Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time. Shot from an aerial vantage, the camera tracks the daily commute on a small stretch of concrete highway. The camera films the traffic below in short five-second excerpts before blacking out; time begins to collapse as the video shifts between scene, and the hours compress into minutes as daylight quickly turns into night. An uninterrupted soundtrack of car sounds plays continuously throughout, both at play with the images on screen and disjointed from the video’s repeated stops and starts. The vehicles begin to resemble more abstracted forms of shape and color: flattened yet mobile, these synchronous moving blocks form an intricate dance of mechanized motion. Representing the constant flow of vehicles on a two-way urban street, Automóvel focuses on the pace of life on any normal working day, and Marcelle’s video offers a playful reimagining of a traffic jam as a symphonic composition of movement and sound. Despite its frequent visual humor, however, Marcelle also considers the struggles of a modern-day labor force and the inexorable cost of “working” in relation to time and resources. Automóvel , by extension, is also a work about stasis and the experience of being caught in an intermediate space, always in transit to an indeterminate destination that never arrives.
Cinthia Marcelle produces video works that address the mundane and attempt to make sense out of everyday chaos. In her practice, commonplace rhythms, patterns and events are an infinite resource of meaning. Her work frequently reimagines everyday “movements” such as traffic as highly formal and sequenced orchestrations. Through a time-intensive and mathematically precise editing process, she re-choreographs disordered movement, using video and photography to document the effects that her interventions have on the usual order of things. Her compositions are at once satirical and lighthearted, and her actions create situations that challenge our notions of conventional behavior by introducing humorous coincidences and connections. Marcelle’s work has been part of significant group exhibitions including New Museum Triennial, New York (2012),Tate Modern Level2, London (2012) and 29ª Bienal de São Paulo (2010). Her solo exhibitions include Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2011), Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo (2011), Camberwell College of Arts, London (2009) and Sprovieri Gallery, London (2009).
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power, 2010) is a mousetrap elegantly crafted in Carrara marble...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site...
Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
De sino à sina (From Bell to Fate) is a six-channel sound installation by Carla Zaccagnini exploring the relationship between modern Brazil and its colonial past...
With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...