10:27 minutes
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by. Malini’s interpretation is comprised by drawings on parchment paper that suddenly appear, mutate, and subsequently vanish. Beyond referencing a glaring injustice and highlighting the arbitrary division of labour between genders, Malani poetically alludes to the fragile and ephemeral nature of our identities, our memory and more broadly our humanity. Like the marks on the paper, Malani meditates on the ease with which our lives can suddenly become undone.
Nalini Malani is a leading contemporary artist from India whose work looks critically at issues of gender, race, geopolitics, and the impact of consumer culture amidst rampant globalization. Working across painting, drawing, installation, animation, video and theater, Malani’s practice is characterized by its political bite, and, as described by the artist, for having an ‘internationalist’ perspective of global issues. Malani came to prominence in the 1980s through pioneering work that brought Feminist issues to the fore, courageously addressing the fatal place of women in Indian society. Highlight the violent legacy of colonialism has been a central concern, especially due to how she experienced it firsthand as a child and refugee during the partition of India. Formally, her work has borrowed imagery from Hindu as well as Greek mythology, and is characterized by a distinct combination of abstraction and figuration. From the 90s onwards her focus shifted towards theater and immersive installation pieces that incorporate video or hand-drawn animation while dealing with similar subject matter.
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
In Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...
The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory...
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...