Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Last Postcards is a series of three small double-sided paintings on plywood in which Biernoff imagines the last communications from explorers lost in the wilderness. Biernoff’s choice of Everett Ruess, Percy Fawcett, and the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader is particularly telling. On one level, the Last Postcards analogize the nineteenth-century explorer with the contemporary artist who looks for purpose in their work.

Installation (Installation)

In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs. Although the imagery present in her work might seem nostalgic upon first encounter, Biernoff’s complex tableaux often reveal the artist’s skeptical look towards her subjects matters. They Were Here (2010), constitutes a clear example.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set in the haunting space of an ex-colonial rubber plantation in Central Vietnam, Phuong Linh Nguyen’s film Memory of the Blind Elephant is a tender portrait of the complex economies of interspecies trauma and resilience in the face of continued extraction and destruction. Formerly present in the coronation of Potau Apui (the Jarai King of Fire), in Dr. Yersin’s exploratory crew during the colonial period, and now a major draw for tourists, the figure of the elephant is ailing, grievous, as though haunting its habitat. Intrigued by the reality she observed, Phuong Linh gathered, documented, altered, repositioned the local materials of ceaseless exploitation of natural resources: raw rubber, ferrosols, and aluminium to assert a critical proposition.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s documentary Four Hundred Unquiet Graves is a powerful and vulnerable visual essay about the descendants of those who were disappeared during the Spanish Civil War from 1936–1939. The film reveals the spectrum of violence that surrounds the war, namely the impact of thousands of forced disappearances on different generations. Surviving family members are haunted not only by the absence of their grandparents, but also by the overwhelming grief that lives in their parents.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Guardian 2 Naufus Ramírez Figueroa explores the historical memory and political reality of the ruins of Kawinal, an archeological site of postclassic Mayan culture that was flooded in order to construct the hydroelectric dam of Chixoy in 1975 in a supposed effort to bring electricity to the country. However, the reality was that the communities living in the area faced the swamping of their lands and properties, and endured the loss of their sacred sites. Those who refused to relocate became the victims—many of which were women and children—of what came to be known as the 1982 massacre of Río Negro at the hands of the military, the spectral traces of which still pervade behind the natural and cultural landscape of the region.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

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.

Installation (Installation)

In the process of creating this deeply personal body of work, titled Recollecting Memories , artist Hitesh Vaidya repeatedly visited the site of his ancestral home that was destroyed during the devastating earthquakes in Nepal in 2015. Through meticulous paintings on salvaged debris, artefacts, and memories, Vaidya navigates the trauma of being uprooted and re-examines his relationship to a fractured past. This aspect of this installation includes various materials from the artist’s former home, including wooden beams and pillars, door and window panels, stone, and floor and roof tiles.

Photography (Photography)

For the last few years, Che Onejoon has been focusing on the relationships between African countries and North Korea. He has attempted to interpret the ongoing Cold War in the Korean peninsula from a new geopolitical perspective. His resulting body of work focuses on the memorial monuments, statues and architectures that were built in 13 different African countries by North Korean government.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Behold A City 4 extols the old grandeur of Manila, the nation’s storied capital – the complex nexus of heritage, modernity, and all sorts of compulsions, political or otherwise, that attempt to define it. This is not Manila whittled down to a scale model but a re-imagination of the city by Ryan Villamael in his ardor to approximate its complexity both as a physical, urban fact and an evolving concept. Behold A City 4 features an entirely new topography and arrangement.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dreaming of the dream of the dream is a 16mm projection consisting of images of waves that come and go continuously. The artist has assembled extracts of cartoons in which water is visible (the sea, bubbles, a stream, waves, etc.). Somewhat nostalgic, these extracts can recall either childhood cartoons or paintings by Hokusai.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In keeping with her mythological proclivity, Minotaur (2009) casts a new light on an old narrative. The film takes the ancient Greek story of the half-man, half-bull as its title subject, but at its core, Minotaur is an homage to pioneering modern dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin. Along with Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer, Halprin’s fearless and lifelong dance practice paved the way for the evolution of modern and contemporary dance as we understand it today.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Tsumeb Fragments was produced for the exhibition at Kadist, “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine” in 2015. In Spring 2015, Nkanga travelled to Namibia, making her way along an almost entirely defunct railway line from Swakopmund to Tsumeb. The artist was intent on reaching The Green Hill in Tsumeb, an area renowned for its minerals, crystals and copper deposits.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Bady Dalloul’s Scrapbook is a 48 minute video beginning from his birth, tracing major global events of the 20 th century, including the beginning and current Occupation and colonization of Palestine, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assassination of family members and the Syrian diaspora. A voice over follows these moments as the camera traces over the collage that includes text; photos; postcards; origami birds; and inserted videos of world leaders. The film is a letter to the viewer, imploring the witnessing of what we assume, but cannot know, to be the artist speaking.

Photography (Photography)

Born in 1974, Kano, Nigeria, Otobong Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Nkanga makes use of different mediums like drawing, performance, photography video or installation to put forward observations and sensations of the everyday influences in our social developments, environment and culture. Her works refers to autobiographical narratives and social ecological realities of spaces of her homeland and places she encounters.

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.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Borrowed Faces is a photo novel published in 2019. These framed colour photographs are selected scenes from the novel. They mimic the aesthetic of a dated comic strip but instead contain vibrantly coloured, digital photos; here the ‘live’ element of the photographic medium meets the theatrics of the graphic novel.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Hole’s Journey by Ghita Skali follows a complex political satire involving a worn-out floor, a political activist, and the Ouled Sbita tribe of Morocco. For 23 years, the director’s chair at an international art institute in the Netherland’s scratched the wooden floor below it. For Skali’s project, a 102 cm x 120 cm section of this scratched floor was cut out and mailed to an expropriated region in Morocco.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A woman you thought you knew by Sin Wai Kin originates from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere . Wearing exquisite hair and makeup and a pair of silicone breasts under shimmering diamanté lingerie, Sin Wai Kin’s former persona, Victoria Sin, assumes an alluring, inviting, and intimidating pose. Through subtle and slow movements, this atemporal courtesan appears as a living deity, whose presence embodies codes of representation found in brothels from the turn of the century, burlesque, and Beaux Arts female nude painting.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lifting Barbells is a video by Kim Heecheon that narrates his letters in Spanish to his girlfriend in Argentina, discussing his feelings after his father died in a bicycling accident. Using the data recorded on his father’s smartwatch, Kim’s video traces digital footage of his father’s route on Google Maps, the location of the accident, and his cardiographic data as he was dying. The video contrasts Kim’s emotional letters with the clinicality of the quantitative data recordings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Landslides is a cinematographic essay/poem by Caroline Déodat in which fictional images are the result of research into the memories of a Mauritian dance born during colonial slavery, the Sega. In the film, the contemporary Mauritian dancer Jean-Renat Anamah crosses mythical landscapes of the Sega that merge with intimate territories. From the pixels of the digital image and the signals of electronic music, this film exhumes in layers of landscapes the spectres of a ritual erased by history through a personal genealogy: between haunting memory and deferred archive.

Photography (Photography)

For the photographic series Rumpty Trumpty , in 1997, Allan deSouza photographed the Trump Taj Casino in Atlantic City, NJ, reprinting the images again in 2017, from digital scans of the negatives. These negatives bear the traces of extensive damage wrought over time. These dust damaged and scratched prints appear as aged and out of date as the orientalist fantasy that they depict.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In conjunction with KADIST’s 2017 exhibition If Not Apollo, the Breeze , artist and filmmaker Lynn Marie Kirby performed Transmissions , a video and live reading created with longtime collaborator Etel Adnan. Inspired by time spent together in Paris, the piece incorporated open-ended conversation about the oracle, Mount Tamalpais (a subject of long-standing fascination for Adnan and the subject of hundreds of works), and a suite of collaborative drawings. The drawings, made in India ink and created spontaneously, are remarkable evidence of two lives, minds, and hands in dialogue.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dhuwã (term used by indentured people of Natal for ‘smoke’), is a single-channel film by Sancintya Mohini Simpson that traces back to the lived experiences of indentured labourers taken from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) to work on sugar plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family were contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal. Filmed originally in 16mm film, Dhuwã captures sugarcane plantations in North Queensland, initially in moments of stillness that are gradually disrupted by a crescendo of repetitive sounds and fast camera movements that culminate in the fields being engulfed by flames.