Burak Delier’s sculpture Homage to Balotelli’s Missed Trick is a symbol of resistance to the demand for success and performance. The sculpture represents Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli, who intentionally missed an opportunity to score during a 2011 game between LA Galaxy and Manchester City. The miniature Balotelli stands on his left foot, raising his right foot to kick the ball. As the viewer approaches the piece, Balotelli begins to spin and the noise of a cheering crowd plays from speakers. The noise turns to audible confusion and then booing, tracking the moments during when Balotelli suddenly turned kicked the ball in the opposite direction of the goal. Because this gesture can be seen as one of the most forbidden behaviors in contemporary society—wasting an opportunity—Delier’s homage to the gesture can be seen as an opposition to the social pressure to achieve conventional forms of success.
Political Turkish artist Burak Delier works in a variety of media. He explores links between capitalism and art, freedom and unpredictability, seriousness and humor, employing the aesthetic strategies of the neo-liberal media that he opposes as a means of political and artistic resistance.
In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
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...
In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
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...
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...
For the two-channel work Asking the Repentistas – Peneira & Sonhador – to remix my octopus works Shimabuku asked two Brazilian street singers to compose a ballad about his previous works with octopi (in which he created traditional Japanese ceramic vessels to catch octopi, with a fisherman who took him on his boat to test them out as we can see on one of the channel)...
Originally a multi-channel video installation with sculptures and sound, this iteration of The Workshop by Gilad Ratman is a three-channel distillation of the expansive project that follows a group’s underground pilgrimage from Mt...
Temps Mort is the result of one year of mobile phone exchanges of still images and videos between the artist and a person incarcerated in prison...
Third Realm (2011) grew out of the artist’s long-term research of Indonesia’s colonial history and the processes of modernization and urbanization that have taken place there...
Jonas Staal’s installation is based on the thesis written by Fleur Agema and titled “Closed Architecture”...
This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective...