What effect does a superpower like America have seen from the outside? To answer this question, the Whitney Museum has called upon forty seven artists and film directors from around the world. Meanwhile, Lawrence Rinder, curator of contemporary art for the New York museum, has travelled extensively in Australian, Brazil, China, Columbia, Cuba, Europe, Mexico, South Korea and many other countries.

From the works selected, all carried out from the nineties onwards, in other words when the US began its rapid ascent to single global superpower, it emerges how much the continent of the stars and stripes affects, in one way or another, the everyday life of everyone around the world, even though maintaining their own vision with reactions and results which could not be more different.

For some, what prevails is admiration for a country that remains the representation of the dream of freedom and democracy, such as Congo artist Bodys Isek Kingelez who imagines Manhattan in the year 3021 as a land of abundance and possibilities. For others instead, contemporary events have more importance, military and industrial power, the treatment of minorities and immigrants, increasing consumerism, the judiciary system. Such is the case with Pakistani artist Saira Wasim who with a series of miniatures, captures the ambiguity and irony of the paternal relationship between the US and Pakistan.

“This exhibition”, explains Rinder “aspires to neither objectivity nor comprehensiveness. Rather it begins to give shape to an emerging historical phenomenon, a phenomenon that we are calling the American Effect”.

until 12.10.2003
American Effect. Global Perspectives on the United States, 1990-2003
https://www.whitney.org