Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The word Takasago alludes to several things at once. Takasago is the name of a multi-billion dollar Japanese corporation, previously situated in Taiwan pre-World War II. It is also a famous Japanese Noh play, the oldest extant form of performance in Japan, combining dance, costuming/masks, acting, and operatic chants.

Photography (Photography)

YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic. The mural contrasts and mixes multiple layers of these satellite images capturing the progressive devastation of the El Quimbo dam on the Yuma river (Magdalena), in the Department of Huila. The project was originally produced for the 8th Berlin Biennale, and developed out of the artist’s research into waterways, their political and cultural impact, and their historical development.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers. Danielle Dean’s work True Red examines how a large corporation co-opted a historical fiction (the vampire), in addition to the traditional red and black colors of radical politics and the avant-garde. The animated video considers how capitalism can gentrify notions of radicality and the mutable nature of advertising.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her 2015 work Orión is a black flag-like cloth with glow-in-the-dark symbols embroidered in the shape of the constellation. In the place of stars, Martínez has substituted the logos of international corporations and entities that use stars as their symbol; celestial navigation commanded by the logic of international corporations. Easily spotted is the smiling face of the Carl’s Jr. / Hardee’s logo, the three-pronged Mercedes-Benz emblem, Walmart’s six-pointed asterisk, and the starry cluster of the Subaru shield.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Created for the Seventh Shanghai Biennale at the Shanghai Art Museum, Zhou Tao’s 1,2,3,4 records morning staff meetings in over forty shops and companies in the immediate vicinity of the People’s Square. Regardless of occupation, the employees count off and move in step to the rhythms of their companies’ corporate songs or chants, which are meant to build team spirit and corporate loyalty. Zhou’s practice alchemizes the ordinary surroundings into a theatre where his camera is not simply a recording apparatus but an extension of existence.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments. The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke was shot in the American Southwest at Mid-century modern architectural structures that were built to house regional independent banks and have since been bought up by Chase, Bank of America, and TD Bank. The video utilizes transparency and opacity effects in multimedia software to question the perceptibility of finance. It offers a complex metaphor (toxic assets, emergency flares, house/mortgage on fire) about the financial sector and the effects of the ‘crisis’ that led to the disappearance (and the ghostly memory) of many local and regional banks.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Paloma Contreras Lomas sometimes incorporates large scale drawing into her practice. For Contreras, drawing is a deeply personal and corporeal exercise that she relates to writing and narration. Her charcoal drawing Bugs Bunny Behind a Mesophile Bush features a gigantic hat providing shelter to the simultaneously identifiable and unidentifiable cartoon character hiding behind a wild bus.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects. Cuevas’s America (2006) is a wall painting of a comic Donald Duck wallowing in a heap of gold coins, alluding to Mexico’s postrevolutionary mural tradition. The mural’s background is one of the earliest illustrations of flora and fauna in the American continent, juxtaposed with a reference to America as having bountiful natural resources available to be exploited, and the historical use of comics as ideological tools.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this two-channel video installation, Spaniards Named Her Magdalena, But Natives Called Her Yuma , Carolina Caycedo gathered footage during numerous research trips to dam sites in the Harz Mountains, Saxony, Westphalia and the Black Forest in Germany interspersed with images of the Rio Magdalena region in Colombia. Extending beyond the documentary form, the work illuminates social power structures and control mechanisms, particularly in connection with the activities of multinational corporations: images of controlled bodies of water are spliced with footage of urban crowds, visualising overlaps in the ways these various bodies are managed. The film is overlaid with the narrator’s voice whispering in Spanish and English, speaking of the artist’s personal perspective, and her own experience with a river she has known since childhood when family lived by its edge.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Carolina Caycedo’s practice conveys her very personal passion and relationship to water, as a powerful necessity and spiritual reminder. Esto No Es Agua / This Is Not Water is a portrait of the Las Damas waterfall in the town of Garzón, Huila in Southern Colombia. The video is composed of footage of the waterfall that is at times mirrored, distorted, obstructed, or kaldeiscoped in different ways.

In 1995, the personal and professional archives of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán were acquired (including the rights to the name and the work of the architect) by the Swiss furniture enterprise Vitra. Frederica Zanco, wife of the owner of Vitra, had received these archives as an engagement present, rather than a solitaire diamond. In this video, The Exhumation , the artist poses the question: how to navigate the laws that render Barragán in public space?

Painting (Painting)

Wonocolo by Maryanto is part of a body of research and work that has been investigating the mining realities of Indonesia and Nigeria since 2015. This acrylic painting refers to ‘Texas’ Wonocolo in Bojonegoro, a traditional oil mine in East Java. Initially built by the Dutch and abandoned during Japanese occupation, it was revived under Indonesia’s independence (1949) and is now a controversial issue between local sovereign right and environmental concern.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain.

Photography (Photography)

Mooi indie (which translates to “Beautiful Indies”) is a term used to depict the beauty of nature in the East Indies during the period of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. The term is usually used to describe a painting, romanticising the alluring tropics through the lens of European imperialism. Later in the 1950s, the prominent Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono, who is known as one of the founding fathers of Indonesian Modern Art, publicly rejected the Mooi Indie genre as Indonesian art.

Photography (Photography)

This selection of untitled photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Joanna Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

Photography (Photography)

This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot a few months before the USA and Cuba restored diplomatic relations in 2015, The New Man and My Father looks into the quiet aftermath of one family’s individual experience of the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). The film brings to the fore a socio-political system made for a country whose successes and failures fell upon the individual men and women who experienced it. In the film, Melis interviews his father about the Cuban Revolution, as well as the more recent re-introduction of capitalism to the island after 60 years of the US-imposed embargo.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ein Ding Mehr , or ‘one more thing,’ is part of a long-term collaborative performance series by artists Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam, which consist of the pair embodying an array of material through holding various poses for extended periods of time. As the artists perform each gesture, we see them gaze on the preparatory drawings, which act as an instructional score of sorts. The drawing itself, besides featuring carefully drawn sketches of each position, also contains a list of the source material that inspired them: a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, Salo, Eugène Delacroix’s Pietà, and a reference to a monument by Auguste Rodin among others.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Selected Scripture is a series of silkscreen prints that Hong Hao has been working on since the 1980s. The series includes 37 prints to date, each of which resemble pages of an ancient open cartography book. In this series, the artist reflects on the authoritative influence of ancient books that shape dominant understandings of the world.

Photography (Photography)

This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

Photography (Photography)

This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering. Amy Balkin’s neon sculpture I (heart) Data Mining , takes on this issue by revealing the acronyms or abbreviations of both technology companies and government bodies that have either profited from data mining, or have used it to political ends. The culprits include Facebook, Investigative Data Warehouse, Apple Computer, The Department of Homeland Security, Narus, Target, and Twitter.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Cuba, due to the lack of materials, workers of state-owned construction companies must remain at work without doing anything, waiting for the end of the working day. Interested in this phenomenon, Adrian Melis asked the workers of a construction company to reproduce the sounds and noises characteristic of their work. The making of forty rectangular pieces for a floor construction is the recording of a “work performance” during a day from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon.

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Darbyshire has made several Furniture Islands, all of which employ different objects and different color values. Furniture Island No 3 looks like a shop display tastefully arranged in complementary colours. Darbyshire’s use of colour is like that of a designer or a painter.