At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops. A closer examination, however, reveals that a key element—the minaret—has been systematically removed, thereby changing profoundly the history and religious character of the city. The work is a response to a November 2009 referendum in Switzerland that approved a ban on the construction of new minarets in that country. It was also a crucial time in Turkey’s negotiation for entrance into the European Union. Instead of making a direct, didactic comment on the controversy, however, Abbas offers up a clever question regarding how landmarks are interpreted in vastly different ways depending on their cultural context. In the Western imagination, minarets are political symbols as much as they are religious architecture. In the Muslim world, they serve as mnemonic devices that enable residents to recognize their own city.
Hamra Abbas, who lives and works in Boston and Islamabad, Pakistan, makes work that has a profound connection to her own cultural context. She asks probing questions about the everyday and its complex relationship with history and ideology; her subject matter ranges from religious rituals to war and the sexual iconography of the Kama Sutra. Working with a diverse range of materials and media, Abbas frequently intertwines the contemporary with the classic to offer up a critique of both modern Western and Islamic cultures.
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
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...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...