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.

Textile (Textile)

Cosmic Tautology I and II are two textile pieces representative of Santiago Borja’s practice and long-standing interest in disrupting universalist assumptions of minimalism by connecting them with other, non-Western or esoteric references. They were hand-woven in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, and are composed of nine squares, the middle one left unwoven. Their composition is based on Red Square, White Letters (1962) by Sol Lewit, but they also take cues from works like Black Series II by Frank Stella.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

David is a five-minute pseudo music video that features an upbeat melodic soundtrack with a duet by the artist Guan Xiao and frequent collaborator (and KADIST collection) artist Yu Honglei. Three screens display a collection of home videos filmed and uploaded by tourists at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence capturing Michelangelo’s eponymous masterpiece. The mass popularity and commodification of this artwork is further exaggerated with the numerous forms that we encounter and consume the image or likeness of the sculpture in our daily lives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Dragon is the Frame by Mary Helena Clark is an elegy that is somewhat paradoxically organized as a film noir or murder mystery, one that pays direct homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo . But the parts don’t fit, and it is only in the eventual recognition of this faux raccord that Clark’s higher purpose becomes apparent. As we hear Bernard Herrmann’s score, we see the Golden Gate Bridge, Mission Dolores, and other Vertigo locations in the present day.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture. By re-appropriating the structure as a temple and imbuing it with a dance performance based on movements and postures found in ancient pottery and murals, the choreography takes its influence from the house’s design and the body positions on ancient Maya ceramics and buildings. A pulse, breathing, and a pre-Columbian clay flute are among the sounds on the soundtrack.

Painting (Painting)

Something To Do With Being Held by Jordan Ann Craig is inspired by a Cheyenne bead bag. Intrigued by the two shades of blue used for the source object (a deep dusty blue and a bold vivid cobalt blue) the artist replicated these shades in her painting. Craig then added in her own colors, including the pink-orange hues, to achieve a bold but soft quality about the work, as she states that she intended the work to convey vulnerability.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Percent for Art is seemingly concerned with “art enrichment” by state or city arts agencies role in it, managing the artist rosters, maintaining public art collections, commissioning artworks, selecting installation sites, among other things for aesthetic and cultural enhancement in both public and private real estate developments. For some, it’s also an opportunity to have desperately needed revenue to counter the displacement of artists and preserve a city or state’s creative spirit. The work, with its serial repetition of percentage signs across six separate bright red panels, appears as splashy retail signage for no apparent sale.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yu Honglei’s video and mixed media works riff on familiar motifs from the Western art historical canon and reimagine them through a playful but subversive culture jamming of their original meaning. Life (2013), for example, depicts a tiled backdrop of various images and stills associated with the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol. Digital reproductions of his silkscreens featuring public figures like Elizabeth Taylor, Chairman Mao, and Debbie Harry form an amalgamation of modern art iconography, while repeated images of Warhol himself serve as a constant reminder that even after his death, the artist is still decidedly present in our art historical consciousness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Sculpture by Musquiqui Chihying comprises a two-channel lecture performance and a photograph. The video begins with 2017 footage of French president Emmanuel Macron announcing his commitment to the restitution of French-held African objects looted during the colonial era. Moving through the video, the artist’s voice narrates over archival images and videos, explaining how so many African artifacts came into the possession of European museums.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes.

Installation (Installation)

Phinthong provided 5,000 Euros to exchange for Zimbabwean dollars, the most devalued and worthless currency in the world. The ZWD has no legal status outside Zimbabwe. The exchange took place through a network of contacts rather than direct with Zimbabweans.

Photography (Photography)

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light. The architect’s longtime studio and residence, which he built in Los Angeles in 1922, exemplifies this philosophy, and has since become an influential part of the modernist architectural canon. In Untitled (Schindler House #01) (2007), Luisa Lambri describes Schindler’s studio by capturing its aftereffects—the play of light and shadow cast through branches onto a surface.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

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.

Installation (Installation)

“On April 13 a painting was lost at JFK airport while going through the security screening. On April 19 a painting was lost at CDG airport while going through the security screening. On April 20 a painting was lost at DUB airport while going through the security screening.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lightning 01 (2014) parodies our contemporary relationship to screen-based media and the absurdity of aestheticizing boredom. The video depicts a computer user aimlessly taking photos of himself, seemingly numb to external stimuli or intervention. Set on a loop, the video produces the illusion of an endless state of bored selfies and disaffected gazes.

Photography (Photography)

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California. Commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller, and built by Richard Neutra in 1937, the Miller house’s open and flowing layout expands upon modernist architectural traditions. It features a flat roof, stone and glass walls, with rooms configured beneath a grid pattern of skylights and supporting cruciform steel columns.

Photography (Photography)

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

Installation (Installation)

Peter Friedl’s projects place aesthetic questions within an expanded field that takes into account the social, political and philosophical context. This textile piece quotes and diverts a flag with a red background and the central star of the Kurdistan National Liberation Front (ERNK, a military organization linked to PKK, founded in 1985 and disbanded in 2000), and not the national flag of Kurdistan. The artist became interested as from 1994, when the town of Lice was destroyed by the Turkish army and the PKK was expelled from Germany.