Since its inauguration in 2002, Queens International has highlighted the contemporary cultural production of Queens in a single major group exhibition approximately every two years. Queens International 2018: Volumes forms a dialog among forty-three Queens-connected artists representing 15 neighborhoods and several generations, including, for the first time, artists who have exhibited in earlier Internationals. In 2018, also for the first time, Queens International includes a partnership with the Queens Library.

The subtitle Volumes encompasses many historical and current meanings of the word. Artists respond to the entire museum and select Queens Library branches, questioning and expanding systems of knowledge production and their effects on how we become and order who we are. What aspects of the past are constructed within and because of libraries and museums? What limits and possibilities do they present spatially, temporally, and virtually, today? Artists in QI 2018 are working through abstraction, chance operations, the transformation of found materials, and the construction of new archives along with other strategies to pose profound and multiple questions about centuries- or decades- old human systems, algorithmically-generated realities, and possibilities for selfhood.

While Volumes marks an expansive presence in both the Queens Museum and Queens Library branches, its interventions are largely non-monumental, positioned rather for speculation and dialog with these sites, its publics, and beyond. Together, they form a complex array of contemporary artistic thought and conversation with which the visitor is invited to engage.
Damali Abrams, Haley Bueschlen, Gabo Camnitzer, Emmy Catedral, Camel Collective (Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats), U. Kanad Chakrabarti, Jesse Chun, Oscar Rene Cornejo, Chris Domenick, Brian Droitcour and Christine Wong Yap, ray ferreira, Christina Freeman, Milford Graves, Janet Henry, Kim Hoeckele, Camille Hoffman, Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips, Qiren Hu, Juan Iribarren, Paolo Javier and David Mason, Peter Kaspar, Patrick Killoran, Ernesto Klar, Essye Klempner, Mo Kong, Ani Liu, Umber Majeed, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Gloria Maximo, Asif Mian, Wardell Milan, Beatrice Modisett, Arthur Ou, KT Pe Benito, Gabriela Salazar, Raycaster (Ziv Schneider and ~shirin anlen), Jaret Vadera, Mary A. Valverde, Cullen Washington Jr., Jack Whitten
Both the Queens International 2018: Volumes catalogue, designed by Bryce Wilner, and the exhibition website, developed by artist Ryan Kuo with research support and motion graphics from Taekeun Kim, consider applications of the term "volumes" in relation to their respective media as a means to illuminate the disjuncture between systems and embodied experience. Both contain short interviews with contributing artists, who the curators asked to describe processes leading up to their work in the show; what a viewer might not see immediately in the work; and overall feelings toward "volumes" as a concept. Text co-developed by the curators and edited by Queens Museum Curator and publications co-editor Larissa Harris is also included.

This website adapts materials used internally for the process of planning the show, including architectural floor plans of the Queens Museum and the 3D exhibition model of Volumes developed by Queens Museum Exhibition Production Manager John Wanzel. The resulting site creates an alternative experience of Volumes by organizing the digital realm's approximation of 3D space on a 2D plane (the table). The website officially launched in July 2018, offering a "preview" of QI 2018, and continued to grow alongside the exhibition until November 2018.
Taking "volumes" as a cue, the website grid attempts to flatten the voices and bodies in QI 2018 onto a universal screen. This is a failure by design. The computer tirelessly garbles the text while fragments of the museum architecture and virtual walkthroughs of the galleries give form to truths, half-truths, and algorithmic untruths about the promises of a biennial. The HTML table beneath the grid is an extension of my web project Tables of Content, which examined containment and white space in online publishing, and is deployed here in the spirit of organizing and indexing material. The artistic aim of the website is to depict an entity, like a museum biennial, that merges art and logistics.

To create the
Volumes logo, I simulated a digital volume hitting a wall in a game engine. There was no design process. Instead, the collision was improvised during a curatorial meeting and drawn in real-time as the computer traced the movement of my mouse. Like this website, the logo is a record of an event whose many layers emerge gradually, if at all.
—Ryan Kuo
Taking "volumes" as a cue, the website grid attempts to flatten the voices and bodies in QI 2018 onto a universal screen. This is a failure by design. The computer tirelessly garbles the text while fragments of the museum architecture and virtual walkthroughs of the galleries give form to truths, half-truths, and algorithmic untruths about the promises of a biennial. The HTML table beneath the grid is an extension of my web project Tables of Content, which examined containment and white space in online publishing, and is deployed here in the spirit of organizing and indexing material. The artistic aim of the website is to depict an entity, like a museum biennial, that merges art and logistics.

To create the
Volumes logo, I simulated a digital volume hitting a wall in a game engine. There was no design process. Instead, the collision was improvised during a curatorial meeting and drawn in real-time as the computer traced the movement of my mouse. Like this website, the logo is a record of an event whose many layers emerge gradually, if at all.  —Ryan Kuo
In a similar vein, the publication addresses and exploits the inherently volumetric architecture of bookmaking in order to allow readers to navigate it in multiple and idiosyncratic ways—the way that one might wander through the open, nonlinear floor plan of the Queens Museum, or move from section to section in a library, encountering the unexpected along the way. The publication comprises content developed for the website, and its launch was timed with the opening of the QI 2018 installations at Queens Library branches in November 2018. This catalogue, a volume in at least two senses of the word, uses the space of the press sheet to evenly, separately distribute text and image throughout its pages. Each of the eight press sheets has been printed such that all of the full-color photograph pages occupy one side of the press sheet, and all of the black text pages occupy the reverse. Text and image come together only after the sheets have been folded down, trimmed, and bound. As the texts are organized alphabetically by name and the photographs are arranged to resemble a gallery walkthrough, the reader reads twice.  —Bryce Wilner This catalogue, a volume in at least two senses of the word, uses the space of the press sheet to evenly, separately distribute text and image throughout its pages. Each of the eight press sheets has been printed such that all of the full-color photograph pages occupy one side of the press sheet, and all of the black text pages occupy the reverse. Text and image come together only after the sheets have been folded down, trimmed, and bound. As the texts are organized alphabetically by name and the photographs are arranged to resemble a gallery walkthrough, the reader reads twice.
—Bryce Wilner
QI 2018: Volumes is organized by Queens Museum Assistant Curator Sophia Marisa Lucas with New York-based performance artist Baseera Khan, working closely with Queens Museum Exhibition Production Manager John Wanzel, and additional collaborators at the Queens Museum and Queens Library. The exhibition website and web-based catalogue accompanying QI 2018 is co-edited by Queens Museum Curator Larissa Harris, with design concept and development by Queens-based artist Ryan Kuo.

Queens Museum is dedicated to presenting the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the uniquely international residents of Queens. In November 2013, the Queens Museum completed an expansion that doubled its size to 105,000 square feet. The expansion provides an additional 50,000 square feet of space, including a suite of new galleries, artist studios, flexible public and special event spaces, education classrooms, a café, back-of-house facilities and visitor amenities. This light-filled new space, designed by Grimshaw Architects, exemplifies the Museum's commitment to openness, inclusion, community partnership and the diverse communities of New York City. A second phase of the project will bring a branch of the Queens Library into the Queens Museum.

Queens Library's mission is to meet the needs of the community by offering lifelong learning opportunities and ensuring there is a positive impact in the community. Queens Library fulfills its goals by embracing innovation and change. With a history of offering pioneering programs that meet the diverse needs of the most diverse county in the US. The Queens Library serves 2.3 million people from 65 locations. It circulates among the highest numbers of books and other library materials in the country.
QI 2018 is made possible in part by support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Agnes Gund, and the American Chai Trust. Exhibitions at the Queens Museum receive significant support from Ford Foundation. Major funding for the Queens Museum is generously provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, Lambent Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, and the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc.