Sculpture (Sculpture)

Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015. The sculpture, employing the technique of traditional Atzompa pottery originating from Oaxaca, Mexico, is an examination of the way in which archaeological heritage is remembered in the earthenware made by Atzompa potters today. Accompanied by the publication ‘Ixiptla Vol.

Installation (Installation)

Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object. They are playful and exaggerated representations of “kill hole pottery” — ceramic dishes in the Mimbres tradition with distinct circular holes located in the center of the pots. Although very little is known about the Mimbres culture’s specific beliefs, they are loosely understood to have terminated the object symbolically in preparation for funerary use.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Do ut des (2009) is part of an ongoing series of books that Castillo Deball has altered with perforations, starting from the front page and working inward, forming symmetrical patterns when each spread is opened. The books belong to O Mundo dos Museus (The World of Museums), a collection conceived by the Brazilian designer Eugênio Hirsch in the 1970s. More than simply a catalogue of artworks, each offers the reader a promenade through a different world museum and its functioning, starting with photo reportage of the building, its urban landscape and architecture, the management and restoration of works, and visitors walking though the galleries.

Photography (Photography)

Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo. Tsai placed live hermit crabs and shells in a sandy enclosure at the site, writing fragments of The One China policy and the Taiwanese Independence statements on each shell. As the hermit crabs moved and swapped shells, they formed new connections between the statements.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies). They are studies for two large sculptures that explore the role of monuments and emblems in the configuration of Latin American national identities. The first drawing reproduces an equestrian statue of Juan Lavalle, one of Argentina’s independence heroes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Benefiting from its geographic proximity to Hong Kong, since the 1980s Dongguan has become the factory of the world, with toys, plastic products and clothing as the major industries in the town. During its heyday, the region produced 50% of the world’s manufactured toys, but since 2008, the toy industry has declined as the factories moved to South East Asia. Archaeology of the Present (Dongguan) No.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As an artist Francisco Camacho Herrera seeks ways in which his work can exist within, and challenge, official social channels. His practice revolves around the possibility of art to bear practical effects on cultural assumptions and reflects on redefining common concepts that can lead art to change the ways in which we conceive society. Camacho Herrera speculated that Chinese sailors might have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eschewing their current musicological function, 4 mourners on a mantel presents photo-realistic depictions of said figures on top of a hypothetical collector’s fireplace. Herein, these funerary objects are displaced as curios which stare back at the viewer in signs of grief and confusion.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Typical Weapons is a series of sculptural interventions where Alejandro Marre transforms traditional Guatemalan craft objects usually sold as souvenirs into weapons. Wooden flutes, hacky sacks, and musical instruments are woven with rope to appear as nunchucks, slingshots, and other forms of armament. Designed to be exhibited as objects from an archaeological museum, the previously innocuous representations of Guatemalan popular culture acquire darker meanings as they come to symbolize the brutality and extreme violence that now mark the country.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Intersticio (Interstice) by Elena Damiani traces the topography of a non-specific site, an in-between zone. The video presents a panoramic view of two territories of a shifting and unresolved character, composed out of segmented events that visually intersect at a shared horizon point. Over the images, a fragmented and ambiguous poetic narration describes, by means of images found in digital archives, a hybrid site that permutes the representation of nature through its fusion of source material.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

As a discipline born at the same time as colonialism, archeology is struggling to rid itself of this sad context. It is simultaneously the science of the creation and the restoration of ruins. Ali Cherri is interested in auctions of archaeological objects and the desire they inspire in this context.

Painting (Painting)

Kadar Brock creates dynamic abstract paintings that are born from a process of painting, scraping, priming, sanding, and painting again. Retaining a commitment to his established process, Brock layers paintings about personal memory, family history, and iconographies of New Age religion, alongside representations of masculinities found in the characters of American and Japanese comic books and film. The physical and emotional process of creation, often taking place over many years, enables a reverse archaeology of the self and renders a delicate balance between body, memory, and psychology.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nos visages ( Our Faces ) continues Nidhal Chamekh’s research around visual souvenirs of figures of the past and the light they might shed on our contemporary era. For this series of drawings, the artist draws from articles of French colonial propaganda, specifically the magazine Le Miroir , founded in 1910. In these documents Senegalese and Berber “infantrymen” participating in the First World War were represented in a way that situates them “somewhere between the ethnographical survey and the hackneyed colonial and orientalist image” says Morad Montazami.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist’s Passings series are hand-sewn works composed of radiological scans of items of clothing loaned by the Tiraz Foundation in Jordan. These articles – Palestinian, Jordanian and other Arab costumes from the 19th and 20th centuries from the Widad Kamel Kawar dress collection – are mixed in with contemporary clothing sometimes borrowed from participants in Kiswanson’s performances. In this particular piece, a tracksuit is overlaid with an 18th century Jordanian Robe.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Blue Elbow (Coude bleu) is made from plaster, burlap, lacquer, pigments and plastics. The materials related to the techniques of the sculpture or the painting but also others, which refer to commerce, to objects of consumption. The chair refers directly to the body as does the title of the work, Blue Elbow .

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013. In the series, the artist persistently dissects, examines and describes his experiences and memories of his family and life in Tunis, Tunisia. As underlined by poet Arafat Sadallah, the artist draws eyes and gazes of unachieved portraits, hands and arms of a skeleton—figures disappear but they witness and testify.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013. In the series, the artist persistently dissects, examines and describes his experiences and memories of his family and life in Tunis, Tunisia. As underlined by poet Arafat Sadallah, the artist draws eyes and gazes of unachieved portraits, hands and arms of a skeleton—figures disappear but they witness and testify.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Uncomformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

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.

Photography (Photography)

The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.

Photography (Photography)

The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.

Photography (Photography)

The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les nucléaires et les choses by Hikaru Fujii is the first video produced in the artist’s long-term project focusing on the Futaba Town Museum of History and Folklore, located in the “difficult-to-return zone” since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011. Over four years, Fujii filmed the rescue and displacement of this museum’s collection of archeological, historical, or cultural artifacts outside the zone, in order to avoid radioactive contamination and biological damage. He followed the actions, gestures, and reflections of the Futaba Museum curator Takamitsu Yoshino and his collaborators, charged with the preservation of these objects and the knowledge they contain about the territory they come from and the life of its community, struck by the disaster.