Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Destinos Posibles Garciga performs a service in Havana, Cuba by offering strangers in the streets a “ride” to wherever they are going for free, in exchange he demands that the passengers address the question “what do they want from life?” A poignant video within the context of the limitations the Cubans have in terms of choices, desires, fantasies, and longing.

Photography (Photography)

La Cultura de la Felicidad (The Culture of Happiness) is a series of five photographs addressing everyday life—a couple in a bed, lovers on a bench and a family reunion. The subjects wear masks made of white cardboard. The series suggests the idea of a reality hidden under the appearances of the power in place that denies violence to citizens.

In 1995, the personal and professional archives of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán were acquired (including the rights to the name and the work of the architect) by the Swiss furniture enterprise Vitra. Frederica Zanco, wife of the owner of Vitra, had received these archives as an engagement present, rather than a solitaire diamond. In this video, The Exhumation , the artist poses the question: how to navigate the laws that render Barragán in public space?

Painting (Painting)

Too Many Names by Troy Chew is a patchwork of contemporary Black culture and resistance, including hand-sewn symbols and patterns found in the coats of arms of the kings of the Dahomey region (now Benin) that ruled from 1600-1900. This painting is part of the series Out the Mud, a longterm project in which the artist explores African American history through the lens of traditional mudcloth techniques found in the West African countries involved in the Transatlantic-slave trade. The title of the series references the technique and materials for making mudcloth.

Painting (Painting)

Ventana indiscreta (Rear Window) by Karen Lamassonne takes its title from Hitchcock’s renowned 1954 classic. The painting is part of Lamassinne’s Homenaje a Cali [Homage to Cali] series, developed by the artist in 1989 in a nostalgic attempt to immortalize Cali at a time in which violence from drug trafficking had rendered it unlivable, and the generation that Lamassone had lived it up with had all but dispersed. Lamassone had formally established in Cali around the middle of the decade at a time in which the hangover from the 1971 Pan-American Games and an artistic effervescence had transformed it from a provincial sleepy town into a newly discovered urban (and sexual) labyrinth, one that was fit for the artist’s own explorations around its representation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Man and Gravity follows the journey of a man in an old, beaten motorcycle, struggling to transport his possessions through a mountainous landscape. At times riding swiftly and at times caught in a bind, we witness the man fighting against gravity and the roughness and irregularity of the terrain. The film draws on the artist’s own Buddhist beliefs, referencing the writings of ascetic Thai philosopher Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, who uses the concept of gravity as a metaphor for karma and destiny.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Invalid Throne by Jakrawal Nilthamrong is a 35mm film that searches the protagonist Kamjorn Sankwan’s memory and connection with the land he grew up in. Using Nithamrong’s cinematic language of visual representations and soundscapes without narration, he highlights a non-human-centered view to meditate upon and reveal the sublime and unspoiled natural landscape ? as Nilthamrong states: “in the middle of nature where no man has claimed ownership”.

In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text. The otherwise banal scissors become suggestively violent in relation to the text, which was originally the title of a print in Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War series. However, Baldessari is less interested in the logical relationships between text and image than he is with the conceptual leaps that the viewer makes with the limited information provided.

Photography (Photography)

Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc. : Arm (with Bottle) belongs to Baldessari’s most recent series of paintings in which the artist brings together photographic, painted, and three-dimensional elements, to juxtapose unlikely body fragments such as noses and ears, elbows and knees, or eyebrows and foreheads.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive. In Person with Pillow: Desire, Lust, Fate , a woman’s facial expression is obscured by such void, leaving only her posture to suggest her emotional state. The two images stacked above the woman can be read as comic-style thought bubbles, intimating that she has lust, desire, and fate on her mind.