching “wicked problems” like invasive species, superfund sites, and petroleum interdependence. She has used life science, bio materials, animation, dinners and software technologies to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents. Her work spans gallery installations and unconventional public participatory projects. Currently, she is working on connecting toxic urban waterways to oceans, and researching the tensions between maritime ecology and the ocean’s primary human use as a capitalist Pangea.
Recent solo shows include Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, bitforms gallery, NY, Montclair Museum of Art, and Diverseworks, Houston, and exhibitions at Sundance New Frontiers, FACT, Liverpool, SFMOMA, Walker Art Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Wave Hill, NY, and the National Museum for Women in the Arts. She has collaborated with Social Science and Humanities scholars at Rice University, New York University, and the University of Minnesota. Zurkow is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and received grants from NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She is a full time faculty member at ITP / Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and is represented by bitforms gallery.
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