Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.
California-born and internationally recognized, Nao Bustamante cut her teeth as an artist between 1984 and 2001 in San Francisco where she studied in the New Genres department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Bustamante’s occasionally precarious and radically vulnerable work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. As Kevin McGarry from The New York Times succinctly put it, “[Bustamante] has a knack for using her body.”
Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner...
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
Paint and Unpaint is an animation by Kota Ezawa based on a scene from a popular 1951 film by Hans Namuth featuring Jackson Pollock...
The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes...
Weekly Southeast Asia Radar: Will Hokkien die out?; Pineapple Lab shuts | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar Photo via Phố Văn Blog August 12, 2020 ArtsEquator’s Southeast Asia Radar features articles and posts about arts and culture in Southeast Asia, drawn from local and regional websites and publications – aggregated content from outside sources, so we are exposed to a multitude of voices in the region...
Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea...
The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes...
In the seminal video Workout , Kanis looks at the phenomenon of exercise in public space—specifically aerobics exercises in parks around Moscow today—as a broader lens for thinking about generational change...