7:31 minutes
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city. Okón focuse d on Ciudad Juárez as a site for many ‘ maquiladoras ’ ( factories) and on its role within the global context. A mixed media and video installation , the work takes the form of a fictitious factory that produces canned laughter for sitcoms. The Factory ’s name, Bergson, refers to a collection of essays studying laughter that were published by French philosopher Henri Bergson in 1900 . Okón’s work Canned Laughter alludes to the dehumanization produced by mechanized processes and slavery in the age of globalization , as well as to the impossibility to translate and reproduce true emotions though technological means.
Working primarily in video, Okón combines the genre of do cumentary with performative elements that together blur the boundary between reality and fiction. His video installations capture improvisational narratives created by the artist and his collaborators—performers willing to participate in a game of social chance that may easily spiral out of control. In them, t he camera acts as a catalyst that unleashes his subjects , empowering them to act out an assumed character and in the process revealing thei r own awareness and perceptions. Characterized by their uncomfortable, somber nature these works deliberately provoke viewers through confrontational humor as a way to achieve catharsis . His videos are used as a device to implicate audiences and also activate them as a participant, pressuring them to consider questions of social conduct and personal behavior within the context of the authoritative nation-state, and to question their own attitudes towards power, ethics, and prejudice vis -á- vis class, status, and marginality. Described by Okón as near-sociological experiments, his works give the audience a unique insight into the subjects he portrays. Most importantly, they also evoke a sense of interconnectivity: deeply implicating us in issues that we may normally consider foreign or removed from our everyday lives.
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies...
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...