4:11 minutes
In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. In midst of sounds of heavy breathing, the camera presents alternating scenes of a man and the shadow of a man wearing a long, pointed hat cast against a wall. Insinuating a sinister mood, the man and the shadow struggle to control the scene through alternating tugs and releases of a rope. The shadow dominates. Later, a human voice murmuring in low, deep tones provides a soundtrack to the visual ambiguity to produce and effect between something derivative of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and a mockery of human desire and struggle. The video ends with an epigram added by Chen: “You cannot, could not, be in the dark, about all the darkness”, an ominous warning of play on words seemingly urges the viewer to approach the incoherent narrative as a layered incantation of play on shadows.
Chen Xiaoyun studied ink painting at the Chinese Academy of Arts and lived as a writer in Suzhou before becoming part of the Hangzhou video art community. Chen’s works stages scenes of everyday life with elements of the strange and the absurd in order to explore existentialist themes through narratives of visual linearity. Chen is drawn to nighttime scenes of ambiguity, making use of shadows and silhouettes in concert with simple plots and fixed scenery to reconcile disjuncture in gazes and assert connections between the filmic eye and reality.
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
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...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Pak created New York Public Library Projects (NYPLP) (2008) during a residency in New York, using public libraries as exhibition spaces and the books they house as raw materials...
The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct...
Golden Bridge is part of “Golden Journey”, a series of site-specific performances and installations created during Lin’s residency at Kadist San Francisco...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...
In Dilemma: Three Way Fork in the Road , Wang references Peking opera in a re-interpretation of traditional text...
The perceived effortlessness of power, projecting above experiences of labored subordination is examined in Death at a 30 Degree Angle by Bani Abidi, which funnels this projection of image through the studio of Ram Sutar, renowned in India for his monumental statues of political figures, generally from the post-independence generation...