Photography (Photography)

The two large-scale stereoscopic photographs in That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama depict a recreation of Elvis Presley’s recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. This study in doubles is underscored by its title, which repeats and doubles Elvis’s original song title. The images are hung in a specially angled wall and the viewers are provided special 3-D glasses in order to contemplate the image.

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.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances. Not to be mistaken as mere portraiture, however, Simmons’ works are explorations of the Black body in relation to landscape and other dimensions of non-linear space and time. Concealing and flattening her subjects with costumes and collage-like, abstract pictorial devices, the artist arranges archival photographs, printed textiles, and anthropological artifacts in configurations that highlight the power of visual culture to shape contemporary understandings of the self.

Installation (Installation)

home, a temporary place by Mithu Sen is part of a project called AºVOID. In this fragmented mental map, the landscape is fleeting, embossed, and ethereal; there are moments of recognition and also a near-violent sudden emptying of memory. Bodies are skeletal, nature is in entropy, context is removed.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects. Cuevas’s America (2006) is a wall painting of a comic Donald Duck wallowing in a heap of gold coins, alluding to Mexico’s postrevolutionary mural tradition. The mural’s background is one of the earliest illustrations of flora and fauna in the American continent, juxtaposed with a reference to America as having bountiful natural resources available to be exploited, and the historical use of comics as ideological tools.

Painting (Painting)

Vivian Suter paints her canvases and then allows them to come in contact with natural elements. For thirty years she has lived in isolation in the Guatemalan jungle, accumulating canvases, sometimes leaving them out for long periods of time. As a result, Suter does not title or date her paintings.

Installation (Installation)

wombmate! by Mithu Sen is part of a project called AºVOID. In this fragmented mental map, the landscape is fleeting, embossed, and ethereal; there are moments of recognition and also a near-violent sudden emptying of memory.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

RE-ANIMATED by Jakob Kudsk Steensen revolves around the haunting sound of the Kauai’O’o, a bird that became extinct in the year of Steensen’s birth. Its mating call, recorded and circulated on YouTube, where it has attracted hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of comments from viewers who felt the need to share their own emotional connection with this creature. For Steensen, the video exemplifies the way in which digital media experiences can serve as a memorial for a disappearing natural world, and how they can activate deeply felt connections with nonhuman creatures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible . Other well known works by Ramirez feature the movement and endless symbolism of the sea—like the simultaneous engagement and retreat of the tide—but La Memoria Verde takes the land, plant life, and its human inhabitants as its subject. The film begins with a soft, green, algae-like image that waxes and wanes in focus, then gives way to swaying treetops blowing in a soft wind.

Photography (Photography)

Natura Negra , which translates to “Black Nature”, is a black-and-white photographic series by Chanell Stone that explores the connection between the Black body and nature within man-made environments. The series features a compilation of environmental portraits staged in urban “forests” that explore the notion of “holding space” within one’s immediate environment. Each image depicts an effort to reclaim and reconnect with the earth, even in spaces of compartmentalized nature like backyard gardens, flora intended as urban beautification, and lush public spaces.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.)

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Imjingawa is Hwayeon Nam’s first foray into borrowing from the documentary form. The root of the work is a Japanese song with Korean diasporic connotations, which the artist heard inadvertently years ago. While tracking the inception and history of the song, her research explored the song’s potential to live beyond “legal, national, ideological, and geographical barriers.” The song earned its fame when it was introduced to the Japanese band, the Folk Crusaders.

Painting (Painting)

Abel Rodríguez’s precise, botanical illustrations are drawn from memory and knowledge acquired by oral traditions. They are the visions of someone who sees the potential of plants as food, material for dwellings and clothing, and for use in sacred rites. Terraza Alta V is part of a series of drawings that track the changing appearance and life of an area identified as Terraza Alta.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Cardón Cardinal by Patricia Esquivias is part of a series of video works in which the artist develops a narrative in front of her computer screen. In this work, the computer sits on a covered piano keyboard, and the reflection of the artist is sometimes visible on the black surface. Cardón Cardinal is a collage of references that revolve around the removal and displacement of a 46 foot tall Pachycereus pringlei , a type of giant cactus also known as a cardón , from Baja California, Mexico to Seville, Spain.