Arpedia

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

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Stone Deaf (Drawing)

Milena Bonilla

Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions. Her drawings, sculptures, and photography are active investigations into our often-fallible notions of history. Stone Deaf (2009) is a direct intervention into Karl Marx’s gravesite, for which the artist literally traced the history of Marx’s grave.

With Roca Carbon ( Charcoal Rock , 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks. Traces of art history reverberate through the sculptures; their mediums reflect traditional materials for drawing and sketching, and the simplicity of their forms gesture toward minimalism. But López dislocates these common objects from their ordinary utility by replicating their component parts in paper, graphite, and charcoal, thus drawing attention to mechanisms of representation and translation.

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Hearsay of the Soul

Werner Herzog

Commissioned for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Hearsay of the Soul (2012) is Werner Herzog’s ode to the landscape paintings of the 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers. The work is a four-channel digital projection of Segers’s artworks accompanied by the emotive music of the Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger. Herzog sees Segers’s vast landscapes as powerful representations of our own interior worlds, resounding with feelings of anger, joy, fear, and loneliness.

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Roca Carbón (Charcoal Rock)

Mateo Lopez

With Roca Carbón (Charcoal Rock, 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks. Traces of art history reverberate through the sculptures; their mediums reflect traditional materials for drawing and sketching, and the simplicity of their forms gesture toward minimalism. But López dislocates these common objects from their ordinary utility by replicating their component parts in paper, graphite, and charcoal, thus drawing attention to mechanisms of representation and translation.

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The Prisoner’s Cinema

Melvin Moti

“The Prisoner’s Cinema” is a phenomenon described in neurology as a hallucination, that appears after a prolonged absence of visual sensations. A blind screen of hallucinations forms itself on the eyes cut off from visual stimuli. The subject can see this projection, but fails to register these mental images, transforming it into an intimate and personal experience.

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Vadim

Tarik Kiswanson

Installation (Installation)

In late 2017, Kiswanson stared working with Vadim, an eleven-year-old Romanian-French boy who he met during castings for a performance. Captivated by what he describes as a “hybrid voice, one that belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once”, he began working with Vadim on a regular basis. Over the course of four months, Kiswanson interviewed Vadim on a multitude of subjects concerning the human condition: from his beliefs on death, his thoughts on growing up and becoming an adult, what it feels like to breathe, talk, move and above all, what it means to be born between several cultures and languages.

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Berlinmuren

Lars Laumann

Eija Riitta was born in 1954 in Liden, Sweden, and is “objectum-sexual.” Since June 17, 1979, her name is Eija Riitta Berliner Mauer taking the name of her husband, the Berlin Wall. In animism all elements of nature are considered as alive and have souls. “Objectum-sexuality” is an extension of this belief.

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The Swimmer

Jeffry Mitchell

Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly. The stocky figure lets his arm drop to his side, towel dripping on the ground. Mitchell’s umber-toned glaze makes everything look earthy and wet, primordial and warm.

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Pascua Dolorosa (Painful Easter)

Fredi Casco

Pascua Dolorosa (Painful Easter) by Fredi Casco is a series of drawings made on old worksheets documenting land surfaces in Caapucú, a forest exploitation area where one of the most violent episodes of the repression of Stroessner’s dictatorship took place in 1976, and during which peasants accused of belonging to insurgent movements were kidnapped, tortured and many of them killed. In 2009, human bone remains were found in the Caapucú region during ground measurement work. These works reveal the tension between a cold and positivistic approach to landscape as put on record in the legal papers, the poignant use of violence as inscribed into the land, and a ghostly invocation of the power of resistance.

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Ventana indiscreta (Rear Window)

Karen Lamassonne

Painting (Painting)

Ventana indiscreta (Rear Window) by Karen Lamassonne takes its title from Hitchcock’s renowned 1954 classic. The painting is part of Lamassinne’s Homenaje a Cali [Homage to Cali] series, developed by the artist in 1989 in a nostalgic attempt to immortalize Cali at a time in which violence from drug trafficking had rendered it unlivable, and the generation that Lamassone had lived it up with had all but dispersed. Lamassone had formally established in Cali around the middle of the decade at a time in which the hangover from the 1971 Pan-American Games and an artistic effervescence had transformed it from a provincial sleepy town into a newly discovered urban (and sexual) labyrinth, one that was fit for the artist’s own explorations around its representation.

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Xar - Sueño de obsidiana

Edgar Calel

The point of departure for Xar – Sueño de obsidiana by Edgar Calel is a poem that the artist wrote in Maya Kaqchikel. Made in collaboration with Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Pereira dos Santos, the film was shot while in lockdown in Brazil, where Calel found himself during the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The film shows Calel ambling around the empty Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer to host the São Paulo Biennial in 1954.

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Chris Wiley

Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012). In photographing seemingly mundane images of doorways and walls, Wiley collapses the viewer’s experience of inhabiting space by foregrounding features that we all too often miss in our built environment: the peeling white paint on a Corinthian column or the rusty studs on a blue door.

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Chris Wiley

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The Carpenter

Jeffry Mitchell

Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench. It is difficult to tell whether the work represents just any carpenter or Christ, the most famous member of the profession and the subject of innumerable parables and artworks. His stilted pose is not too Messianic; drips of ochre glaze render his handiwork and hammer equally soft.

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Man and Pet

Jeffry Mitchell

In Man and Pet (2012), two benign ceramic figures smile sweetly upward. The man wraps his small companion in a hug, his arms extending in round arcs all the way to his feet. Though the expressions are strikingly similar—suggestive of Rockwellian Americana—the pet seems somewhat more genial and familiarly fuzzy than its owner, whose saurian pupils lend his face a reptilian air that belies his warm grin.

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Untitled

Mark Bradford

This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series. It’s contrasting dark and vibrant tones presage his later series of works, exhibited at L. A.’s Hammer Museum as Scorched Earth. These larger works share a map-like quality, looking like aerial views of some scarred urban landscape.

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El territorio no está en venta

María Buenaventura

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

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Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s

Robert Zhao Renhui

Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s is from the series “As We Walked on Water” (2010-2012), which looks into Singapore’s history around the phenomenon of land reclamation. After exhausting the country’s own soil from its tiny hills and ridges, the government had to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue its reclamation efforts. At the early stages of a land reclamation project, the imported sand would sit idle for some time, forming an artificial desert-like landscape.

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Untitled (Set of Six Drawings)

Adrian Villar Rojas

Based on historical prophecies and fantasy, the artist creates apocalyptic scenarios that posit an enigmatic world plagued by social, political, and environmental upheaval. Untitled (Set of Six Drawings) (2012) is an intricate watercolor of a child sitting cross-legged with its head stuck inside a giant mask resembling a duck head covered with eyes. It looks like a scene snatched from science fiction or a surreal dream; it is tempting to see in it some kind of warning sign, or an ominous vision of the future.

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Tierra

Regina José Galindo

In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial. Tierra depicts the artist standing naked in a lush field that a bulldozer has broken up. The video references an incident in which innocent Guatemalans were brutally murdered and buried in a mass grave.

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Museum of Russian History on Bolotnaya Square

Arseny Zhilyaev

The Bolotnaya Battle Park Complex is the future home for the Museum of Russian History (M. I. R.). Located on the grounds of Bolotnaya square in Moscow, this park sits on top of what once was a swamp. Above the main building stand two bio-engineered ‘living sculptures’, which strike various poses to commemorate the brave acts of those defending the federation from foreign intervention during protests of May 6th, 2012.

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Tapitapultas

Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker

In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented. The artists used disposable spoons as catapults to shoot thousands of plastic bottle caps at a hole in a concrete platform. The platform was once part of a U. S. military installation in the Panama Canal Zone, and it is now an observation deck in a nature park.

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Fordlândia Fieldwork

Clarissa Tossin

Installation (Installation)

In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry. When his rubber trees died from disease and his primarily indigenous workforce revolted, his enterprise went busts within a few short years. Ford never faulted his own planning, but instead blamed the “inhospitable” Brazilian landscape.

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Maids Rooms

Daniela Ortiz

In her work, Maids Room (2012) which is part of a series, Daniela Ortiz undertakes an architectural analysis of the houses belonging to the upper class of Lima. Her research highlights the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to the domestics. The project offers an analysis of this room, its size and its position in relation to the rest of the house.

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Reflection Paper No.2

Wang Taocheng

Reflection Paper No. 2 is one of four videos in which Wang attempts to accurately illustrate the writings of influential Chinese Eileen Chang, who published her works during the Japanese occupation of China. Image and text reflect on the everyday experiences of women in society, family, marriage, love, and death.

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Taiwan WMD - Uranium

James T. Hong