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Queens Museum
Queens International 2016 is the seventh iteration of the biannual exhibition held by New York's Queens Museum, which highlights artists living or working in the borough. Organized by the museum's director of exhibitions Hitomi Iwasaki and guest curator Lindsey Berfond, this year's edition features 34 artists and collectives, a quarter of which comprises artists with East Asian or Middle Eastern backgrounds. Dealing with the theme of "thresholds," the exhibition is a timely meditation on the way various spaces relate to one another, and the borders between them that provide means of contact, exchange and transgression. Expanding beyond physical spaces, the show also features artists defying conventional narratives and disciplines within their work.
Iranian artist Shadi Harouni's video The Lightest of Stones and the Heaviest of Men (2015) is a whimsical yet poignant work portraying the artist's attempt to "carve" through a pumice quarry, in an isolated mountain of Iranian Kurdistan, with her bare hands. While she is doing this, with her back facing the audience, in the foreground are...