Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three Maiko s were included in Ron Terada’s 2008 exhibition, Voight–Kampf , at Catriona Jeffries gallery. More ambitious in size and subject matter, this show with its complex video installation marked a new path for Terada’s work. Voight-Kampf is based on a scene from Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner in which a giant advertising billboard in the midst of a dystopian city of Los Angeles in the future displays a geisha eating candy.

Photography (Photography)

From Green to Orange is a series of silver films immersed in a bath of dye and rust. While the perception of the subject is made difficult by the chemical reaction, vegetation becomes discernible at a closer look. Thu Van Tran interferes in the depths of a mystery, in the density of a hallucinated dream.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development. The single-channel video Waltz of the Machine Equestrians is a response to the overwhelming number of motorbikes and scooters overtaking the streets of Vietnam as small agrarian communities have been displaced by the construction of skyscrapers. The video shows 28 “equestrians” on motorbikes and scooters arrayed into a rainbow cavalcade held together by strings clipped onto brightly colored ponchos.

Painting (Painting)

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building. Viewers unwittingly become voyeurs, peering through the rectangles that stand for windows and observing the residents therein, who ponder questions both mundane and existential: “Where is Ron now?” and “What have I become?” The queries and characters are treated democratically—not judged, praised, or subjected to hierarchy. While their thoughts are specific, the painting captures a universal urban activity: looking across to the building next door and wondering about its residents, all the while knowing that they have probably looked over and wondered about us, as well.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sara Cwynar’s composite photographs of found objects and images court feelings of time passing. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she produces intricate tableaux that draw from magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogs. Cwynar is interested in how design and popular images work on our psyches, in how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes. It is written and directed by artist Nao Bustamante and its cast includes notable Los Angeles-based artists Gabriela Ruiz, rafa esparza, San Cha, Markus Kuiland-Nazario, Ron Athey, and Dorian Wood. The work also features a musical and sound score by Nick Hallett and costumes by OLIMA.

Installation (Installation)

Ofrenda [Offering] by Elyla includes a single-channel video and the mask used in the performance. The video is a recorded action of the artist, who appears removing a sieve mask that was pinned to the skin of their face, leaving a trail of blood that falls on their naked, mud-covered body. Worn in El Baile de las Negras , a colorful dance performed by men dressed as women, the mask originates from Indigenous celebrations in Monimbó, Nicaragua.

Installation (Installation)

Lyrics: Edition

Installation (Installation)

Blue time is a song co-written by artists Saâdane Afif and Lili Reynaud Dewar. Collaborations are frequent in the work of the Afif, as is the case of the exhibition “Lyrics” which opened at the Palais de Tokyo in 2005, in which Saâdane Afif asked artists and musicians to translate his artworks into song lyrics and interpret them. The lyrics written on the wall produced a silent story, in a musical way that remains implicit (unlike certain installations by the artist where lyrics can be heard on headphones).

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In this work, Saâdane Afif quotes André Cadere’s round wooden batons using the copy share and remix principles. Cadere’s sculptures, batons constituted with a mathematical chain of painted wood segments containing one error in the succession of colors, can be presented according to any possible configuration (on the wall, floor, hung or not). In the catalogue documenting the project, Power chords, there is a facsimile (another type of quotation) of one of Cadere’s conferences: “Présentation d’un travail, utilisation d’un travail” (presentation of a work, use of a work).

Photography (Photography)

As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.

Photography (Photography)

As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jonas Van and Juno B’s video work Kebranto is anchored by the figure of Boitatá, a snake that is part of the imaginary Guaraní communities that live between the current nation-states of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The mythical figure Boitatá is a protector of jungles and forests. In GuaraníBoitatá is the union of two words: Mbói (snake) and tatá (fire).

Photography (Photography)

As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.

Photography (Photography)

Mosaic Collage (Fang Banger)

Photography (Photography)

Bariga Nights is a photographic series set in the Bariga neighborhood in Lagos (Nigeria). This district has the reputation as home to some of the most disenfranchised of an estimated 21 million inhabitants of Lagos. After several years of being on the road across Africa, Europe and North America, Okereke decided to stay in Lagos in 2016.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present. Developed from a literary work, it deconstructs notions of narrative forms, styles and conventions. It is a hybrid piece, an example of the elasticity of the medium.

Installation (Installation)

In a broader sense, the meaning of ‘blackout’ —primarily an electrical failure or momentary interruption, opens up to new organizations, perceptions and different ways of experiencing time and space. Every person caught in a blackout must redefine the potentiality of public space, relate to strangers and invent new temporary forms of organization. A blackout acts as the breaking point of an established order, on a personal level as a loss of consciousness or on a collective level, as the temporary disruption of political institutions for example.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Erratum: Brief Interruptions in the Waste Stream exists as performance, sculpture, drawing, video and the printed word. In a short video the two artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine transform a porcelain toilet into bricks in four movements. In quite brutal actions, they use sledgehammers to smash the toilet into small shards that are then reshaped to form a stack of bricks.

Installation (Installation)

Rossella Biscotti’s “10×10” series investigates the relationship between demographics, data processing, textile manufacturing and social structure. The work observes how demographic records have been modeled through the use of punch cards to program both early data processing machines and automated looms (jacquard). Reversing the process, Biscotti turned to the 2001–2006 census information of Brussels—where she was then based—to create a pattern on these textiles.

Photography (Photography)

In 2011-12 the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers staged a 10-part series of conversations and collaborations with scientists, theorist, and philosophers inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film, Powers of Ten (1977). PoT was an IBM sponsored documentary that visualized the relative scale and limits of the known universe, both macro and microscopic, through a sequence of magnifications by 10-to-the-x-power. Using the picnic as human-scale index, Futurefarmers capture their meetings with scholars through audio, photography, and then distributed the results publicly through a website and publication .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2019, Ayoung Kim traveled to Mongolia to research its widespread animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones, and sacred caves that purify human guilt. The Mongolian people’s belief that rocks and minerals are alive, like other natural elements, consider the particular origin myth that human beings were born from stones. For the video work Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix Kim creates her own hyperbolic mythology connected to the origin of the fictional mineral genderless Petra Genetrix, a figure who also appears in other recent works by the artist.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Poet and writer Fred Moten gesticulates joyously during Girl Talk by artist Wu Tsang. Moten is dressed in light drag—a studded cloak hanging loosely over his body, his eyes and mouth adorned with makeup. Filmed in a sunlit garden, Moten whirls in slow motion to the trickle of a lion-headed water fixture and the acapella rendition of jazz standard Girl Talk by singer Josiah Wise.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Related to Edie Fake’s Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — Personal Business draws an association between architecture and the body, with ornamental structures that are decorative and protective. Fake notes, “More and more I’m trying to bring an anarchy into that architecture, or a fantasy and ecstasy of what queer space is and can be.” A beautiful building that’s defended by an imposing front. In this way, the architecture becomes a metaphor for the constructed layers of the self.

Photography (Photography)

The Caste Portraits Series by Leah Gordon investigates the practice of grading skin color from black to white, which marked the extent of racial mixing in 18th century Haiti. Médéric Moreau de St Mery (1750-1819), a French créole slave owner and freemason living in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), created a taxonomy of race classifying skin color from black to white using names derived from mythology, natural history, and bestial miscegenation. His Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789) hierarchizes 128 possible combinations of black-white miscegenation into nine categories (the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulâtre, the quarteron, the métis, the mamelouk, the quarteronné, and the sang-melé).

Photography (Photography)

On New Year’s Eve in 1965, Lisette Carmi met and photographed a group of transgender people living and working on the Via del Campo in Genoa–the main street for prostitution in the city, located in the former Jewish ghetto. This encounter was the beginning of a seven year relationship with the group, and led to the publication of I Travestiti (1972), a controversial book that comprised all of the images Carmi took of the group between 1965-1971. Forming close friendships with the people she portrayed, the artist rented an attic near Via del Campo in Genoa to live with them, she captured the everyday lives of the group, depicting sex work from a new perspective.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Michelle Handelman’s video work Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes its inspiration from Musidora, a famous French silent film actress, and a character she played called Irma Vep, from the film Les Vampires (1915), directed by Louis Feuillade. The work uses these characters as metaphors to highlight the lives of those who live in the shadows—or feel like they do—and the anxiety they experience as marginalized figures. Musidora was a 20th-century feminist, who was known not only for acting in movies, but also for directing her own plays and films, and having secret affairs with Colette and other famous people of the time.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including the Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-metre cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jes Fan’s video work Xenophoria , as opposed to the term ‘xenophobia’, refers to a love of the foreign and is inspired by the name of a mysterious species of aquatic carrier shell. This creature, Xenophora pallidae, calcifies free-floating objects in the water to its spine, bringing foreign bodies into its own structure. Likewise, Xenophoria stages a delirious search for the melanin pigment – the molecule responsible for skin color – as it manifests in both human and non-human bodies.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Diagram series relates broadly both to Jes Fan’s interests in body modification and gender hacking as well as the artist’s investment in destabilizing hegemonic categories such as gender, monogamy, and the classical individuated subject in favor of more creative, egalitarian, and communal modes of envisioning ourselves. As a whole, the series consists of forms which originate from the bodies of Fan’s milieu of friends and collaborators in New York. Fan first creates a mould of a concrete anatomical feature on a specific body which captures their attention (for example: the pectorals or biceps).