Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows. Nugroho’s work both preserves traditional culture and offers a contemporary interpretation of it through his insertion of comical figures to comment on current social conditions. Moving Landscape includes characters such as a diamond-headed man, a UFO, and other items that appear frequently in Nugroho’s drawings and murals. The shadows and silhouettes rotate in a custom-made, lit tent structure to create a fantasy world that blurs the line between daily life and fiction. The narratives here are complex and ambiguous and speak to a range of psychological states that echo everyday reality.
Working with a variety of media including comics, animation, mural painting, graffiti, embroidery, video, and puppetry, Yogyakarta-based artist Eko Nugroho comments on social justice, cultural tradition, and the human condition. The concepts, materials, and strategies of his oeuvre reflect a sophisticated understanding of “fine art,” crafts, as well as street art. For example, Nugroho’s use of embroidery is inspired by local street gangs whose jackets are embroidered with their logos and by the embroidered badges worn by local government officials to announce their affiliations. After the Indonesian Reformation in 1998, Nugroho started to use caricature in his work to criticize the government’s policies about democracy, freedom, and censorship. These metamorphic figures, their surroundings, and the idioms indicate the dysfunction of contemporary Indonesian society as well as the tribulations of the world at large.
In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape...
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape...
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
Untitled is a work on paper by Martin Kippenberger comprised of several seemingly disparate elements: cut-out images of a group of dancers, a japanese ceramic vase, and a pair of legs, are all combined with gestural, hand-drawn traces and additional elements such as a candy wrapper from a hotel in Monte Carlo and a statistical form from a federal government office in Wiesbaden, Germany...
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes...
He wants Hong Kong to fall in love with theatre and he’s doing everything he can to make that happen | South China Morning Post He wants Hong Kong to fall in love with theatre and he’s doing everything he can to make that happen Performing arts in Hong Kong Hong Kong theatre wunderkind Tom Chan is the youngest and only producer to stage a long-running musical show in the city...
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Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
Searching for We’wha is composed of five photographic triptychs combining photographs from the American West (New Mexico and Arizona) with excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived a feminine gender expression...
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 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...
The sculpture And Shadows Will Follow is an angle piece that articulates a space since its appearance highly changes depending on the point of view...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...