Burak Delier’s sculpture Homage to Balotelli’s Missed Trick is a symbol of resistance to the demand for success and performance. The sculpture represents Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli, who intentionally missed an opportunity to score during a 2011 game between LA Galaxy and Manchester City. The miniature Balotelli stands on his left foot, raising his right foot to kick the ball. As the viewer approaches the piece, Balotelli begins to spin and the noise of a cheering crowd plays from speakers. The noise turns to audible confusion and then booing, tracking the moments during when Balotelli suddenly turned kicked the ball in the opposite direction of the goal. Because this gesture can be seen as one of the most forbidden behaviors in contemporary society—wasting an opportunity—Delier’s homage to the gesture can be seen as an opposition to the social pressure to achieve conventional forms of success.
Political Turkish artist Burak Delier works in a variety of media. He explores links between capitalism and art, freedom and unpredictability, seriousness and humor, employing the aesthetic strategies of the neo-liberal media that he opposes as a means of political and artistic resistance.
In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
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...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
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 ...
The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
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...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
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...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
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...