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“Dark Clouds Of The Future” is a cinematographic video animation of the abandoned gold mine in Brazil, Serra Pelada (“Naked Mountain”). Thought to be one of the largest mines in the world, made famous by the photographs Alfredo Jaar and later by Sebastião Salgado, the hand-dug mine is now a mercury-polluted lake. During his research trip to Brazil, Pachpute met many former gold diggers who used to work at Serra Pelada, inciting his interest in the concept of the witness. The motif of the eye in “Dark Clouds Of The Future” is reference to witnessing and participating in the environmental destruction brought about by industrialization. The perpetual movement and transformation in Pachpute’s landscape suggests the continuous erasure of the natural environment, provoking fears and questions for the future articulated in the ominous clouds casting shadows across the mountain. The repetitiveness of the medium, the strokes of coal and pencil on paper, brought to life, as a cinemagraph is a sophisticated examination of the irreversible consequences for nature and man. “Dark Clouds Of The Future” puts into question the autonomy of the individual in the face of a global community whose actions devastate the natural environment.
Prabhakar Pachpute calls attention to issues concerning land politics, industry, and labor through a multimedia practice that includes drawing, painting, sculpture, animation, and murals. Best known for his site-specific charcoal wall drawings, Pachpute’s work references his own experiences growing up in a multi-generational coal mining and farming family. Employing surrealist motifs, the artist’s works are politically rooted depictions of characters that have experienced the seizure or ‘donation’ of their land for economic gain. Considering issues of exploitation through economic, social, and environmental lenses, the artist’s work critically reflects on evolving histories of familial attachment and physical ownership of agricultural and industrial resources.
Orang Phebien: Telling the story of the Baweanese | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Illustration: Hadi Osni August 5, 2020 Lesser known narratives involving migration in Singapore are in the spotlight with The Arts House’ latest edition of LumiNation ...
Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement...
Tsumeb Fragments was produced for the exhibition at Kadist, “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine” in 2015...
A Jacob Lawrence Expert on a Profile of Him from ARTnews’s Archives – ARTnews.com Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All January 24, 2020 1:35pm George Chinsee Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) was one of the deftest documentarians of African-American life in the United States, and over the next few years, people across the country will get a chance to see one of his greatest series of paintings, “Struggle: From the History of the American People” (1954–56), united in full for the first time...
Weekly Picks: Malaysia (16 – 22 July 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Malaysia July 16, 2018 Hua (華) Settler Imaginary in Borneo , at Malaysia Design Archive, 19 July 8pm Academic Dr Zhou Hau Liew presents ‘ Preliminary Thoughts on the Hua Settler Imaginary in Borneo: Cultural Mapping, Revolutionary Communism, and the Ideas of Chineseness ’...
Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia...
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...
Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
Binelde Hyrcan’s video “Cambeck” is a playful study of four boys on a beach in Angola playing in a chauffeured car made of sand...
Online Seminar: Frequencies of Tradition With Anselm Franke, Ho Tzu Nyen, Chia Wei Hsu, Yuk Hui, siren eun young jung, Jane Jin Kaisen, Ayoung Kim, Hyunjin Kim, Hwayeon Nam, Emily Wilcox, and Soo Ryon Yoon The Times Museum and KADIST present three online sessions that consider tradition as a contested space, where one can critically reflect on Asian modernization and the Western canon...
(Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notations by Newell Harry brings together a litany of contemporary politics—mobilization around enduring racism, the legacies of Indigenous and independence struggle, and the prospects of global solidarity against neocolonialism and social injustice...
Comprised of fifty-one photographic postcards, Antin’s 100 Boots is an epic visual narrative in which 100 black rubber boots stand in for a fictional “hero” making a “trip” from California to New York City...
Gregory Halpern spent five years shooting ZZYZX , and another year editing the results, from an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after his Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to live in California...
Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) by Leelee Chan is inspired by the camouflaging nature of the peppered-moth caterpillar...