Arpedia

5 is a three channel video about the dualities of death and resurrection, reminiscence and fantasy, chronological and retrospective narration. The main video features two dancers intertwining, caressing in trancelike movements, with intimacy eventually leading to scarring and bleeding. Towards the end, the trace of bodily movements and fluids crescendo in an image of a skull in a synthesis of performance, painting and theater.

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Nachbau

Simon Starling

Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis. Starling found photographs of a hang dating back to 1929, taken by Albert Renger-Patzsch, the German New Objectivity photographer. Firstly, he researched the artworks that were presented then which for the most part had been restituted or acquired by private collectors after the war.

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"Two young men from Aadloun", Studio Shehrazade, Saida, Lebanon

Akram Zaatari

“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.

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Work No. 299

Martin Creed

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005. His broad smile, on the verge of laughter, encourages reciprocity on behalf of the onlooker. This could be said to be a typical tactic in Creed’s work as it is so infused with humor and irony.

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Undocumented Intervention

Julio Cesar Morales

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation. Morales drew inspiration from both his childhood near the United States-Mexico border as well as from photographic documentation on U. S. government websites.

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Untitled

Jedediah Caesar

For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms. This technical rework allows for a clinical inspection of the material contents of the piece and the resulting slanted industrial monolith echoes minimalist sculpture, although with a different expressive texture. Indeed, Untitled can be seen as a contemporary pyramid with a painterly surface.

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Happy Birthday

Jonathan Monk

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Happy Birthday

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Primero Estaba el Mar

Felipe Arturo

Installation (Installation)

Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement. Each waveform represents a syllable of the sentence “Primero estaba el mar.” This sentence is the first verse of the Kogui poem of creation. For the Koguis, an indigenous community from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the Colombian Caribbean coast, water was the absolute presence before the creation of the universe.

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Silencer #16 & #17

Will Rogan

MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication. In the series, Rogan alters the magazine’s pages by erasing the image of the magicians doing their tricks, leaving only the background of their performances on view. These contexts range from the more overtly staged scenario in Silencer #16 —the erased magician is about to perform a trick on his assistant trapped on an odd, almost dada looking box—to the more “colloquial” Silencer #17 in which the absent magician’s silhouette appears in what seems to be a children’s hospital.

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20 Surrogates

Allan McCollum

In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium. The Glossies are drawings, rectangular forms applied with blank ink and watercolors, which fill up the sheets parallel to the edges except for a small margin. Finally, the whole paper is covered with an adhesive plastic laminate, which gives it the shiny surface of a photograph.

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Pink Man Walking on Boats with Woman Following

Francis Alÿs

Pink Man Walking on Boats with Woman Following

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Mythological Time

Sun Xun

Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town. While it is not named in the film itself, the town at the center of Mythological Time is a re-imagined incarnation of Sun’s hometown of Fuxin, in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Sandwiched between North Korea and Inner Mongolia, Fuxin is a poor coal-mining region that used to contain one of China’s largest open-pit mines and has historically been the site of significant conflict, thanks to its rich mineral resources.

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Serengeti Green

Phillip Maisel

While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves. Elements used in various stages of photographic processes (color filters, glassine, and prints themselves) are integrated back into the artwork either as part of the sculpture or as collage elements that are later added to the print. In some of the works, Maisel cuts into the prints themselves.

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Plug the well ( July / August 2003)

Keith Tyson

The work of Keith Tyson is concerned with an interest in generative systems, and embraces the complexity and interconnectedness of existence. Philosophical problems such as the nature of causality, the roles of probability and design in human experience, and the limits and possibilities of human knowledge, animate much of his work. Language as a coded system, as a representation medium, but also as something that generates a whole variety of realities also plays a central role.

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Untitled

John McCracken

Though not strictly representational, some objects in Untitled (1962) are recognizable: a flower, an egg, a foot. The arrows and directional lines suggest movement, but the forms they point to intertwine, prohibiting a straightforward reading. The shapes are as illustrative as a Rorschach inkblot; in their confounding, simple indeterminacy, they depict nothing and everything at once.

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Eraser

Will Rogan

Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees. The steely grey sky stands in stark contrast to the vehicle’s luminously pristine white finish and makes this already deathly object seem even more ghostly. The grass underneath is half-turned brown and further marks this as a lifeless landscape.

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The Left Hand Can't See That the Right Hand is Blind

Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.

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HOWE

Joachim Koester

HOWE

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Die Siedlung

Clemens von Wedemeyer

Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants. It complements von Wedemeyer slightly earlier and more artistic film Silberhöhe (2003) which decried imposed Modernist living model. In Die Siedlung , a voiceover describes and criticizes the different sites on view while the camera moves slowly past a vast abandoned 1930s Nazi army barracks which has yet to be converted or demolished, the building site and wastelands for the new private single family housing area, a constructed pond and finally the 1960s or 70s communal blocks of flats.

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Residencia Milan 1

Juan Araujo

Residencia Milan 1 is a painting of a house surrounded by lush forest. The image depicted is both photorealistic and creates the illusion of an unfolded piece of paper, with creases and discolorations. In referring to the circulation of images, the painting raises questions of a viewer’s relationship to the image of a beautiful house: as icon, wish, or standard of beauty.

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Forest Gathering N.2

Gregory Crewdson

Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios. These scenes are tangibly atmospheric, visually alluring and often deeply disquieting. Never anchored precisely in time or place, these and the other narratives of Beneath the Roses are rather located in the dystopic landscape of the anxious American imagination.

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Sal Sem Carne

Cildo Meireles

Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil. The piece draws on Meireles’s first-hand contact with many indigenous groups through his father’s work with the Indian Protection Service. The recordings on the LP contain narrative accounts of massacres of native peoples, as well as indigenous music and rituals.

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The End One

Raymond Pettibon

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon. The images allude to recurring topics, such as the superhero (present both in Untitled Superman and No title without the comics ), a book cover (his literary sources), or a mushroom cloud. Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Pettibon’s sophisticated, witty drawings combine image and text to explore the gamut of American popular culture.

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There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

Julio Cesar Morales

There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

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There are veins in these lands, I

Rodney McMillian

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point. Calling up the unknown intimacies of these objects, McMillian upends their usual orientation, placing them directly on the wall to serve as paintings, rather than covers. Layering over the repurposed textiles with hardware store paint, McMillian transforms the sheets into canvases, creating abstract landscapes on top of the traces of human bodies intact in the fabric.

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366 Liberation Rituals

Igor Grubic

366 Liberation Rituals is a series that gathers a number of actions related to the artist’s micro-politics. They materialize as a plurality of pointers that destabilize reality and interrogate our outlook on the political historicity of former Yugoslavia. These actions were realized over the course of the year the artist turned forty and revolved for one part around the revolutionary movement of 1968 and on the other on the informal group called Grupa šestorice autora (Group of Six Authors)* which was active in Zagreb between 1975 and 1979.

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Untitled (Men)

Matt Lipps

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form. For Untitled (Men) (2011), he snipped from magazines and textbooks pictures of handsome or famous men, from the ancient Greek to the modern. Arranged in a tableau, lit theatrically, and rephotographed, the two-dimensional figures have an embodied presence.

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Unregistered City series #1 #2 #7

Jiang Pengyi

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water. Yet, ambiguous lights blink from buildings and yachts still sail on the water, and further observation reveals these structures to be miniatures manipulated by the artist through Photoshop and other postproduction image tools. The model city’s surroundings are themselves real abandoned spaces, perhaps an empty room, a wait-to-be demolished building, or a discarded bathtub.

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Olive Oil (from the Propo Series)

Paul McCarthy