Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video “Shangri-La” refers to the mythical city of James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” written in 1933 and is exemplified in a film by Frank Capra which speaks of eternal youth in a city of happiness. In 1997, a small town in an agricultural region of central China near the Tibetan border was proclaimed as the place that inspired Shangri-la. Thereafter, a dozen other cities in the same area have claimed to be paradise on earth, prompting a marketing battle without mercy, raging on until the government’s intervention.

Painting (Painting)

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s recent drawing of cutout figures on architectural tracing paper takes a statement by Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo, as a point of departure for the work. Stating, “migration problems can and should find their solution within the affirmation of ‘freedom of movement’ as the new inalienable right of humans. No human has chosen or chooses the place where they were born.

Installation (Installation)

Dale Harding’s installation Body of Objects consists of eleven sculptural works that the artist based on imagery found at sandstone sites across Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland. Mouth-blown with ochre on sandstone, these extraordinary stencilled images depict weaponry, domestic tools, and ceremonial objects that are specific to the region and that relate to Harding’s own ancestry. In response to these enduring indexes of Indigenous material culture, Harding produced a suite of cast objects using the stencilled imagery as a guide, along with objects that relate to his family history: boomerangs, spears, clubs, and whips are all part of the display.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body. The Buddhist master Padmasambhava achieved this state from his union with Mandarava, a female spirit (dakini) and princess in Tantric Buddhism. Through study and physical connection, each played a key role in the other’s enlightenment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Satirizing an airport security checkpoint, The Ecdysiast – Molt (Body Inspection) by Yao Qingmei offers a comedic and critical inquiry into the logics underpinning collective control and surveillance culture. The three channels of the video respectively feature a dancer (left), a chorus (middle), and a security inspector (right). The dancer and security inspector enact a mechanical burlesque performance that parodies the body inspection procedures implemented by airport security.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Flesh in Stone – Ghost No. 1 is a stunning series of cement made body parts in various scales and movements, along with components such as iron and plaster molds to emphasize their tension. The “incompleteness” of Flesh in Stone weakens the figurative image itself, thus shifting the viewer’s focus onto the relationship between the rough material and the ideal rounded body shapes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Composed of five episodes, Brine Lake (A New Body) by Shen Xin is set in a fictional factory where iodine is produced as a byproduct of natural gas sourced from deep sea brine lakes. Korean, Japanese, and Russian are spoken in multiple episodes. The protagonists have multiple encounters and conversations with two unseen employees of the factory whose visions are overtaken by the camera.

Photography (Photography)

LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel. His photograph of this throwaway object calls back the body, and the handprint is in fact his own right hand; thus the piece can function as a self-portrait of the artist, in an ironic twist on the art historical genre.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Painting (Painting)

In the painting called “The Consciousness of Memory, Time, and Guilt” as in many of her recent works, the body is fragmented. The brain, the ear, the eyes, these body parts that put us in relation with the other and link the visible to the invisible, remain isolated. Whereas the skulls are joined by lines evoking rivers.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

From afar, Chimeric Antibodies by Angela Su may look like scientific drawings or botanical illustrations. Yet, upon closer look, sexual organs and imagined human and plant elements start becoming recognizable, and realistic. Each intricate, large-scale drawing indeed mixes human body parts, machines and other organic constructions as they become intertwined and inseparable.

Painting (Painting)

Wynnie Mynerva places their body at the center of their practice from an intimate perspective and healing dimension. Their paintings are thresholds where body parts proliferate beyond names and labels, dissolving and intermingling gender marks, organs, and prostheses. Resurgimiento [Resurgence] was produced in the aftermath of their fifth solo show Closing to Open (Galería Ginsberg, Lima, 2021), in which Mynerva addressed their experience of going through a vaginal surgical procedure to help them feel more aligned with their gender identity.

Textile (Textile)

A “mata ni pachedi” is a piece of painted textile that depicts narrative images of goddesses. Traditionally, the images would be painted onto a piece of cloth found in the temple. Also known as the “kalamkari” (a hand-painted or block-printed cotton textile), “mata ni pachedi” literally translates to “behind the mother goddess”.

Photography (Photography)

A Trip to the North Sea is composed of 6 parts. The images show a rough sea, with huge waves. The waves foam, swell and collapse.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world. The video—located in an imagined contemporary Malaysian middle-class living room, a space of a fictive former imperial power—explores the precarious link between fact and fiction, fakery and authenticity by overlaying three believable, authoritative forms: a documentary, a website, and a realistic reconstruction of a contemporary home. It is rife with occidental colonial documents and exotic cultural artifacts—the trophy-evidence of Empire-making.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate. The form used for this drawing is a request for medical attention. This work illustrates an assembly-line of severed bodies being pumped full of feet and other body parts.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Wagon Wheel is a work with a fundamental dynamism that derives both from the rotating movement of the elements suspended on poles and the kicking of the legs of the figure. It is based on a pornographic image by Giulio Romano (ca.1499-1546). Romano had completed Raphael’s frescos in the Vatican after the latter’s death but was not paid for the work.

While most of Ashmina Ranjit’s work has been large-scale installations, often immersive and site-specific, the series Hair Warp – Travel Through Strand of Universe is a brilliant concentration of both her beliefs and aesthetic. In this series, human hair is treated as a sacred element that connects womanhood and as Ranjit states, “all phenomena beyond the sky”. In the painting, the sinuous hair strands morph constantly into different braids, swirls, and landscapes, emitting a mysterious force of life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables. Referencing iconic folklore such as Alice in Wonderland, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharata, Ganesh’s video illustrates the story of a hero’s journey and transformation that is not driven by the glory of violent conquest or saving a damsel in distress. Ganesh’s short video features a colorful style of illustration specific to the artist’s comic works.

NFT (NFT)

In the agricultural areas of Mexico, Indigenous people use the mylar magnetic tape unspooled from VHS cassettes as an alternative to the scarecrow—the reflective tape flutters in the wind and does an excellent job scaring birds away from crops. This kind of creative reuse of materials (overproduced and devalued) that flow through the global trade of consumer goods, is especially rich in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. In 2020, during a period of isolation due to Covid-19, Edgardo Aragón unspooled a VHS tape and installed it in his father’s crop of corn for six months.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Dragon is the Frame by Mary Helena Clark is an elegy that is somewhat paradoxically organized as a film noir or murder mystery, one that pays direct homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo . But the parts don’t fit, and it is only in the eventual recognition of this faux raccord that Clark’s higher purpose becomes apparent. As we hear Bernard Herrmann’s score, we see the Golden Gate Bridge, Mission Dolores, and other Vertigo locations in the present day.

Installation (Installation)

Palimpsest is a series of what artist Phi Phi Oanh calls “pictorial installations”. Lacquerscope is the name she has given to the lacquer projection machines that she created from lenses and old parts of small format film projectors. The name harkens back to the early age of mechanical reproduction that also coincides with the “invention” of Vietnamese lacquer painting in the last century.

Installation (Installation)

o que diriam as pedras a marte? [What would the stones say to Mars?] is a sculptural work consisting of two parts by arquivo mangue.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Embracing the conflicting negative and positive affect of the horror genre, Ho Rui An’s film Student Bodies is a self-described work of “pedagogical horror,” that organizes social, political, and economic events in Asia around the motif of the student body. Bound together by a suspenseful, eerie soundtrack, the film temporally cycles through its separate, though thematically interrelated, phenomena and events centering Asian students. Using the student body motif as a human signifier of varied connotations, the film follows phenomenon ranging from the Ch?sh?

Photography (Photography)

Dialect by Felipe Romero Beltrán is a photographic series that follows a group of immigrants who have recently crossed the strait (the maritime border between Morocco and Spain) to avoid border controls. The young immigrants settle in Seville while their legal situation is either resolved or refused. Reflecting on his own status as a migrant, Beltra?n’s series of photographs documenting Morrocan immigrants is a tribute to their trajectories; a trace of their existences.