Film & Video (Film & Video)

The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment. Chen Xiaoyun has added a written narrative and a poetic quality to his works. Image fragments containing different pieces of information are linked together by the text, their interplay producing a synesthesia effect.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Humor and Law, Kick of Duality, Point of View III, Selfie with Pan, and Thinking of You are part of an ongoing series of digital drawings Karam Natour has been creating since he was studying at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. The protagonist of the vast majority of these drawings is Natour himself, naked and without facial features. They were initially created only in digital formats – the artist would perform the postures required for the drawing, document himself and then trace the figure digitally – to be posted on Facebook, often generating debates online among friends and colleagues.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sung Hwan Kim created the drawing push against the air 01 during a rehearsal for his eponymous 2007 performance at De Apple (as part of Prix de Rome), Amsterdam, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. For the performance, Kim interviews his frequent collaborator David Michael DiGregorio and a fellow musician, Byungjun Kwon, about love songs they have composed. The performance appears spontaneous and creates a space of vulnerability and intimacy, however in reality, the three rehearsed the performance numerous times and performed it in numerous cities.

Painting (Painting)

En Guard Souvenir is composed of a group of eleven elements (ten paintings on paper and a sculpture) which deconstructs and recomposes the context of Tienanmen Square in Beijing. This square is known for numerous political events : the cultural revolution between 1966 and 1976, the arrest of the Gang of Four and protests in 1989 where thousands of demonstrators who were protesting against the corruption of the regime were killed. In this work, Bruno Pacheco alludes to the historical importance of this place, the choice of viewpoints reveals very precise but sporadic details there : part of the mausoleum devoted to Mao, a portrait of him and its frame, a view overlooking the Forbidden City, etc.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations. One of their projects consists in using virtual reality (environments created to simulate this world) for therapeutic reasons for soldiers suffering traumas after the Iraq war. The double projection creates a parallel between animations and testimonies by soldiers reliving their mission, the explosions, gunshots and ambushes, their fears and their guilt.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In SEA STATE 6 Charles Lim takes the viewer down the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore, a massive underground infrastructure for oil and fuel storage, built to support the commercial operations of oil traders, petrochemical ventures and manufacturing industries in the area. The first of its kind in Southeast Asia. Located at a depth of 130 meters beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong Island, the Caverns provide infrastructural support to the petrochemical industry that operates on Singapore’s Jurong Island, a cluster of islets reclaimed into one major island and connected to the mainland in the 1980s.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In SEA STATE 6 Charles Lim takes the viewer down the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore, a massive underground infrastructure for oil and fuel storage, built to support the commercial operations of oil traders, petrochemical ventures and manufacturing industries in the area. The first of its kind in Southeast Asia. Located at a depth of 130 meters beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong Island, the Caverns provide infrastructural support to the petrochemical industry that operates on Singapore’s Jurong Island, a cluster of islets reclaimed into one major island and connected to the mainland in the 1980s.

Painting (Painting)

The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection. Various vanishing points and interior perspectives, like in another painting dated the same year called Continental Breakfast , create a complex matrix in which motifs, shadowy or geometric forms coexist to further confuse the map of this space. A disturbing yet alluring virtual reality composed of a medley of seemingly abstract designs is depicted through digital and painterly means.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the islands of the Strait of Hormuz off the southern coast of Iran, a distinctive local culture has emerged as the result of many centuries of cultural and economic exchange, the traces of which are seen not only in the material culture of these islands but also in the customs and beliefs of their inhabitants. Central to these is a belief in the existence of winds—generally thought of as harmful—that may possess a person, causing her to experience illness or disease, and a corresponding ritual practice involving incense, music and movement in which an hereditary cult leader speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in one of many local or foreign tongues in order to negotiate its exit. While their exact origins are unclear, the existence of similar beliefs and practices in many African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to the south of Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This particular drawing, like many of Grotjahn’s works, presents a decentered single-point perspective. Unlike the traditional vanishing point, the rays here emanate from the surface’s middle and hover around an indefinite and impossible convergence. The resulting fluttering of the image’s sections animates the drawing in relationship to its named subject, the butterfly.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The sculpture And Shadows Will Follow is an angle piece that articulates a space since its appearance highly changes depending on the point of view. Initially conceived for an exhibition with natural light, this work diffracts light and projects a shadow like a cut-out. Surprisingly the work stands like a drawing in space, a graph and its imprint, a line and a point.

Painting (Painting)

Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot. The arrows and directional lines suggest movement, but the forms they point to intertwine, prohibiting a straightforward reading. The shapes are as illustrative as a Rorschach inkblot; in their confounding, simple indeterminacy, they depict nothing and everything at once.

Painting (Painting)

Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure. The courtroom as a space for the implementation of justice and of legal argumentation, but also through which different affective forces, some hegemonic and others marginalized, battle each other out in their respective quests for acknowledgment, accountability, and retribution. The work was produced at a time during which several popular revolts, such as in Egypt, seemed to have effectively been hijacked by reactionary forces, resulting in the violent dismissal of collective demands for emancipation, including through sham trials and wrongful convictions criminalizing activists, journalists, and protesters.

Painting (Painting)

Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure. The courtroom as a space for the implementation of justice and of legal argumentation, but also through which different affective forces, some hegemonic and others marginalized, battle each other out in their respective quests for acknowledgment, accountability, and retribution. The work was produced at a time during which several popular revolts, such as in Egypt, seemed to have effectively been hijacked by reactionary forces, resulting in the violent dismissal of collective demands for emancipation, including through sham trials and wrongful convictions criminalizing activists, journalists, and protesters.