Installation (Installation)

Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself. The title of the piece comes from the literal translation of René Magritte’s painting from 1938, La Durée Poignardée , whose more familiar translation is “Time Transfixed.”

Photography (Photography)

Mofokeng’s experiences during the turbulent time of the 1980s in South Africa led to a turn in his practice, opting to turn to the crowd, focusing on individual faces and bodies within the masses to tell a story of the collective resistance that is present in the daily life and surroundings of South African townships. “Miriam Maine’s funeral” urges the viewer to connect to the sadness that they are witnessing in the scene. Miriam Maine — the sister in law of Kas Maine a tenant farmer Mofokeng documented for historian Charles Van Onselen — was a respected member of the Bloemhof community.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall. More than a simple reference to the sport, the work has the disconcerting effect of creating a danger zone in the gallery space. The reference to direct aggression or violence is reinforced by the piece’s rapid pace.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province. It begins with sound – perhaps a hammer, or a gong – the lack of image making its identification difficult. A landscape emerges of an open field where a farmer tends his grazing cow herd.

Installation (Installation)

Landscape Series no. 1 presents landscape as a “quiet witness of history.” It began with searches of online archives of Vietnamese news-media, for images of figures in landscapes “pointing, to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing.” The uniformity is striking but the sequence is subtly structured: the typology hints at narrative progression, though of an uninformative narrative, lacking details.

Painting (Painting)

Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu initiated the series 1000 Pieces (of White) in 2009, as a way to produce objects and images as a portrait of their shared life as partners and collaborators. Interweaving public and private, personal anecdote and pop cultural appropriation, their work attests to the poetry of the everyday. In addition to found and original materials, the artists have occasionally incorporated drawings and sketches by artist friends, and even by their own daughter into the ongoing work.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Erratum: Brief Interruptions in the Waste Stream exists as performance, sculpture, drawing, video and the printed word. In a short video the two artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine transform a porcelain toilet into bricks in four movements. In quite brutal actions, they use sledgehammers to smash the toilet into small shards that are then reshaped to form a stack of bricks.

Painting (Painting)

Calling attention to campaigns for land rights, survival, and sovereignty, Prabhakar Pachpute’s recent works consider how farmers in India use their bodies in performative ways during acts of protest. The oil painting Inclined uncertainties depicts a grotto-like city atop a boat carried by headless human bodies. The waterless boat navigates through a desolate landscape, propelled forward by the faceless humans, who appear to be holding the cumbersome structure together.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Home (good infinity, bad infinity) by Lêna Bùi sheds light on the experiences of those who live along, and on, the waterways of Saigon, Vietnam and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Vietnam is a tropical country of major sand extraction; the UAE a desert country of major land reclamation. Scenes of the Saigon river being heavily eroded due to industrial machines mining sand for construction of skyscrapers are interspersed with images of concrete jungles, and aerial views of Saigon and Sharjah varying in scale and style.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

SUPERFLEX makes a distinction between two types of projects with different temporalities: works that occur during an exhibition and other that evolved over several years. Thus, since 1997, they are working on a biogas system (SUPERGAS), first installed in Kenya, then Thailand and today in Mexico, perfecting at each stage the means of production, utilization and commercialization of this system. GUARANA POWER is one of these sustainable projects that create a real economy.

Photography (Photography)

In 2011-12 the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers staged a 10-part series of conversations and collaborations with scientists, theorist, and philosophers inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film, Powers of Ten (1977). PoT was an IBM sponsored documentary that visualized the relative scale and limits of the known universe, both macro and microscopic, through a sequence of magnifications by 10-to-the-x-power. Using the picnic as human-scale index, Futurefarmers capture their meetings with scholars through audio, photography, and then distributed the results publicly through a website and publication .

Installation (Installation)

On September 22, 1940 the French signed an accord, which granted Japanese troops the right to occupy Indochina. The Japanese presence in Indochina lasted until the end of World War II and during the occupation, jute supplies from India were interrupted. Jute was used to make sacks as well as gunpowder, a crucial material for the war industry.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After Reality is a video by Zhou Tao, which was born out of his residency with the Kadist Foundation in Paris in 2012-13. Prior to arriving to the residency, the artist had begun filming in in Guangzhou, China, capturing footage of the lush vegetation from the semi-wild and semi-urbanized zones of Guangzhou’s urban fringe and a group of Dragon Boat rowers training in the adjacent river. As he arrived in Paris, he was confronted with the radical difference with which Europeans arrange and organize environments: the highly manicured cityscapes of Paris in stark contrast with the overgrown abundance of Guangzhou.

Installation (Installation)

Descent into the Fungal is a two-channel video and a sculptural installation. The mushroom / sculptural element is site-specific and is grown from readymade mushroom blocks sold by mushroom farmers. They are given two weeks to mature and follow their natural cycle, bringing the natural element directly into the white cube.

Photography (Photography)

For the works KAKERA, Bullet Train and KAKERA, Loving God Tatsuki Masaru traveled throughout Japan to visit museums holding kakera (which translates to “fragments”) of Jomon Period potteries –Japan’s pre-history 2,300-15,000 years ago. Small and fragile, the kakera were donated by farmers who had found them in their fields, or by archeologists, and then wrapped in newspapers and stored away. Today they sit quietly on the shelves of museums, unknown to people.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

All Nations are Created Special is a black and white woodcut print by the artist collective Pangrok Sulap. Emblazoned across this fantastical 10 metre long print is the Bahasa Malaysia phrase Semua Bangsa Tercipta Istimewa , which loosely translated means “All Races are Special”. Pangrok Sulap takes the translation one step further, as the title of the work declares “All Nations are Created Special”.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?