Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Dud Effect is a film that revisits the fear of nuclear attacks during the Cold War by staging the firing of a R-14 missile by a solitary soldier on the site of a real Soviet launch base installed in Lithuania. For this film, Deimantas Narkevicius used no animation or 3D effects, instead it is the silence of the place interrupted by the voice of the Russian soldier (who truly served on a military base in Lithuania) that creates this worrying atmosphere in which the execution of such an act becomes possible. The War Game (1965) by Peter Watkins was a source of inspiration, since he displays a personal and collective concern about the danger of the nuclear arms race in the United Kingdom in the 1960s.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Concerning his objects, Pozarek often relies on chance to guide him. He uses scraps of wood, boxes, hinges and doors, keeping a close eye on what position each object will assume later in the space. Although it suggests the opposite at first glance, Zwillinge is autonomous and functionless.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Displacements works use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalogue for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico. Using pre-Columbian objects and other artifacts from Mexican history, the exhibition aimed to explore various representations of death in the Mexican cultural tradition. Roldán’s works begin with these rich black-and-white photographs and break them apart into fragments, slicing and dismembering the artifacts they depict.

Photography (Photography)

For Bettina Poutsttchi’s large-format, site-specific photographic work Echo (2009–10), the four exterior walls of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin were covered with a digitally edited collage of archival images of the glass-and-steel facade of the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), which had once been located nearby. That milestone of late East European modernism was completed in 1976. It served as the seat for the Volkskammer—the parliament of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Performance (Performance)

This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection). In this instance Ondak collected images of people queuing in front of all sorts of buildings in various newspapers. He then inserted these in a Slovakian newspaper without trying to give any coherence with the information in the text on the same page.

Mr. Black, Mr. Navy, Mr. Stripes is a photographic series of opera gloves made of men’s tailored trousers that were presented in 2017 in “La Plage” in Paris, a shop window turned into an experimental art space. The personification of the objects named after characters intended to compose a fiction from the display. The project follows Zhu’s thinking on the definition of “queer”: how to express a state?

Photography (Photography)

In this anti-collage, which comes from a series of 4, Macuga takes a photo she found in the archives of Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw. The series was made on the occasion of her exhibition there in 2011. In 2000, Harald Szeemann curated an exhibition at Zacheta called ‘Beware of Exiting your Dreams: You May Find Yourself in Somebody Else’s.’ The exhibition provoked a violent response as a result of his inclusion of Maurizio Cattelan’s La nona ora , where the figure of the Pope is struck down by a meteor.