Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s video installation Rewilding consists of three large-scale projections placed across the exhibition space. The poetic footage filmed by the artist portrays three interconnected worlds: a colony of termites; a piano repair workshop in the outskirts of Manila; and an empty concert theatre. Their interconnectivity is shaped by the voice-over of three narrators: a musician discussing the balance between order and chaos found in classical music; a piano repairman describing termite infestations in an instrument of European origin; and a scientist describing the unique social structures of this tropical parasite.

Photography (Photography)

Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U. S. naval shipbuilding company—in Maine. Gary Gilpatrick, Insulator (2008) belongs to a group of portrait-like photographs of the shipyard’s workers lunchboxes. Created over the period of a year, Lockhart’s film and accompanying still photographs are intended as an exploration of the social spaces inside this kind of workplace.

Photography (Photography)

Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition. The title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior.

Photography (Photography)

Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works. Distinctly modernist in style, the photos depict two of San Francisco’s most recognizable sites—the affluent neighborhood of Nob Hill and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge—through extremely estranged angles and balanced compositions. Moreover, these two images are representative of Gutmann’s work inasmuch as they epitomize two of the photographer’s visual obsessions: the automobile and the city of San Francisco.

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)

Jepira is a mythical and essential place of the spiritual dimension for the Wayuu people. It is the starting point and final resting place in their transcendence process which is part of the territory and not dissociated from it, such as in the Catholic notion of Heaven. Today, the Pilon de Azúcar hill which corresponds with Jepira is part of their reclaimed land and connects this dessert culture to the sea; it is the place the Wayuu go when they need to speak with the dead which, along with dreams, is the main way to access spiritual knowledge.

Painting (Painting)

Wonocolo by Maryanto is part of a body of research and work that has been investigating the mining realities of Indonesia and Nigeria since 2015. This acrylic painting refers to ‘Texas’ Wonocolo in Bojonegoro, a traditional oil mine in East Java. Initially built by the Dutch and abandoned during Japanese occupation, it was revived under Indonesia’s independence (1949) and is now a controversial issue between local sovereign right and environmental concern.

Installation (Installation)

Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Resiliencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience by Naomi Ricón Gallardo is a fabulation in which four characters find themselves in temporalities that overlap Mesoamerican narratives about the creation of the world with the contemporary time of accumulation by dispossession. Together, they summon the powers of fire and joy so that the opossum conjures its ability to play dead and resuscitate in extractivist areas. The work reanimates Mesoamerican fables about time and territory where the four characters—Hill, Opossum, 9 Reed (Mixtec cave deity), and Agave/Mayahuel (Moon and Pulque Goddess)—create a space for conceptual intervention through performative action and popular music.

Painting (Painting)

Every work in Hoeber’s 2011 series Execution Changes is titled in alphanumeric code. The geometric pattern that composes each acrylic-on-panel painting is determined by a preordained ratio of 2 to 3. But even though a formulaic system determines the image’s structure, its surface is full of painterly effects.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Free Categories #14

Photography (Photography)

Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter. The room seems messy and in disrepair, but simultaneously romanticizes the scene. The fruit and the sitter suggest a robustness in contrast with the mise-en-scene.

Photography (Photography)

Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky. The women in the photograph exist ambiguously here. The photograph’s title, the subject’s outfits, and their environment suggest that they are both trapped and glorified within their position.

Photography (Photography)

Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s is from the series “As We Walked on Water” (2010-2012), which looks into Singapore’s history around the phenomenon of land reclamation. After exhausting the country’s own soil from its tiny hills and ridges, the government had to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue its reclamation efforts. At the early stages of a land reclamation project, the imported sand would sit idle for some time, forming an artificial desert-like landscape.