Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape. Cortright’s backgrounds are made seedy by the appearance of digitally-rendered strippers, while various layers of internet escapism collide together in an infinite loop. The dancing girls are sourced from VirtuaGirl, a software that makes footage of strippers available for download.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects. Capitalizing and commenting on the ubiquity of homemade video, the short film replicates with banal proximity the amateur special effects that thrive on the web. This rather cliched visual trick recalls a funhouse mirror, or, perhaps more aligned with Cortright’s frame of reference, a dream-sequence cue from after-school 90s television.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair. Marshal Tie Jia is a frog god, who was born in a pond in Jiangxi, China, before fleeing to Matsu Island off the coast of Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution after his temple was destroyed. Spirit Writing attempts to reconstruct the original temple using 3D modeling software, operated in real time as Hsu asks the Marshal questions, receiving answers through a divination ritual in which the chair is swung violently around by his acolytes.

Painting (Painting)

What Color is Luke Murphy’s outstanding digital painting that elegantly loops in nonstop motion. The artist cleverly usurped the familiar signage of brightly scrolling words that we ordinarily see calling out to advertise a Bodega or sidewalk cart’s fast food. In a DIY manner, Murphy constructed the extra-luminous LED panel screen and also wrote the code that sets the pace and pattern of the flowing words.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As the video Datamosh begins to play, Yung Jake emerges out of a colorful, smoke-like background and breaks into rap. Malfunctioning green screens and pixelated digital mash-ups bleed into each other in a parody of the music video trope and specifically of the trend of ‘datamoshing’—a digital technique commonly used across this genre. The song’s lyrics distinctly borrow from the lexicon of rap, combining mentions of clubs, money and fame, with self-referential and humorous lines that literally describe the way in which the artist subverts the medium.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

His large installation entitled The Museum of Proletarian Culture (2012) looked at the changes in artistic practice that have occurred in Russia throughout the last thirty years – from the amateur art of the late Soviet era to the commercialized post-Soviet cultural practices and the more recent self-expression via contemporary social networks. Thus, the exhibition becomes a whole installation where it is impossible to distinguish architecture from assemblage, facts from fantasy, document from fiction. It is a museum of museums where viewers find themselves in the era of didactic exhibitions; whereby the main protagonists are workers, engineers, and amateur artists, and finally replaced by the creative class of 1990s and 2000s.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

His large installation entitled The Museum of Proletarian Culture (2012) looked at the changes in artistic practice that have occurred in Russia throughout the last thirty years – from the amateur art of the late Soviet era to the commercialized post-Soviet cultural practices and the more recent self-expression via contemporary social networks. Thus, the exhibition becomes a whole installation where it is impossible to distinguish architecture from assemblage, facts from fantasy, document from fiction. It is a museum of museums where viewers find themselves in the era of didactic exhibitions; whereby the main protagonists are workers, engineers, and amateur artists, and finally replaced by the creative class of 1990s and 2000s.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

El Salto (The Jump/The Waterfall) by Juan Covelli depicts the Salto de Tequendama, a waterfall located on the outskirts of southwest Bogota. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the waterfall served as a national symbol that captured both the singularity of its geographical reference point, as well as the romantic experience of nature and immensity. The video installation arises from a detailed archive research into historic representations of Colombian landscape and reflection on their role in the present-day imaginary of the country and the wider world.

Textile (Textile)

Sombras de los Valles (Shadows of the Valleys) is part of a series of works created by Bayrol Jiménez in which he is influenced by hand-painted signs and large billboards in Mexico. From small artisanal store-front insignia to widespread symbols and lettering, Jiménez looks at how this iconography shapes Mexican cultural identity. It is worth noting that the hand painted signs especially are highly unique, especially in an age of homogenised digital images and reproduced typefaces.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

His large installation entitled The Museum of Proletarian Culture (2012) looked at the changes in artistic practice that have occurred in Russia throughout the last thirty years – from the amateur art of the late Soviet era to the commercialized post-Soviet cultural practices and the more recent self-expression via contemporary social networks. Thus, the exhibition becomes a whole installation where it is impossible to distinguish architecture from assemblage, facts from fantasy, document from fiction. It is a museum of museums where viewers find themselves in the era of didactic exhibitions; whereby the main protagonists are workers, engineers, and amateur artists, and finally replaced by the creative class of 1990s and 2000s.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

ÆTHER (Poor Objects) by Li Shuang builds on the artist’s consideration of the interplay between physical and digital spaces. Through a kaleidoscopic video collage, Li examines the complexities of personal subjectivity within an increasingly immersive and omnipresent online culture. Among disparate imagery that includes extra-terrestrial simulations, dizzying hordes of birds, animated figures trapped in dystopian virtual spaces, and real-life abandoned places, the video references the Chinese creation myth of Nuwa, a goddess who uses her own body to repair the sky.

Photography (Photography)

Through a hand-painting process, Shi Guowei created Manufactured Landscape . At first glance, the painting appears from afar as a landscape photograph. Yet, upon closer attention, the work reveals itself as a landscape painting thoroughly hand-colored by the artist onto a photograph.

Installation (Installation)

The Chair (2012) foregrounds media-based tensions between analog and digital imaging technologies as a means of challenging the continued circulation of visual ephemera from India’s colonial past. A mix of found photographs and staged studio portraits deliberately made to look older, The Chair features multiple portraits of figures dressed in period costumes that reference the ornate fashions popular during Great Britain’s imperial rule of India. A hybrid frame wraps around this assemblage, a composite of variously ornate and simple wood finishes culled from disused and forgotten pictures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

They/Them by Juan Obando is a video essay and deepfake that uses Adobe Stock clips, maintaining their branded watermark, but animating the scenes underneath with a narrative of self-critical awareness. It’s a meta-narrative that uses the staged scenarios (as evidence) to talk about the variable politics (and mercenary capitalism) of the stock footage industry and the misinformation dilemma we’re facing with the arrival of AI technology. In a surprising reversal, a deepfake is used to tell the truth.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video work Any Resemblance is Coincidental , CHEN Zhexiang mined portraits of real Asian criminals that were abandoned on the Internet. In order to form a database of the portraits, he saved the files under the original names retrieved from the Internet. CHEN used digital facial recognition technology to build a lexicon of the criminals’ facial characteristics in order to analyze them.

Photography (Photography)

Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment. Referring to China’s modernization and its capitalist and utopic visions, RMB City explores the ways in which global communication impacts imagination, values, and ways of life. By appropriating virtual reality, Cao Fei opens up a new frontier in the field of art production that surpasses conventional materiality and invites collaboration and exchanges with her public and clients.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

If one had been guessing at Takeshi Murata’s criticism of American consumerist culture up until watching Infinite Doors , it would be solidified after hearing the announcer from The Price is Right squawk prizes one after the next. In the two minutes of the film’s runtime, can count the word “new” used twenty-eight times, and “car”—the holy grail of prizes on that show—used eight times. The bodacious women introduce free prizes, the doors slide open repeatedly, and the crowd cheers with an insatiable appetite in a clear signal of an American propensity for numbing overconsumption.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Cao Fei’s video La Town, 2014 depicts a mythical metropolis that has been destroyed by unknown forces. Although the damage is obvious, as the camera navigates across the elaborate, handmade dioramas, the inhabitants of La Town carry on with their activities and the normality of everyday life pervades. As the film progresses, the latent chaos and violence begin to emanate from every corner of the miniature city: a bloody briefcase left on the ground, a kidnapping scene, an axe murderer on the loose, a ferocious man-eating octopus—all rendering the darkness of this new post-apocalyptic world order.

Photography (Photography)

Diversionist is part of the Cosplayers Series from 2004. In Cosplayers Cao Fei depicts the popularity among Asian youths of “cosplay” in which daily life is merged with images of video games and popular films. For many, this virtual reality is an outlet to “transcend” the paradox of a developing society in which the pleasures of consumption and depression of alienation go hand-in-hand.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fly was first commissioned as an immersive video experience for Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2016, imitating the mosaic structure of a fly’s eyes with a patchwork of projectors. As a single channel video, this work focuses more on the succession of sequences, shot in Bennani’s hometown of Rabat, showing interviews with relatives, an open-air market or a wedding, and jamming them with surreal digital manipulations. A recurrence throughout the film is a fly that accompanies us along the journey, as a childish motif or the symbol of a vanitas , able to sing Rihanna’s song.

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.

NFT (NFT)

Radical Digital Paintings is a collection of 239 works that were painted from 2016–2021; one exemplary image from the series is #98 . This painting was made after Scudder did the first ever Radical Digital Painting show, a hybrid performance/painting/lecture that brings together his painterly and pedagogical interests. In Scudder’s work, it is often difficult to pick apart what is a painterly effect versus an artefact of a lens-based or computational process.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964). Ezawa uses his signature cartoon-like style to remix and reenact these crime scenes, leaving only the artworks as “real” objects (as they are depicted in the films), rather than illustrating them. Reversing fiction and reality in an unexpected way, this gesture invites the viewer to question the reliability of the visual footage.

Painting (Painting)

Something To Do With Being Held by Jordan Ann Craig is inspired by a Cheyenne bead bag. Intrigued by the two shades of blue used for the source object (a deep dusty blue and a bold vivid cobalt blue) the artist replicated these shades in her painting. Craig then added in her own colors, including the pink-orange hues, to achieve a bold but soft quality about the work, as she states that she intended the work to convey vulnerability.

Photography (Photography)

Composed of four images, the series Sleeping Elephant in the Axis of Yogyakarta (2011) explores the artist’s observation of how Javanese mythology and cosmology have marked the geography of Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Indonesia. Through photomontage digital operation, an identical elephant is superimposed in front of iconic landmark of the city: Parangtritis Beach, Sultan Square, the City Monument and Mount Merapi. These four locations are spiritual symbols and the subject of cosmological beliefs in Indonesia and the imagery of elephant has long been considered as a cultural and religious icon.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

biarritzzz is interested in how the development of the internet, and experimentation in the virtual world happens simultaneously with the experimentation in the material world of the human species; and how these developments reflect the precariousness of life within neoliberalism. The title of their video work Mandacura is a corruptela (a linguistic distortion on writing or pronunciation) of the Portuguese sentence Mão da Cura (Healing Hand), distorting Portuguese into what sounds as Brazilian Afro-Indigenous. Inspired by and using the music and poetry of Alberto Marques, and drawing sources from archival images, webcam videos, screenshots, gifs and memes, the video asks: What provokes our feelings toward society, history, culture, and the future?

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film. Displayed in a custom cabinet, these imaginary drugs are materialized as physical objects, packaged in meticulously designed boxes, listing dosage and description information along with references to the fictional source. Each box is filled with placebo tablets.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

His large installation entitled The Museum of Proletarian Culture (2012) looked at the changes in artistic practice that have occurred in Russia throughout the last thirty years – from the amateur art of the late Soviet era to the commercialized post-Soviet cultural practices and the more recent self-expression via contemporary social networks. Thus, the exhibition becomes a whole installation where it is impossible to distinguish architecture from assemblage, facts from fantasy, document from fiction. It is a museum of museums where viewers find themselves in the era of didactic exhibitions; whereby the main protagonists are workers, engineers, and amateur artists, and finally replaced by the creative class of 1990s and 2000s.