Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gated Commune , a video by Camel Collective, is a critique of the complex, and often obtuse, language used to describe sustainable development projects. To construct a future scenario in the imagination of the viewers, a voiceover narrates two perspectives of futuristic practices in architecture and social behaviors: neo-primitives on one hand, who value organic materials and design based on geometric forms, and futurists on the other hand, who value organic forms and computer design. In this constructed universe, both perspectives lead to societal structures that malfunction due to issues with their design, which are not in line with their users’ needs.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Something Other Than What You Are by Camel Collective is formed by two works: a multi-channel video installation with controlled lighting, and a single-channel version with stereo sound. In both works, the 36 minute video depicts a narrative taking place outside of a live theater performance in the form of monologues that moves between the production and technical crew. There is a set of three different characters—a lighting technician, a lighting designer, and a professor all played by the same actress who share in their personal experiences and attitudes the precariousness of their work, the problems and myths of collaboration, and the obsolescence of theatrical technology.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland by Karrabing Film Collective is a surreal exploration of Western toxic contamination, capitalism, and human and non-human life. Set in a land and seascape poisoned by capitalism where only Aboriginals can survive long periods outdoors, the film tells the story of a young Indigenous man, Aiden, taken away when he was just a baby to be a part of a medical experiment to save the white race. He is then released back into the world to his family.

Photography (Photography)

The series “The Golden lines” was started in 1996 and consists of photographs with “spiritual-transport” lines. While they resemble subway maps or star clusters, the lines mostly refer to ancient Chinese diagrams of Dao and inner alchemy. Both of the images are of undisclosed actions performed by Collective Actions on the field in Kyevy Gorky.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Aktionsplan is a map of the field by Kyevy Gorky. Here Monastyrsky locates many of the iconic actions that occurred between 1977 and 1999. In this drawing, the static positions of the audience are marked with circles while the audience that re-locates is marked with hexagons as an arrow delineates their trajectory.

Painting (Painting)

After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective. This “return to origin” reveals an interesting critical reflection on the interactive relation between outside change and internal reflection, and the possibility for more experimental approaches that revive “traditional media.” Chen’s series Collective Memories depicts some of the most important architectural works and urban sites in modern Chinese society, especially those related to the history of revolutions. Instead of reproducing the images himself, Chen invited the public to participate in their making by using their fingers to paint directly on the paper or canvas.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leonardogillesfleur describe Action 3:02 as their “first New York blizzard storm at about 5am. The photographic moment of a photo album which could have been taken by anybody in any familiar situation with the intention to immortalize that moment.”

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Of Action 26:15 leonardogillesfleur notes: “There is almost an ice-cream store in every corner of Buenos Aires. The family [in the video] is having an ice-cream in the hot summer afternoon. Small tics appear on people’s faces from a fly or the attempt to hold still while the ice-cream top melts or drops off its sugar-cone.”

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

BF15 is a preparatory study for the collective’s intervention at the BF15 gallery in Mexico, near Monterrey. It includes a photograph, a collage, sketches and notes. The intervention consists in the seamless extension of the wall of the BF15 gallery beyond the property boundaries, invading the sidewalk and the street, entering public space.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter. As the artists dice, mix and plate meals, they begin throwing food at each other—the scene rapidly turning into a battlefield made of food projectiles, broken glasses, and dirty settings. Disruptive, playful, and aggressive, the protagonists’ actions fuse the spontaneity and innocence of children’s games with the force and reality of adults.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. The video takes the form of a channeled message from Adama, High Priest and spiritual leader of the Lemurians.

Installation (Installation)

In this work, Omer Fast probes the feelings experienced by young people involved in an acts of war. Four monitors installed in the form a chariot of war relay the words and faces of four young Israeli soldiers. The installation shows a young generation confronted by the reality of danger, whether being attacked or facing death.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. These drawings were created during the trial of political activists pursued by the government that the artist would regularly attend. During the tribunal, the artist would let his pen slide freely across his notebook, replicating the automatic drawing techniques of the surrealists.

Painting (Painting)

The Exploitation of the Dead cycle is composed of a very large number of elements which the artist reorganizes differently every time. The installation is presented like a “parade of objects”, with images whose historical role has been suspended or their meaning has changed. The references have become lost, through repetition the works have become banal.

Installation (Installation)

In a broader sense, the meaning of ‘blackout’ —primarily an electrical failure or momentary interruption, opens up to new organizations, perceptions and different ways of experiencing time and space. Every person caught in a blackout must redefine the potentiality of public space, relate to strangers and invent new temporary forms of organization. A blackout acts as the breaking point of an established order, on a personal level as a loss of consciousness or on a collective level, as the temporary disruption of political institutions for example.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including the Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-metre cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.

Photography (Photography)

Redefining The Power (with Didi Fernandes) is a metaphor of how reflections on history and society during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) are largely ignored within the canon of history. Resulting from Kia Henda’s research on the Fortaleza de São Miguel built by the Portuguese in the 15th century in Luanda, Angola, the Redefining The Power series was created 10 years after the Angolan Civil War as a reflection on the reactivation of memory surrounding historical monuments. Through this work, the artist aims to replace the memorialized colonial heroes and war symbols through re-appropriation, determining traumatized lands as forms of resistance and pride.

Installation (Installation)

The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions. This work by Native Art Department International signals a reminder that we–the audience and institution–are located on and occupy traditional territories. The work appropriates and twists white artist Sam Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) in response to his work Scaffold (2012) installed in 2016-7 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Unit/y we see Amapola Prada in the center of the screen wearing an oversized, worn out sweatshirt, socks and flip-flops—standing motionless on a dimly lit street in her native Lima, Peru. As the video progresses, people, stray dogs, and cars pass by unbeknown to her presence, inescapably fulfilling their roles in the everyday. The title of the work gives us a clue.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Summer Camp , Lola Gonzàlez filmed a group of friends at the home of her parents in the department of Charente (France) in the process of transforming the house into a training camp. They are doing exercises with the furniture as if they were training to fight against something yet to happen. Gonzàlez ’s films persistently evoke the same fear of an external threat, one which is never explained but which can be placed in relation with the current political situation and social tension.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Orbit by Bo Wang is based on the story of Hu Na, a former professional tennis player who was known for defecting from the People’s Republic of China. While on tour in California for the 1982 Federation Cup with the China Federation Cup team, Hu Na fled her hotel room and sought refuge at a friend’s home on her second day in the United States. In April 1983, she requested political asylum on the basis that she had a well-founded fear of persecution because of repeatedly refusing to join the Communist Party of China’s tennis team.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion. The plane appears as an anthropomorphized figure: lying on the sands of the beach without its wings, it resembles a sculptural torso that has lost all its limbs, with cables coming out of its body appearing as internal organs. These injuries remind the viewer of the danger inherent in these artifacts, and the potential for both heroism and death implicit in flying them to far-away territories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

16 films is a selection of David Haxton’s single-screen videos, which he began producing in the 1970s as a continuation of some of the conceptual underpinnings of his earlier film installations. As the described by Haxton, “[he] became interested in in examining the nature of the medium [of film] including light, movement, and the formation of a three-dimensional illusion of space in a flat surface.” This selection of films were produced in 16mm film between 1970 and 1982 and have been digitally mastered in high definition from the original 16mm films, which are preserved by the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles. Reminiscent of the paired back, low-fi quality of other conceptual video work from that period, Haxton abides to a certain criteria to restrict aspects of the medium: he does not do any editing, always fixes the camera onto a single position for the whole duration of the films, and he limits the actions of the performers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices describing histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints. This work by Jane Jin Kasen and Guston Sondin-Kung explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist. The video begins with the image of a ghost-like female figure, representing La Llorona, slowly walking down a well-known street in Oaxaca, from the main square (el Zócalo) to the Teatro Macedonio Alcalá, with a painful expression on her face. According to this famous oral myth, the Weeping Woman drowned her two sons in a fit of grief and anger after her husband abandoned her.

Installation (Installation)

In the nine-channel video installation, Against Step by Yim Sui Fong, a phantasmagorical image of a male dancer appears on a large-scale video projected on a floating retro-projection screen. His cathartic sequence of movements is based on an index of the bodily behavior of random people previously recorded by the artist while observing thousands of Hong Kong citizens in public space. Some of this recorded footage, done in poor mobile video quality, is played on loop in a set of TV monitors placed below the large projection.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site. Here, Tanaka has spread out various objects he collected throughout the city of Guangzhou. By fiddling with a window frame, water buckets, plastic bags, cardboard, soda bottles, and many other things, Tanaka creates fragile, temporary sculptures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tourisme International was shot as the recording of a show on the scale of a country. In the urgency of perpetual travel, this tourist journey visits monuments, museums, institutions presented by North Korean guides whose voices we do not hear. Marie Voignier entirely redesigned the sound of each sequence in post-synchronization, making only the living experiences of footsteps and rustling of clothes audible, to create a new universe, disconnected from the official discourses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Na China” means “In China” in Igbo language. Marie Voignier’s film NA CHINA! focuses on the African women communities who have emigrated to Guangzhou, in the southeast of China.