Painting (Painting)

Carib Carnival illustrates Aubrey Willams’s unique artistic language, combining Pre-Columbian iconography with abstraction. A series of abstracted shapes that resemble bones, masks and serpent-like images surrounded by fiery vapors and gases, illustrate the destruction of culture as one of the predominant themes of Williams’s work. He considered the Mayan and Aztec cultures to exemplify a number of present-day faults; according to Williams they developed technologies that would eventually lead to their own destruction.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion. The plane appears as an anthropomorphized figure: lying on the sands of the beach without its wings, it resembles a sculptural torso that has lost all its limbs, with cables coming out of its body appearing as internal organs. These injuries remind the viewer of the danger inherent in these artifacts, and the potential for both heroism and death implicit in flying them to far-away territories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Beyond the White Walls , with a commentary written and spoken by Jeremy Deller, is often wryly amusing. The artist narrates the many projects he has completed or which are in progress beyond the gallery walls. It is beyond the gallery where Deller is at his most effective and where his art reaches out to and into people’s lives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing. As the shot widens it reveals the process we see unfold: a piano being vigorously tested by a factory machine designed to determine the endurance of the instruments. Contrary to what is often relayed, the work has nothing to do with Chinese factories or fast changing global economies.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Dora Garcia’s work is a result of institutional critique and more generally that of language, following the conceptual artists of the 1960s like Weiner and Kosuth and Fraser from the 1980s and 1990s. What a fucking wonderful audience (2008) is positioned conveniently at the crossroads of several trends identified in the work of the artist. The performance from which it is derived, was made at the Biennale of Sydney in 2008, taking the form of a guided tour at the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney and focuses on artworks that were not physically present.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this four-channel 10 min video installation different episodes play simultaneously on the four screens. The artist has arranged several different scenarios and symbolic props which make it easy for viewers to feel the pervasive ambiguity which cannot be put into words. On the one hand, our imagination is tempted by the delicate details, but on the other hand, our imagination is limited through a very rigorous structure.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked . Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions.

Photography (Photography)

Kastura (2012) is an installation consisting of 24 black-and-white photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto bequeathed by Kimura’s grandfather; free-standing structures on which they are hung; and ornamental plants. The photographs appear to have been taken in late 1950s soon after tours of the villa were first offered to the public. Then, as today, visitors were led by a guide and could only follow a designated route.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Akira Takayama’s work Happy Island – The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous , five video screens perpendicular to the floor feature footage of cows grazing and resting in the rolling hills of a farmland. Renamed ‘The Farm of Hope’ by owner Masami Yoshizawa, the property is located 14 kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and is part of a now restricted area that became highly contaminated with radiation after an earthquake and tsunami caused leaks from the plant in 2011. Most of the livestock in the restricted areas have either starved to death after being abandoned by their owners or have suffered from the effects of radiation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Through the language of dance and choreography, Void by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity. Serafin’s research into the making of this dance video is centered around creation myth stories of pre-colonial animistic religions from the Philippines, which were suppressed by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism. Through movement, the materiality of his bodily presence on the screen, and the accompanying sci-fi soundtrack, this work proposes the foundation of a queer mythology; the nascent moment of a ‘queer spiritual force’ coming out of an apocalyptic era, perhaps our current one, that has arrived to refund a new kind of humanity.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering. Amy Balkin’s neon sculpture I (heart) Data Mining , takes on this issue by revealing the acronyms or abbreviations of both technology companies and government bodies that have either profited from data mining, or have used it to political ends. The culprits include Facebook, Investigative Data Warehouse, Apple Computer, The Department of Homeland Security, Narus, Target, and Twitter.

Painting (Painting)

Strongly influenced by history and memory, Goddy Leye’s paintings are based primarily on stories and mythologies. Containing ideas, emotions, and sensibilities, signs and symbols occupy an important place in Leye’s work, though he has to retrieve them from an interrupted history. The painting Animal was made in reference to an important precolonial kingdom, Bamun.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chinese restaurants have been a familiar feature of Swedish cities since the late 1970s, embodying the foreign and the exotic. Lap-See-Lam started the project by documenting the interiors of several Chinese restaurants in Stockholm at a time when many of them were about to be taken off the map. Her own family was selling their business in 2015.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made the TV series: “France / tour / detour / two / children”, in which they aimed to identify the lifestyle of French people in 12 episodes of 26 minutes each. On each episode a little boy and girl are firstly asked about their daily lives. By broadening the scope of the interview, the questions of Godard and Mieville gradually bring the protagonists to think of themselves as subjects in the history of the world, to “live and see themselves on television” with a critical point of view.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pasajes I is the first in a series of Sebastián Díaz Morales’s four videos Pasajes , which focuses on a solitary man walking through Buenos Aires. He walks through churches, shops, and libraries—accessing completely different interior spaces simply by going through doors. The seamless editing allows the man to transcend locations: after he enters a house from a busy intersection he emerges in the halls of a school.

Installation (Installation)

Jonas Staal’s installation is based on the thesis written by Fleur Agema and titled “Closed Architecture”. The paper, written by the second most important person of Geert Wilderds’ Freedom Party, concerns an ambitious model for a new prison that focuses on the reconditioning of prisoners by means of four phases. Staal’s work is developed through a book, a plan and a 3d virtual tour in the social imagery of a current minister of the State of the Netherlands.

Photography (Photography)

The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Goddy Leye’s installation work The Beautiful Beast , a video is projected onto a gold-colored wooden box filled with sesame seeds. The sesame seeds look like pixels underneath the video, suggesting the texture of animation. The artist portrays a strange man who writhes on the ground like a beast against this ‘pixelated’ field.

Installation (Installation)

End of 2008, Pierre Leguillon presented at KADIST, Paris the first retrospective of the works of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) organized in France since 1980, bringing together all the images commissioned to the New York photographer by the Anglo-American press in the 1960s. This exhibition, destined to tour in various locations, presents the original pages of the magazines, including “Harper’s Bazaar”, “Esquire”, “Nova” and “The Sunday Times Magazine”. As Pierre Leguillon states: “The mythology surrounding Diane Arbus’ character is willingly set aside to offer a more neutral point of view on a more unfamiliar part of her work, although it was mass-distributed.” Many of the characters portrayed in these commissioned works seem less sensational at first glance than the “freaks” that made Diane Arbus’ work so famous, since the retrospective MOMA organized in 1973 in New York, two years after her suicide.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Cluster Illusion examines the brain’s tendency to recognize a pattern as something abstract. Rather than seeing the distinct dots of which the images are composed, our brains turn these dots into illusory clouds. This series is a study of human vision and a commentary on the human urge to find shapes and patterns in anything, giving coherence to the whole.