This Saturday is the hotly-anticipated grand opening of "This World & Nearer Ones," a major exhibition on Governors Island organized by Creative Time. Intended to be the first in a series of regular art projects on the island--a former military post that the city is turning into a cultural destination--the show features new work by 19 artists and artist collectives from around the world, ranging from outdoor art installations to a zombie movie played in an abandoned theater.

The pieces were conceived last year at the height of the financial crisis and in the midst of two wars, and many of them share a somber, even spooky quality. Mark Beasley, the show's curator, likens the effect to a "dark mirror," a devise the Impressionists used "in order to refresh their eyes and see color anew." The projects also respond to the developing nature of the Governors Island, most of which is still in a state of dilapidation. "For me the main driver in the narrative is the island," Beasley says. "All the works bounce off that." As a result, the show encourages viewers to explore the art and the site at the same time--a tour made even more enjoyable by renting a bike from one of the island's kiosks.

ArtWeLove did just that during a preview of the exhibition. Here below are a selection of the show's standout works.

Installed in one of the island's many rickety houses, Judi Werthein's film "La Tierra de los Libres" features an insistently catchy Spanish-language version of the "Star-Spangled Banner" with a politically fraught backstory. Attired in colorful clothing, the singers are refugees from the Colombian countryside who were driven to Venezuela by the region's drug wars. Faced with little prospect of employment, they fell back on their rural cultural traditions and became musical entertainers--a poignant commentary on what a more internationally-minded John Edwards might have called "the two Americas."

Artist Anthony McCall became famous in the 1970s for his minimalist light installations, and his piece in the show--occupying the island's chapel--attains a beauty that borders on the spiritual. Beamed down from the ceiling through a haze generated by fog machines, the light draws runic lines on the ground while sculpting volumetric shapes in the air. (See more photos below.)

German conceptual artist Klaus Weber's contribution is one of the eerier pieces on view. Oversized, matte-black, and morosely hanging from a tree, this wind chime has been set to a tritone harmony, otherwise known as the "Devil's Interval"--a musical construction once believed to summon the devil, and also sometimes believed to have an erotic effect on its listeners. (Black Sabbath was a big fan, unsurprisingly.)


One of the best pieces in the exhibition, and certainly the funniest, is the Bruce High Quality Foundation's zombie movie "Isle of the Dead." The plot: every artist in New York dies, only to be reborn as zombies who shuffle past the city's art institutions--the Met, the Guggenheim, Artists Space, and others--to come to Governors Island. There they gather in a theater to groan the lyrics to "The Summer of '69" while a montage of images from that fateful year play onscreen. Imbued with nostalgia for art's glory days while at the same time suggesting a critical, communal, and good-humored way forward, the film should bring renewed attention to the up-and-coming Brooklyn artist collective. (Watch a preview of the film below.)

Edgar Arceneaux's piece, titled "Sound Cannon Double Projection," is as much a haunted house as it is an artwork. Taking over both floors of an abandoned, crumbling building, the artist installed two sub-woofers to generate low-frequency sound waves that can't be heard but inspire a sense of creeping anxiety. Such sound waves, which also create a barely perceptible tremor throughout the house, are also linked by ghost-hunters to places inhabited by the unquiet dead.

For his piece, Tue Greenfort rummaged through the island's desolate former army barracks for mirrors, linoleum, wooden doors, and other materials, then cut them down into letters spelling out "Project for the New American Century" across the back of one building. Referring to the title of a neocon think tank that was responsible for ginning up the country's aggressive foreign policy under Bush, the piece implicitly asks where the soldiers who slept in these barracks are deployed today.

Another work that addresses the island's military history is Krzysztof Wodiczko's "Veterans’ Flame." For the piece, installed in the dark basement of a munitions storehouse, the artist recorded interviews with every military veteran who has returned to New York City, then had scientists at M.I.T. develop a video image of a flame that jumps and flares in time to the veterans' words. The effect is a moving tribute to the living that has an ancient resonance despite its high-tech execution.

Finally, Nils Norman's outdoor installation is called "Temporarily Permanent Monument to the Occupation of Pseudo Public Space"--a title weightier than the assembly of tents, sleeping bags, and plastic furniture, which could be either a communal space at a music festival or a refugee camp. Playing with the idea of the island as both a cultural space and a former military site, the piece strikes a compelling balance between free-spirited enthusiasm for the arts and a reminder of the crushing iniquities around the world that can make such things seem frivolous.

Watch a preview of the Bruce High Quality Foundation's "Isle of the Dead":