Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways. He is usually depicted with two faces as he looks both forward and backward, to the future and the past. The video, which is deftly animated in collaboration with Aimée de Jongh, presents a close-up of a dying “duck-rabbit,” a vivified version of an ambiguous illustration made popular by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts. The video’s title figure, a Filipina actress, vaudeville dancer and singer who played racialized, peripheral roles in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, flits in and out of a montage of scenes. Ruperto digitally modified the 16mm film by blurring the background and all of the figures in each scene except for Cooper herself.

Installation (Installation)

Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change. Be Oblivion, in Disconnect (2011) is a sculpture and an intervention. Two cardboard boxes house white neon letters that collectively have the potential to spell “Be Oblivion.” The dismembered phrase is rendered powerless in its present state; the potential power lies with the viewer, who could conceivably reconstruct it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth. Set in an empty, derelict room with nothing but an old mattress on the floor, the film features a series of actors independently performing a demonic possession, or at least their interpretation of what one would look like. Although each reenactment is slightly different, actor after actor, the viewer is confronted with a common thread: a near archetypal response that binds them all together.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives. These conceptual throughlines also underpin Ruperto and Minnesota-based director Rini Yun Keagy’s eerie experimental documentary Ordinal (SW/NE) , which collapses mythology, scientific research, Californian agricultural history, American literature, and speculative fiction into a poetic and timely examination of possession, infection, and individual agency in an age of wanton industrial agriculture and alienation. Ordinal (SW/NE) tells the tale of a young Black man named Josiah as he navigates the banalities of daily life while potentially being possessed by a malignant supernatural force or stricken by valley fever, a little-known yet gruesome and sometimes lethal real-life respiratory illness which disproportionately affects farm and field workers, particularly Filipinos and African-Americans.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive. The original photographs were taken by anonymous photographers, not as art but as documents of the building of the Panama Canal. The laborers in the images are holding cans of kerosene and spraying it into the foliage.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Dark Beyond Deep by Zhu Changquan the film presents the process of how consciousness gradually develops and extends from the real world to virtual space through a raven named Cyma. Cyma redefined things in the “digital garden” in the film by comparing them with the logic in reality. It opened a new passage for mutual reflection between objects in real life and the existence of digital objects in digital space.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Dark Clouds Of The Future” is a cinematographic video animation of the abandoned gold mine in Brazil, Serra Pelada (“Naked Mountain”). Thought to be one of the largest mines in the world, made famous by the photographs Alfredo Jaar and later by Sebastião Salgado, the hand-dug mine is now a mercury-polluted lake. During his research trip to Brazil, Pachpute met many former gold diggers who used to work at Serra Pelada, inciting his interest in the concept of the witness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gikan Sa Ngitngit Nga Kinailadman (From The Dark Depths) by Kiri Dalena is a stylistically collaged film inspired by the true story of a young activist’s drowning. Moving between reality and fantasy, it depicts the story of a dead communist who sinks to the bottom of the ocean into a dreamlike subaquatic utopia. In the film a young woman mourns the death of an activist that took place years ago.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Blalock resists the immediacy that we have come to expect from photography—that each photograph should communicate its message without delay. Within the dark obscurity of three, three, three (2013), he frustrates and complicates this conditioned response to the photographic medium, questioning the photograph’s purpose.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. In midst of sounds of heavy breathing, the camera presents alternating scenes of a man and the shadow of a man wearing a long, pointed hat cast against a wall. Insinuating a sinister mood, the man and the shadow struggle to control the scene through alternating tugs and releases of a rope.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her 2015 work Orión is a black flag-like cloth with glow-in-the-dark symbols embroidered in the shape of the constellation. In the place of stars, Martínez has substituted the logos of international corporations and entities that use stars as their symbol; celestial navigation commanded by the logic of international corporations. Easily spotted is the smiling face of the Carl’s Jr. / Hardee’s logo, the three-pronged Mercedes-Benz emblem, Walmart’s six-pointed asterisk, and the starry cluster of the Subaru shield.

Photography (Photography)

In Gradation (2011), nine raspberries lined up on a lichen-dotted rock progress from left to right, dark to light, plump and juicy to not-yet-ripe. Through a curatorial act of collection and arrangement, Campbell alchemizes discrete instances of color, fabricating a gradient. Viewed alone, each berry would be unremarkable.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program. T. Hong’s research is not only an effort to revisit a dark time that complicates certain histories, but more importantly an investigation of how violence is enacted in the name of rationality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Monelle by Diego Marcon was filmed at night inside the infamous Casa del Fascio, the headquarters of the local Fascist Party in Como Italy, designed by Giuseppe Terragni under Mussolini’s rule. The building is immersed in darkness and it is initially difficult to recognize the iconic rationalist architecture, flashes of light illuminate languid adolescent girls sleeping amidst the space for just a few seconds at a time. Next to the bodies, strange humanoids are lurking, they are CGI-generated, but the human eye does not have enough time to register their artificiality, they materialize and disappear in a flash like ghosts.

Painting (Painting)

On the artwork, Rommel states: “I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Purity, where they take a lot of walks through the jungle in Uruguay, or Paraguay, I can’t remember. One of the characters takes a walk and jumps off a cliff; it’s kind of dark. The painting reminded me of a long, dark, and very serious walks in beautiful places.” With references to Howard Hodgkin in the incorporation of the stretcher into the painting and certain kinds of mark making, to Matisse’s cut outs and to the history of Cubist collage, Rommel has created a dreamy oeuvre that manifests her strong conceptual interest in process and unmapped journeys.

Installation (Installation)

The acronym “CFL” stands for an existing light standard (Compact Fluorescent Light) as well as a standard nutrient (Cognitive Fooding Laboratory). “CFL” is a mobile laboratory for growth of watercress shoots which contain high levels of anthocyanin – a natural pigment used by fighter pilots to increase their visual acuity at night in order to achieve better responses to light stimuli. In the work Celador, a taste of illusion (2007), the viewer is invited to consume the plants – a candy with the flavor of illusion.

Photography (Photography)

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water. Yet, ambiguous lights blink from buildings and yachts still sail on the water, and further observation reveals these structures to be miniatures manipulated by the artist through Photoshop and other postproduction image tools. The model city’s surroundings are themselves real abandoned spaces, perhaps an empty room, a wait-to-be demolished building, or a discarded bathtub.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Game (Six Pieces) by Erbossyn Meldibekov is inspired by the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle and is composed of three colors (red, green and white) instead of six, referencing the colors of the Afghan flag. The work provides a revisionist interpretation of the legacy of The Great Game (the original 19th-century standoff between Russian and British empires over Afghanistan), and Afghanistan’s position as a centerpiece of the longstanding War on Terror, (the military campaign led by the United States and their allies against organizations and regimes they identified as terrorists after 9/11). Game (Six Pieces) mobilizes dark humor and irony to illustrate the complex and unstable relationships between communism, Islam, and American and British imperialism.

Painting (Painting)

In DUST 171217 Zhang Zhenyu uses fragments of dust collected across the city, and then creates dark abstract paintings, repetitively gluing the material to the canvas, applying up to 30 or 100 layers and sanding until he arrives at a smooth surface. The result is a reflective surface, an abstract object in which the viewer can see themselves staring back. The project began in 2014 and reflects a rampant process of modernization in his native China.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series. It’s contrasting dark and vibrant tones presage his later series of works, exhibited at L. A.’s Hammer Museum as Scorched Earth. These larger works share a map-like quality, looking like aerial views of some scarred urban landscape.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tropical Siesta begins in a rural landscape of Vietnam. Very quickly, painted images of students sleeping on their school benches appear. A text speaking of how the communist regime has placed agriculture at the center of its economy reads alongside the images.

Photography (Photography)

The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits. It is unclear if these subjects are related, despite the obvious doubling of visual cues, and Lassry offers few hints to suggest that these men have any association beyond their sitting for the same picture. By extension, Lassry subverts conventions in portrait photography by identifying his subjects with numbers, erasing the familiarity inherent in the act of naming, Men (055, 065) functions as an anti-portrait in which anonymity supplants intimacy.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fog and Smoke is the first video Jeamin Cha made after returning to Seoul from London where she studied and started as an investigation into the meaning of “otherness” in documentary filmmaking. The opening scene depicts an abandoned construction site that had once been part of the Songdo International Business District in Incheon, near Seoul. In the dark of the night, the sounds of a countdown and piano notes fill an empty apartment building and echoes far into the unknown corners and hollows of a newly built city.

Photography (Photography)

“I focused on how the political and physical merged” analyzes Willie Doherty. Out of the Shadows II plunges us into a dark night lit by a few street lights in a deserted street where a car is parked in the Irish city of Derry. What is at stake is yet to be unearthed.

Painting (Painting)

Figura Noturna II by Antônio Obá depicts a dark figure, surrounded by a halo of light set against an even darker background. He has one eye open, which stares intensely at the viewer. The image relates to a theme recurrent in the artist’s practice: the figure lying awake at night.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Third Seal—They Are Already Old. They Don’t Need To Exist Anymore is part of The Seven Seals , Tsang’s ongoing series of digital videos that are projected as installations onto the walls and ceilings of dark rooms. Using texts and computer technology, the series draws its reference from various sources—the Bible, Judeo-Christian eschatology, existentialism, metaphysics, politics, among others—to articulate the world’s complexity and the dilemmas that people face while approaching “the end of the world.” The Third Seal is a nineteen-by-twenty-seven-foot projection on a single wall that, together with sound, creates an immersive and dynamic environment.

Painting (Painting)

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.

Painting (Painting)

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.

Performance (Performance)

Variation & Improvisation for ‘In Harmonia Progressio’ by Duto Hardono is part of a series of work that focuses on sound loops as a fundamental element of his performance – a metaphor that Hardono employs as he examines the human condition, such as time and temporal spatiality. Unlike other works, where he generates sound using analog cassette tapes, this performance uses the human voice. Participants are instructed to vocalize ‘In’, ‘Harmonia’, and ‘Progressio’ – words that make up a Latin phrase which means “progress inside harmony”.