Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Kids , Song Ta has made reports to the information desk at the Guangzhou Zoo in order for missing children announcements to be broadcast throughout the zoo. Instead, the names of members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Guangdong Province were called in place of these fictitious children. Song Ta facetiously subverts the status of these powerful men, later jailed for corruption, to that of children and zoo animals, whilst constructing a narrative that closely mimics and reflects upon political reality in China.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yang Song’s Die features a clay mask of the artist himself slowly dissolving into water. Clay returns to clay. Clay originates from and returns to earth, becoming a metaphor for life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dr. N Song belongs Ozawa’s body of work The Return of Dr. N in which he follows a humorous fictional character based upon the historical figure Dr. Hideyo Noguchi who researched yellow fever in Ghana in 1927. Though Dr. Noguchi was known for his unruly temper and behavior and many of his discoveries were erroneous, he was widely revered in Japanese society. Ozawa’s Dr. N story explores links between Japan and Africa, past and present, fact and fiction, through the commissioned work of Ghanaian painters and musicians working in popular African styles.

Installation (Installation)

Halfway between a painting and an installation City Sound of Rug gathers found images, synthetic foam, painted metal plates, and prints placed on the floor. Rugs are elements representative of commerce and related to the idea of territory, handicraft and community. In City Sound of Rug, the rugs are used as surfaces upon which prints are manually made.

Painting (Painting)

Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang is a series of landscapes in the Xiaoxiang region in the modern day Hunan Province, China, and was a popular subject of poems, drawings and paintings during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Liang follows tradition by interpreting the historical subjects by classical Chinese artists including Dong Yuan (934–962 AD), Mu Xi (died in 1281 AD), Wen Weiming (1470–1559 AD). This reinterpretation represents the meeting point of the Xiang River and the Dongting Lake.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The short film I Can Only Dance to One Song by Arash Fayez features a series of people from the migrant community in Barcelona singing along or dancing to songs of their choosing. The video begins with a man contently sings along to a song while getting his hair cut at the barber shop; a woman dances emotively to another song in an empty room full of desks, maybe a school or place of religious study; in a food market, a cashier nods his head to music while tallying customers’ orders and then later moves through the aisles of his store passionately dancing and mouthing the lyrics as if he were in a music video. Expanding on the music video aesthetic, the film then cuts to a group of young men perched in front of a graffitied wall, cheerfully dancing and rapping along with the song playing from their stereo.

Installation (Installation)

Canción para un fósil canoro (Song for a chanting fossil) by Rometti Costales is inspired by the history of the building that currently hosts the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) in Santiago, Chile. The duo associated the layers of the building’s history with the vestiges of life and the processes of fossilization that have taken place in areas of the Atacama Desert, a territory that has been the stage for several episodes in Chile’s tumultuous economic and political history. The work operates as a metaphor for the strata of historical memory, condensing different materials and operations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Imjingawa is Hwayeon Nam’s first foray into borrowing from the documentary form. The root of the work is a Japanese song with Korean diasporic connotations, which the artist heard inadvertently years ago. While tracking the inception and history of the song, her research explored the song’s potential to live beyond “legal, national, ideological, and geographical barriers.” The song earned its fame when it was introduced to the Japanese band, the Folk Crusaders.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Painting (Painting)

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form. Here, Capistran humorously remixes the form and style of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings with California punk rock band Black Flag’s song title and logo (created by artist Raymond Pettibon). White Minority , then, appropriates, recontextualizes, and riffs on language and visual signs to unmoor notions of identity, power, and revolution.

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).

Photography (Photography)

The two large-scale stereoscopic photographs in That’s That’s Alright Alright Mama Mama depict a recreation of Elvis Presley’s recording studio in Memphis, Tennessee. This study in doubles is underscored by its title, which repeats and doubles Elvis’s original song title. The images are hung in a specially angled wall and the viewers are provided special 3-D glasses in order to contemplate the image.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Dad is Byron is an audio work produced in collaboration between Diamond Stingily and her father, the house musician Byron Stingily. Viewers are invited to pick up a wall-mounted telephone that has been retrofitted to play a recording of a conversation between Stingily and her father. Although initially the artist planned to focus on her father’s recollections of the violence during his childhood in Chicago in the 1960s and how music helped him cope, the conversation has a natural and intimate meandering.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Artist Wong Kit Yi’s A River in the Freezer combines directed and found footage to meditate upon glacial memory, cryogenics, and frozen fiction. She synthesizes disparate subjects—ranging from Longyearbyen, Norway (a town where no one is allowed to die), the fair-haired manga character Cygnus Hyoga, 19th-century global trading in ice, and color wavelength theory, among others—within a karaoke-inspired sing-along format.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Cardón Cardinal by Patricia Esquivias is part of a series of video works in which the artist develops a narrative in front of her computer screen. In this work, the computer sits on a covered piano keyboard, and the reflection of the artist is sometimes visible on the black surface. Cardón Cardinal is a collage of references that revolve around the removal and displacement of a 46 foot tall Pachycereus pringlei , a type of giant cactus also known as a cardón , from Baja California, Mexico to Seville, Spain.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wailing Requiem is the fourth and final chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A moonscape is a vista of the lunar landscape or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term “moonscape” is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated by war. Moonscape by Mona Benyamin is inspired by and dedicated to the Lunar Embassy—a company that now sells land on a variety of planets and moons, established in 1980 by a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

By Way of Revolution is a series that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

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)

Fly was first commissioned as an immersive video experience for Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2016, imitating the mosaic structure of a fly’s eyes with a patchwork of projectors. As a single channel video, this work focuses more on the succession of sequences, shot in Bennani’s hometown of Rabat, showing interviews with relatives, an open-air market or a wedding, and jamming them with surreal digital manipulations. A recurrence throughout the film is a fly that accompanies us along the journey, as a childish motif or the symbol of a vanitas , able to sing Rihanna’s song.

Photography (Photography)

It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000 , which could be the refrain of a song, is the title of a photograph of a minimal moment, the vision of a Parisian pedestrian, a cut flower lying on the pavement covered in rain drops. Is this moment captured by chance or a mise en scène? There is a sort of hiatus in the image; the planes – motif and background – connect nature in full bloom, pure, fragile, ephemeral with the grey weighty tarmac.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s work brings together spoken and written language, photography, vintage television and computer animation to pay homage to African-American popular culture. Figuration (B) is a mediatic dumpster dive through the not-yet-historical past, its fantasia of purloined images flowing to an interruptive, channel-surfing logic. A stream of TV clips, commercials, news segments, video memes, and movie scenes—at times run backwards, doubled, or layered over other clips—incorporate archival and pop cultural sources layered with a soundtrack constructed of found and made sources to make something akin to a video mixtape.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Historical representations of the female form and the clichés and misunderstandings that surround them have been the subject of recent research and historical revision. Marry, Fuck, Kill by Ruth Patir reimagines sculptures of fertility goddesses from ancient times as real-life women by animating them as a moving sculptural bodies. In a country such as Israel, where the presence of ancient ruins are common, if not everyday for some, this work speaks both to the present and the distant past, and draws continuities between.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens exist in literature across many cultures including Ancient Greece and India, described as part bird and part woman, or like a mermaid. They were said to charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) (2023) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Photography (Photography)

Zhang Kechun’s photographic series The Yellow River documents the effects of modernization along the eponymous Yellow River, the second longest in Asia. The Yellow River is considered the cradle of Chinese civilization but also poses a great threat, as the river is capable of breaking its banks at any time. Inspired by the novel River of the North by Zhang Chengzhi, the artist travelled on a fold-up bicycle through eastern China’s Shandong province, where the river discharges vast amounts of water into the sea, before slowly tracing it westward over several month-long trips heading to the river’s source near the Bayan Har Mountain in Qinghai.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body. The Buddhist master Padmasambhava achieved this state from his union with Mandarava, a female spirit (dakini) and princess in Tantric Buddhism. Through study and physical connection, each played a key role in the other’s enlightenment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables. Referencing iconic folklore such as Alice in Wonderland, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharata, Ganesh’s video illustrates the story of a hero’s journey and transformation that is not driven by the glory of violent conquest or saving a damsel in distress. Ganesh’s short video features a colorful style of illustration specific to the artist’s comic works.