Julio Torres was out scouting for a lunch spot one day last summer with the performance artist Martine Gutierrez when she paused and took him aside. “I have the Whitney on the phone,” Torres recalled Gutierrez saying to him.
“I pulled him by his backpack into an alley,” added Gutierrez, who joined Torres on a recent Zoom call. Gutierrez and Torres, an Emmy-nominated screenwriter known for his surrealist comedy, had been invited to take part in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, the prestigious exhibition periodically surveying contemporary American artistry.
The Brooklyn-based duo accepted the offer and, roughly a year later, will be putting on a characteristically bizarre performance about a New York City sea wench who stumbles upon a smartphone and unlocks a whole new world. It’s like an ultra-modern “Little Mermaid.” The show, called “Marina,” will be staged once an evening from August 27-30 on Little Island, the 2.4-acre floating park on the Hudson River.
“Marina” marks the rare occasion on which the Biennial will take place outside the literal institution. “Bringing the Biennial beyond the walls of the Museum … marks a watershed moment in the history of this long-running exhibition,” co-curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer said in a statement.
The story stems from Gutierrez’s “lifelong fascination with mermaids,” according to Torres, who added, “I myself have been a fan of that lore as well, and the idea of being from somewhere else and not belonging. Someone has to write some sort of dissertation on queerness and mermaids.” (He clarified, however, that Marina is not a mermaid but an “under-the-sea creature very much in the lineage of a mermaid.”)
Fans of Torres, a former “Saturday Night Live” writer who went on to co-create the HBO horror-comedy series “Los Espookys” and direct the A24 film “Problemista,” might find the Whitney Biennial to be an unusual forum for his work. But the sea wench shares the outlandishness of characters he has written in the past for Gutierrez, such as an impaled beauty queen in “Los Espookys” or a performance artist-turned-agent in HBO’s “Fantasmas.” (Torres wrote and directed “Marina” based on a story he envisioned with Gutierrez, who will star in the production alongside a few of their friends.)
“It does feel like Martine is holding my hand through it,” Torres said of developing a high-profile live performance for audiences to witness down the road. “I’ve never done something quite like this. In film and TV, you’re sort of piecemealing the magic. It’s not all there at once, at the same time, happening before your eyes.”
Gutierrez, whose visual works have previously shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale, had an existing relationship with the Whitney prior to the ongoing Biennial. (“We used to see each other more seriously. Now we’re open,” she joked.) For a seven-month period beginning in late 2022, an image of her sprawled on a shag rug, dressed in lingerie and covered in Barbie-like dolls, appeared on a massive billboard outside the institution. The piece, titled “Supremacy,” took aim at sexism and harmful gender norms in culture.
With “Marina,” Torres and Gutierrez didn’t set out to critique anything specific: “I always think that the commentary or the themes or anything like that just comes about organically,” Torres said. “We just set out to make this underwater fantasy.” But in its playful exploration of how we as a society interact with modern technology, the show will undoubtedly strike a chord with extremely-online viewers over its four nights.
“I’m sure it will evolve,” Torres said. “I don’t think either of us will fall into that very proper theater thing [where] every night is the same, every night is blocked to perfection. We’ve assembled a very free group of people that … will find new choices and freedoms.”
