Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his photographic series Périphérique (2005–2008), Mohamed Bourouissa used the composition of classical paintings to stage the portrait of friends and young people in the banlieue s (suburbs). He states “by deconstructing the clichés surrounding this subject, I deal with the problematic power struggle and its mechanics.” This series follows various themes explored throughout the work of Bourouissa. For Temps Morts, his first film, he depicted a yearlong series of mobile phone exchanges with someone in prison.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

During Summer 2011, few months after the nuclear accident, performance artist Kota Takeuchi got a job at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and kept a blog about the labour conditions of clean-up workers. In 2012, he exhibited an ‘anonymous’ video taken from the 24-hour live feed on TEPCO’s website that monitored the clean-up activities. The video, which then went viral in Japan and became known as the “Finger Pointing Worker”, captured someone in a protective suit, entering the frame and pointing his finger at the video surveillance installed by TEPCO on the nuclear plant site.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In her new series titled Ninas Peruanas Cusquenas , Teresa Burga depicts young indigenous women from Peru’s Andean region, dressed in traditional garments. Sourcing imagery from the internet, the drawings recall an untitled series of drawings from 1974, in which Burga selected images of women at random from various print media, and then rendered the images on paper. Those drawings, like the newer ones, suggest the perils of images without context––how assumptions are made, stereotypes are formed, and knowledge is gathered.

NFT (NFT)

For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders. The series of looping three-dimensional animated videos are only seconds long—a timespan familiar to gif and online meme culture—and feature global dictators, strongmen and strongwomen, kings and queens, princes and princesses, emirs, sheikhs and sheikhas, sultans, shahs, emperors and empresses, popes, ayatollahs, presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and GOATs. The subject of cakes has a specific personal meaning for Raad, whose first job as an adolescent was photographing pastries at a bakery in Beirut.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Interrogation is a video constructed entirely from still film photography and photoshop collage — playing out as a photomontage along with a voiceover. By using still photography instead the moving images, Wang Tuo creates room for the audience’s imagination. The voiceover produces a rhythm to enhance the tensions in the work.

Installation (Installation)

Lengüitas sagradas (Blessed Little Tongues) by Juliana Góngora is the result of a careful creative job between Juliana Góngora and the Koreguaje community and their workshop Masipai. During several months, the artist and the community leaders Juven Piranga and Yinela Piranga kept an essential communication to materialize one hundred miniature bags, knitted with cumare and containing tiger chocho and rattle seeds inside. Each ‘little tongue’ has been knitted using the colors that identify the clans that form the artisans of the Masipai group (wise people).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco.

Photography (Photography)

In her 2003 series “Better Lives”, Sue Williamson explores stories of immigrants in search of a better life in a historically contentious South Africa. In an attempt to address and confront xenophobia in South African history, Better Lives series subverts racism and prejudice by emphasizing the immigrant as human, and thus gives the subjects a voice. “Better Lives: Richard Belalufu” tells a tale of surviving in a hostile South Africa through the undercurrent reflections on violence, abuse and the difficulty of finding home as an immigrant.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To make the video installation Soft Staycation (Gaze Track Edit) , the artist, playing the role of ‘job creator’, hired a group of unemployed and expat freelancers through Craigslist to watch a 30 minute compilation of national tourism ads. These ads, which are generally sponsored by various publicly funded tourism boards and screened in airports for example, were found on the Internet by Keller. He used a gaze-tracking camera to measure the eye movements of the people participating in the experiment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Untitled” was filmed in Bodh Gaya, India during a residency in 2011. There, he came across a scene that appealed to his interest in the political and social aspects of modernity. He filmed a policeman who, seemingly, is controlling traffic.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nathan Lewis has always made figurative and abstract drawings, which are related to anatomical textures and patterns he encountered when working as an ICU nurse. Hence the title of this work, Tissue II , is a spare and elegant work, in which the artist combines hand sculpted paper with embossment and frottage for the first time in his practice. The effect recalls African weaving and skin embellishment, but also reflects the influence of his former job as an intensive-care nurse, seeking to heal the most damaged.

NFT (NFT)

In the agricultural areas of Mexico, Indigenous people use the mylar magnetic tape unspooled from VHS cassettes as an alternative to the scarecrow—the reflective tape flutters in the wind and does an excellent job scaring birds away from crops. This kind of creative reuse of materials (overproduced and devalued) that flow through the global trade of consumer goods, is especially rich in Mexico and other parts of Latin America. In 2020, during a period of isolation due to Covid-19, Edgardo Aragón unspooled a VHS tape and installed it in his father’s crop of corn for six months.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For the work Wigan Pit-Brow Women: Intersections with the Caribbean (mobile) , Candice Lin studied English Victorian Arthur Munby’s racialized and masculinized drawings of working-class white female miners. Specifically, Lin’s work critically addresses Munby’s observations about the laborers’ femininity that was more concerned with the modesty of the women, than that they toiled in life-threatening situations. “Pit brow women” or “pit brow lasses” were female surface laborers at British collieries.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium. The Glossies are drawings, rectangular forms applied with blank ink and watercolors, which fill up the sheets parallel to the edges except for a small margin. Finally, the whole paper is covered with an adhesive plastic laminate, which gives it the shiny surface of a photograph.