Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa. Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa . Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Moon Also Rises by Yuyan Wang comprises a one-channel video and light installation. The work is based on a 2018 initiative in China to launch three artificial moons into orbit above major cities to provide continuous daylight. Set in an oppressively illuminated environment, the images depict lethargic crowds in megacities, surrounded by glowing neon lights, and workers in LED factories performing repetitive tasks on an assembly line in a kind of trance state.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel. The action is simple: I kick a video camera through a site that is embedded with sociological elements, which I try to question through my practice. I chose Red Square as the site to work in Moscow.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lyrics 1, 2, 3 is part of siren eun young jung Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–). The work closely follows first and second generations of Yeoseong Gukgeuk actresses, who later became an important source of inspiration for the artist. Formally, this genre of theater draws from Westernized aspects of traditional Korean music performance, as well as from adaptations of pansori , a Korean genre of musical storytelling, to create a staged version of traditional Korean opera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Muted Situations #2: Muted Lion Dance by Samson Young, Chinese lion dancers perform the auspicious procession traditionally presented at special occasions such as weddings or during the Lunar New Year. Yet, the customary percussive sound of drums and cymbals are absent. Instead, it is the sound of the performers’ physical exertion that comes to the forefront, revealing the beautiful, exhaustive rhythm of their craft—their feet hitting the ground, deep inhales and exhales, and the rustling of their clothes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The absurd condition of human survival under environmental degradation and geonational balkanization is taken as a starting point for WA’AD by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The work’s premise is a confessional narrative emerging from a Palestinian astronaut on a desperate international flight mission to colonize Mars. That there is also an Israeli astronaut on the same mission plays into the complexities of the landed history of ethnic antagonism between Israel and Palestine, which has stretched on for centuries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground. Comprised of curt lines such as “forever” “failure” “to live,” the Korean forms non-sequiturs and double entendres to the English script following a line of questioning between a detective and a victim telling a meandering story surrounding a bullet being in a wrist, going to hospital, traveling to Japan, and the discovery of a love triangle. This narrative of a potentially grave situation is told in a nonchalant manner.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Taking the same name as their most recent solo show at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, siren eun young jung’s video work Deferral Theatre intertwines various threads from the last decade of the artist’s research into the Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatrical form, in which all of the roles are played by women, as well as performance-based modes of queer resistance in South Korea. The radical and temporally border-crossing qualities of gender fluidity, and lineages of queer subversion within performative spaces, animate Deferral Theatre through a critical deconstruction of Korean history, tradition and gender norms. One particularly powerful scene depicts a young drag king performer tearing at their suit and tie as they lip-sync passionately to a song in English, while the frame lilts with an ecstatic languor, as if the operator of the camera were staggering feverishly.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this four-channel 10 min video installation different episodes play simultaneously on the four screens. The artist has arranged several different scenarios and symbolic props which make it easy for viewers to feel the pervasive ambiguity which cannot be put into words. On the one hand, our imagination is tempted by the delicate details, but on the other hand, our imagination is limited through a very rigorous structure.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The word Coyolxauhqui refers to femicide or the killing of women in rural Mexico on the basis of gender. The mutilation of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the sun god and human sacrificer, is reimagined in this film. Coyolxauhqui by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is the first in a trilogy of films that positions itself as a form of political resistance, delving into the relationship between current Mexican femicide and broader cultural traditions.

Photography (Photography)

In order to make If I dig a very deep hole (2007) the artist looked for the extreme geographical opposite of Paris when drawing a straight line throughout the globe. Then, he went to this place, the Chatham Islands in New Zealand, to photograph the full moon before coming back to Paris to take a picture of that same moon. This work brings together two diametrically opposite places, two singular experiences, two different moments and the same full moon.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. These drawings were created during the trial of political activists pursued by the government that the artist would regularly attend. During the tribunal, the artist would let his pen slide freely across his notebook, replicating the automatic drawing techniques of the surrealists.

Installation (Installation)

O (for various skies) by Jesse Chun is a two-channel video sculpture that decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing language. The project disrupts bureaucratic documents pertaining to the United States government’s lunar colonization and militarization, such as The Lunex Project of 1958 and Project Horizon of 1959, through methods of visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry, while interweaving lesser known Korean folklore about the moon, such as the precolonial Korean women’s moon dance ( ganggangsullae ) and shamanistic ritual dance for ushering the departed into another world ( gildakeum ).

Textile (Textile)

Like most of Laura Rokas’s hand-stitched works, Once in Two Moons was made while she sat in bed, imbuing the work with a tender sense of domestic intimacy. The scene’s dominant figure is a faceless woman whose blood red, dagger-like fingernails, polka dot jacket, and jet black hair resemble a sort of avatar of the artist. The figure surveys a chaotic scene that might be described as a “cute apocalypse” (a phrase Rokas says is characteristic of her work in general).

Textile (Textile)

Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.

Installation (Installation)

Tughra is a protocol by Sharif Waked that reproduces the sixteenth century calligraphic monogram for tughra ; also known as the signature of Suleiman the Magnificent. Under Suleiman’s reign, at the beginning of the 16th century, the Ottoman empire achieved its apex both in terms of territorial extension and cultural creation. Suleiman personally instituted major judicial changes relating to society, education, taxation, and criminal law, as such he is often referred to as ‘The Lawgiver’.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work BRB is a 30 min. journey in the new game world of Second Life (“SL”). Consistent with Segal’s work with the projected image, this video was shot using a virtual in-world camera, with the footage later being transformed by a software custom designed by the artist.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“Relation between Black and blood” explores the connection between performance, installation and representation. The artist’s use of watercolour is inherited from Mughal miniature painters who migrated from Delhi to the East India Company on the Ganges for the opium trade. The Miniaturists used cheaply available transparent Mica to paint images of the water carrier, the cobbler, dancers, prostitutes, wanderers and god men.

Textile (Textile)

Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be misunderstood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca.