Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world. The video—located in an imagined contemporary Malaysian middle-class living room, a space of a fictive former imperial power—explores the precarious link between fact and fiction, fakery and authenticity by overlaying three believable, authoritative forms: a documentary, a website, and a realistic reconstruction of a contemporary home. It is rife with occidental colonial documents and exotic cultural artifacts—the trophy-evidence of Empire-making. The video parodies television networks and documentaries as researched authoritative forms of information. It begins by posing as a serious, believable work of non-fiction, but becomes increasingly unsettling with its inclusion of fictive events, memories, and histories around the urgent contemporary problems of migration, racism, power relationships, and empire making.
Born in Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong’s work examines the formation of his country’s multicultural identity vis-à-vis global migration, trade, colonialism, and the postcolonial circulation of people, ideas, and capital. His extended body of work uses various media—drawing, painting, performance, installation, video, and on-line projects—to critique the impact of these developments on contemporary life within and without South Asia. With the increasingly hegemonic domination of the media industry in everyday life, its systems of representation have become a central issue in Wong’s recent work, which oscillates between reality and fiction, irony and transgression—and gains a new strength in the process.
Days of Our Lives: Reading is from a series of work was created for the 10th Biennale de Lyon by the artist...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible ...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
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 Untitled (Sword) , addressing histories of colonialism with abstraction, a large steel blade extends from the gallery wall...
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...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions...
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...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
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...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
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...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...