NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art and Hyundai Motor Company present the next Hyundai Terrace Commission by Marina Zurkow. Presented on the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace, Zurkow’s The River is a Circle marks the Museum’s second Hyundai Terrace Commission, part of a 10-year partnership between Hyundai Motor and the Whitney, and will be on view from April 9, 2025 through early 2026.

Created in collaboration with James Schmitz and Blake Goble, this innovative work by Zurkow comprises an animation and accompanying installation. The River is a Circle builds on the artist’s previous pieces, Hudson Follies (2022) and Does the River Flow Both Ways? (2022), which offer a split view of the Hudson River, allowing visitors to simultaneously observe the world above and below the water. 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 references to hyperlocal community history, barges with historical scenes traveling along the water, schools of fish, and oyster reefs. The dynamic elements of this ecosystem are driven by algorithmic probability. Responding to real-time weather, the software system continuously reflects New York City’s current conditions and seasons.

Focusing on the Meatpacking District surrounding the Whitney Museum, The River is a Circle explores a combination of local history and river ecology, researched with the help of Hudson River Park Trust. This site-specific work alludes to significant moments that have impacted the Manhattan neighborhood’s evolution, such as the Lenape trading post located nearby, the meatpacking industry, the illicit night life of the 1970s, gentrification, and the adjacent installations by artists Gordon Matta-Clark and David Hammons. The artist intends to speculate on a circular economy and a potentially positive return to more modest strategies of maintaining ecosystems.

“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 sustainable futures in the environmental, economic, and social domains,” said DooEun Choi, Art Director of Hyundai Motor Company. “Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle 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.”

Hyundai Terrace Commission: Marina Zurkow: The River is a Circle is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant.

The Hyundai Terrace Commission enables annual site-specific installations on the Museum’s largest outdoor gallery, offering an innovative platform for artists to experiment, respond to the space and the neighborhood, and showcase their work to the world. The commissions will encompass installations, sculpture, performances, and multimedia projects. In addition to the Hyundai Terrace Commission, Hyundai Motor also supports the Whitney Biennial, presented every other year, aligning the brand with the Whitney’s most groundbreaking and signature presentation of the leading contemporary American art of our day.

Marina Zurkow (b. 1962) invites people to explore ways of knowing and feeling nature-culture tensions and environmental messes. By engaging research, speculation, and technologies, she fosters intimate multispecies and geophysical connections. Zurkow works as a founding member of the collaborative initiatives More&More (Investing in Futures), Dear Climate, and Climoji. Recent exhibitions include WHAT IF? at MoMA’s Creativity Lab (New York); Antroposcenes, Lo Pati Centre d'Art (Amposta); The Breath Eaters, Wolfsonian Museum (Miami); Underfoot/Overhead, Wasserman Projects (Detroit); and Can the Substrate Speak? at Festival Art Souterrain (Montreal). Her work has also been shown at SFMOMA; Walker Art Center; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts. Zurkow was a 2022 fellow at the Environmental Media Lab, Princeton University; and received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Rice University, NYFA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Creative Capital. She resides in the Hudson Valley, New York, is represented by bitforms gallery, and teaches at NYU.