Photography (Photography)

According to Viktor Kochetov, Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows is the first hand-colored print he ever made. Although this might well be a part of the artist’s mythology, this image perfectly demonstrates the methodology the Kochetovs used in their work. The snapshot itself was created during a journalistic assignment to document the meeting between a WWII veteran and school children in the Kharkiv region.

Photography (Photography)

Having a press card allowed Viktor Kochetov to photograph freely in public places, access to which was strictly regulated for amateurs. Seeking a way to transgress the reportage canon, the Kochetovs employed a method of taking images of large gatherings that emphasize the structure and “patterns” of the imaginary collective body. His 1978 photo of women sorting corn, titled Working women, builders of communism, are sorting corn… , is organized on this principle: the scarfs on the workers’ heads are perceived as an element of uniform, which creates a visual rhythm.

Photography (Photography)

Ukraine-Russia / Volleyball by Viktor and Sergiy Kochetov features a concrete monument of women volleyball players before the railway station in the village of Vodyanoye, Kharkiv region. It’s a typical Soviet sculptural composition, thousands of which were casted in the USSR during this period. Many can still be found all over post-Soviet territories, leading to regular debates on the destiny of this visual heritage in Ukraine.

Photography (Photography)

Hit Man Gurung’s series I Have to Feed Myself, My Family and My Country… addresses labor migration, a phenomenon prevalent in South Asian countries like Nepal. The laborers, most of whom are young and middle-aged, come from marginalized and underprivileged backgrounds. They leave their families back in the homeland with the dream of pursuing a better life for themselves and their families.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Rubber Man continues exploring issues related to land use, also noticeable in his Untitled series (2011). More specifically, Rubber Man addresses the French colonial legacy of land use for the exploitation of rubber –today exploited by multiple forces such as individuals, governments, multinationals and international banks– and its effects on Cambodia’s indigenous forests and culture today. The video takes place in Ratanakiri, an area in northeastern Cambodia increasingly known in local and international news for land grabs and protests, and where the artist frequently traveled to over two years.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film installation Mud Man by Chikako Yamashiro is set on Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands, two locations at the center of local controversies surrounding the presence of the United States military. Japanese and Korean languages are mixed (a combination of unclear Japanese — Uchinaaguchi , fragments and mumbles in Korean and onomatopoeic sound effects to complement the narration), and the landscape of the two islands (Okinawa and Jeju Island) juxtaposed. The film tells the story of a community visited by bird droppings that resemble clumps of mud falling from the sky.

Painting (Painting)

The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism. Historically, in countries such as the US and South Africa, the term “boy” was used as a pejorative and racist insult towards men of color, slaves in particular, signifying their alleged subservient status as being less than men. In response, Am I Not A Man And A Brother?

Painting (Painting)

Both Head-Portrait with Red and Blue Background and Man with Blue Tie are classic examples of Weeks’ deftness of line, shape, and color. These two works illustrate his signature flattened style -a vast departure from figurative painting of the time- and hints of influence from modernist painters like Henri Matisse and Maynard Dixon, although with a somewhat darker tone. Both figures stare with with expressionless faces and hollow eyes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“A man wanders near the windows of a gallery, situated adjacent to the street. He occasionally gazes through windows into the gallery but never enters.” Passersby are numerous since these windows are by a tram stop on a busy street. It is surprising to note how few of them take any notice of this man peering repeatedly through the slightly tinted glass into an empty meeting room with no distinctive signs to be seen.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Man and Pet (2012), two benign ceramic figures smile sweetly upward. The man wraps his small companion in a hug, his arms extending in round arcs all the way to his feet. Though the expressions are strikingly similar—suggestive of Rockwellian Americana—the pet seems somewhat more genial and familiarly fuzzy than its owner, whose saurian pupils lend his face a reptilian air that belies his warm grin.

Photography (Photography)

Untitled (Man with Bees) is part of Curran Hatleberg’s attempt to make sense of the current state of the “American Dream”, or lack thereof. “Without question our present American experience feels increasingly strange, unnerving and dreamlike. Our country is utterly different and changed now in its present iteration – surreal and confounding – and we can’t help but regard it with a confounded stare that we hold in reserve for the most bizarre and difficult circumstances.” This image is one, like many in the series that find something poetic, supernatural, and surreal in the common human condition of middle America.

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)

Shot a few months before the USA and Cuba restored diplomatic relations in 2015, The New Man and My Father looks into the quiet aftermath of one family’s individual experience of the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). The film brings to the fore a socio-political system made for a country whose successes and failures fell upon the individual men and women who experienced it. In the film, Melis interviews his father about the Cuban Revolution, as well as the more recent re-introduction of capitalism to the island after 60 years of the US-imposed embargo.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking) (2011-2014), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place. Shot in Uyuni, Bolivia, the film depcits world’s largest salt flat, a site that sits in a mountainous region at over twelve thousand feet above sea level. Ramirez’s work is deeply invested in the loss of regional identity, and the anachronistic dress of his “modern-day shaman” in the film is meant to reconcile the historical and cultural gaps between tribal traditions of a specific time and place and the all-too-prevalent homogeneity brought on by advanced capitalism.

Installation (Installation)

Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon by Cici Wu is delicate, but physically much more robust than Cici Wu’s earlier works. What continues is the sense of longing, of something unresolved; it is haunting, like the images from a dream that we try to remember upon waking up. Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon revolves around the story of a developmentally challenged young boy, who purportedly disappeared during the handover of Hong Kong by the British to Chinese governance.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 1980s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

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.

Pink Man Walking on Boats with Woman Following

Painting (Painting)

Chris Johanson’s Untitled (Painting of a Man Leaving in Boat) (2010) pictures a canoe drifting toward an off-kilter horizon line, which demarcates the cobalt sea from the cerulean sky. An orange-haired figure, oar positioned in mid-stroke, looks ahead—whether toward an edge or an infinite expanse, it is impossible to tell. Echoing a trope that recurs in Greek epic poetry, transcendental painting, and current-day reality television, the character is alone with nature.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages. The work’s connection to Amazon deforestation is difficult to ignore. Yet still, it also engages in broader issues about the country’s fractures, such as the 2018 fire at Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum and the ongoing erasure of its past.

Painting (Painting)

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s recent drawing of cutout figures on architectural tracing paper takes a statement by Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo, as a point of departure for the work. Stating, “migration problems can and should find their solution within the affirmation of ‘freedom of movement’ as the new inalienable right of humans. No human has chosen or chooses the place where they were born.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (2016) is characteristic of the artist’s practice. Apostolos Georgiou invites us into a scene of cinematic tension. In the foreground, a man is kneeling with his hands on his head.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

This anarchist flag is made from Huayruro seeds, a native plant of South and Central American tropical areas. In some cases, the Huayruro seeds are used in the preparation of psychotropic plants such as Ayahuasca (Tohé). These plants occupy a central place in Amazon biopolitics.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three cut-outs are made of three aerial photographs coming from the archives of the Ecuadorian Military Geographic Institute. These are views of the Amazon forest. The photographs are cut following an optical illusion pattern called “reversible cubes” or “tumbling blocks”, based on the Necker cube, a multistable object of psychophysics that is constantly switching perspectives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video work Drag, a man in a dark room pulls on the end of a rope. In midst of sounds of heavy breathing, the camera presents alternating scenes of a man and the shadow of a man wearing a long, pointed hat cast against a wall. Insinuating a sinister mood, the man and the shadow struggle to control the scene through alternating tugs and releases of a rope.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly. The stocky figure lets his arm drop to his side, towel dripping on the ground. Mitchell’s umber-toned glaze makes everything look earthy and wet, primordial and warm.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Goddy Leye’s installation work The Beautiful Beast , a video is projected onto a gold-colored wooden box filled with sesame seeds. The sesame seeds look like pixels underneath the video, suggesting the texture of animation. The artist portrays a strange man who writhes on the ground like a beast against this ‘pixelated’ field.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench. It is difficult to tell whether the work represents just any carpenter or Christ, the most famous member of the profession and the subject of innumerable parables and artworks. His stilted pose is not too Messianic; drips of ochre glaze render his handiwork and hammer equally soft.

Photography (Photography)

This early photographic work by Fre?de?ric Nauczyciel, titled Untitled (Boîte à prière, Istanbul, Novembre 2005) , features a young man in religious attire reading a religious text from inside a glass prayer box. Seemingly truncated by the shadows cast upon his seated position, the man is dramatically illuminated by a white neon light above. The harsh synthetic light reflects off of the man’s white robe and the glass box to create a haunting, artificial glow.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Suspension a young man is hanging in the air, falling, or perhaps drifting through time and space. There is no special or definite way to understand it. And it is in this construction where Morales envisions the world as an endless void, or timeless gravity, that we fall deeper and deeper into our own humanity.