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 title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior. Their identities are unknown. The ghostly, illuminated space creates a strange effect of time traveling, transporting viewers back to the historical event depicted. The men’s gazes seem to tell stories that have been buried in collective memory. For Lê, the act of appropriating, recycling, and remixing imagery is a means of rescuing both images and the memories embedded within them.
Dinh Q. Lê’s artistic practice centers on his lived experience of political and social conditions in his native Vietnam; he and his family fled the country via Thailand in 1979 and immigrated to the United States. Lê interweaves the experiences that helped shape his identity with Vietnamese national mythologies, collective memories, and expanded cultural histories. Incorporating imagery from a variety of sources, such as archival photographs, documentaries, Hollywood films, and Vietnamese iconography, Lê’s investigations raise critical questions about the distribution, reception, and consumption of images, and how images inform national identity.
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...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P...
For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
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...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
Blindseye Arranger (Max) (2013) features a greyscale arrangement of rudimentary shapes layered atop one another like a dense cluster of wood block prints, the juxtaposition of sharp lines and acute angles creating an abstracted field of rectangular and triangulated forms composed as if in a cubist landscape...