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. When his rubber trees died from disease and his primarily indigenous workforce revolted, his enterprise went busts within a few short years. Ford never faulted his own planning, but instead blamed the “inhospitable” Brazilian landscape. These topographical maps present different locations related to Fordlândia’s history: a current Fordlândia satellite image of the abandoned rubber plantation built by Ford in 1928, juxtaposed with postindustrial landscapes from Detroit, Dallas, and Los Angeles, is printed on the back side of the folded mapsculpture.
Clarissa Tossin’s photographs, videos, and installations are active investigations into the workings of urban planning and labor politics. The artist draws poignant parallels among historical events, creating engaging narratives that are also often subversive. Many of her works are concerned with what could be called a topography of place. Focusing on the promises, legacies, and failings of modernity, globalism, and utopian idealism, much of her work concentrates on cultural and economic connections between the United States and Latin American countries. Tossin’s most recent artwork, Archaeology of the Present, investigates the link between Indigenous civilizations and current Los Angeles via the lenses of gender and appropriation.
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...
On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages...
Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video...
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...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread...
The series West (Flag 1), West (Flag 3), and West (Flag 6) continues da Cunha’s ongoing exploration of the form’s various vertical, horizontal, and diagonal stripes...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
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...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities...
Adição por subtração 4 (Addition by Subtraction, 2010) is an intervention into the white cube with both beautiful and intimidating results...
Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil...
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...
Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning...
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...
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...