Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. Central Station shows a character reaching to wipe a tear from her face as the blues of her wardrobe seem to blend in with the dismal blue of the background.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The figure in Alignment slouches with his head in his hands in a gesture of failure or despair, speaking to the difficult task of balancing individual freedom and societal rules.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The two characters in Argument interact in an ambiguous gesture of conflict or embrace as the world around them pulsates in agitated waves.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago. They were Christians and pagans that were often oppressed by the majority Muslims in the Riau community and were eventually forced to convert to Islam. Zai conveyed this history in Converting through the stark contrasts of red, white, black.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore. Inspired by the women of Riau, Back to Mother seemingly traces the central role of maternal figures in nourishing of Riau’s history as an early archipelago kingdom that was Hindu, Buddhist, and animist prior to 14th-century Muslim invasion. Organic materials such as beeswax form a layer of balm protecting threads of red paint symbolic bloodlines in a turtle-formed mandala—a primordial womb that recalls the Hindu and animistic origin of Singaporean society.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open. A bundle of small red rattan balls hang from the front end of the plank, precariously knotted to a single thread hanging from the gallows’ edge. A book hangs from similar red threads at the plank’s rear, its surfaced wrapped multiple times over with the thread to hold it in place, the red thread resembling blood vessels or connective tissue.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (Colors) and Untitled (Ghost) are representative of McCarthy’s work. Upon first encounter, her abstract colorful compositions resemble somewhat formal nonrepresentational landscapes. However, a closer inspection reveals the presence of a lowbrow style that draws inspiration both from outsider and folk art traditions.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A painting reminiscent of a certain “naive primitivism,” Untitled (the way in is the way out) is representative of McCarthy’s work. Upon first encounter, her abstract colorful compositions resemble somewhat formal nonrepresentational landscapes. However, a closer inspection reveals the presence of a lowbrow style that draws inspiration both from outsider and folk art traditions.

Performance (Performance)

Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space. Upon hitting the cold, hard gallery floor, the seemingly confused interpreter writhes slowly on the ground while reciting a few lines from the curatorial statement in a whispered moan.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Soufiane Ababri’s desire to construct a historical family and a genealogy of queer kinships in Bedwork / Yes I AM sees him conjuring up a pantheon of gay writers and artists whose intellect has changed the course of human history and development, despite their outsider status. Figures as disparate as Michel Foucault, Glenn Ligon, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and André Gide populate Ababri’s drawing series in the artist’s signature naïf style, their homosexuality the thread that connects them. The series of over forty drawings are part of Bedwork, a larger project that Ababri began in 2015.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Bath Time by Sharif Waked is a short video based on the tragi-comic outcome of the Israeli Blockade and the wars in Gaza. The story tells about how, after a war and the ongoing economic pressure, the Gaza Zoo lost several of their animals, and decided that they could paint a donkey so that it could pose as a zebra. The video imagines the donkey in the shower after a shift impersonating a zebra at the Gaza Zoo, as the hot water slowly washes its faux stripes away.

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.

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)

Eclipse is a series of screenprints from Jordan Kantor’s larger vitrine installation that included reworkings of a single image of a small group viewing an eclipse through shielding cut-outs. Printed on a clear surface, the work plays with ideas of obstruction and viewing, connecting spectacular natural phenomena with contemporary art making.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Letter I Never Wrote is one of the most powerful series of Jinoos Taghizadeh. This is a series of stamps reflecting on variety of issues that the artist finds them important and critical to be discussed and seen by the public, which is also hidden and not talked enough by the Iranian government. From extremely political issues such as the chain murderers of intellectuals and politicians in Iran to environmental changes and archeological decadence of historical heritage, Taghizadeh is using one of the most popular form of circulation for information and communication to put these issues on top of them.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Letter I Never Wrote is one of the most powerful series of Jinoos Taghizadeh. This is a series of stamps reflecting on variety of issues that the artist finds them important and critical to be discussed and seen by the public, which is also hidden and not talked enough by the Iranian government. From extremely political issues such as the chain murderers of intellectuals and politicians in Iran to environmental changes and archeological decadence of historical heritage, Taghizadeh is using one of the most popular form of circulation for information and communication to put these issues on top of them.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision. Often the artist works with the motifs of the counterculture and contemporary non-religious spiritualism. The figure hangs suspended—seemingly ascending—animation.