Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In conjunction with KADIST’s 2017 exhibition If Not Apollo, the Breeze , artist and filmmaker Lynn Marie Kirby performed Transmissions , a video and live reading created with longtime collaborator Etel Adnan. Inspired by time spent together in Paris, the piece incorporated open-ended conversation about the oracle, Mount Tamalpais (a subject of long-standing fascination for Adnan and the subject of hundreds of works), and a suite of collaborative drawings. The drawings, made in India ink and created spontaneously, are remarkable evidence of two lives, minds, and hands in dialogue.

Painting (Painting)

Adnan’s paintings are simple images with bold contrasting colors and rich textures. This particular work has an iconic feel and a strong physical presence in spite of its diminutive size. All of her paintings are small but, like Howard Hodgkin’s work, their intensity gains from their diminutive size.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Interested in role-play and videogames, Ana María Millán developed workshops with different communities in order to create characters and scenarios for her animations, often in collaboration with a choreographer. Elevación evokes various narratives inspired by the comicstrip Marquetalia, Raíces de la Resistencia (Marquetalia, Roots of the Resistance) (2011). This comic strip is a memoir of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas written by Jesús Santrich, one of its leaders who, after the 2016 Peace Agreement, rejoined dissident members of the organization in a clandestine guerrilla splinter group in 2019.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

En rachâchant is based on the short story Ah! Ernesto! (1971) by Marguerite Duras in which the child Ernesto does not want to go to school anymore as all that he is taught are things he does not know.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva traveled to Japan for a month to make a series of short 16mm films, often shot in slow-motion. This film, shown in continuous loop, has a run-time of just under 3 minutes, and is presented without sound. It captures a traditional Shisa (combination of a dog and lion from Okinawan mythology) animated by an invisible person.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Na China” means “In China” in Igbo language. Marie Voignier’s film NA CHINA! focuses on the African women communities who have emigrated to Guangzhou, in the southeast of China.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tourisme International was shot as the recording of a show on the scale of a country. In the urgency of perpetual travel, this tourist journey visits monuments, museums, institutions presented by North Korean guides whose voices we do not hear. Marie Voignier entirely redesigned the sound of each sequence in post-synchronization, making only the living experiences of footsteps and rustling of clothes audible, to create a new universe, disconnected from the official discourses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

25 by Vuth Lyno addresses the legacy of the UN’s 1992-93 peacekeeping operation in Cambodia (UNTAC). This operation steered the country’s transition out of three decades of war and destruction—civil war, the Khmer Rouge era (1975-79), and the factional conflicts of the 1980s—towards a new, ‘democratic’ future. It was the most ambitious and successful UN peacekeeping mission of its time.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney. This ubiquitous form of public transportation, originally built from U. S. military jeeps left on the islands after World War II, is normally exuberantly painted and personalized. They are known for their crowded seating and kitsch decorations, which have become an omnipresent symbol of Philippine culture.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The drawing “Heidegger’s Cabin” (2005) is inspired by Martin Heidegger’s essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” During the artist’s stay in a high alpine area, near a lake reservoir, Bussmann related the landscape in her surroundings to her reading of Heidegger’s terms on the work of art and the meaning of a “thing.” In attempt to link spiritual heights to natural heights, Bussmann metaphorically relates the subjects of being and truth to a hiking path, and its different degrees of challenge and risk. In the drawings rather than finding the optimal path to reach ultimate meaning and materialization, Bussmann never arrives at “Heidegger’s Cabin,” and instead is led off the beaten track to areas she never discovered before. Upon her return from the mountains in 2004 and 2005, she continued to develop the series, leading up to 20 drawings on handmade paper that attempt to problematize Heidegger’s theory on artworks as “things” as bearers of traits, “things” confronting the world of perception, and “things” as formed matter.

Painting (Painting)

Maria Taniguchi works across several media but is principally known for her long-running series of quasi-abstract paintings featuring a stylized brick wall device. Full of subtle gradations and low-key modulations, these are her trademark: a sustained, reiterative practice, steeped in repetition but carefully attuned to the economies and the sculptural presence of painting. Her approach to painting is conceptual.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Typical Weapons is a series of sculptural interventions where Alejandro Marre transforms traditional Guatemalan craft objects usually sold as souvenirs into weapons. Wooden flutes, hacky sacks, and musical instruments are woven with rope to appear as nunchucks, slingshots, and other forms of armament. Designed to be exhibited as objects from an archaeological museum, the previously innocuous representations of Guatemalan popular culture acquire darker meanings as they come to symbolize the brutality and extreme violence that now mark the country.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The piece consists of sculpture of 10 elements, among them: a globe, a picture of a gorilla, a chair, scrabble letters, 3 glasses of black ink, a book whose title is illuminated by the beam of a 8mm projector, a pair of boots, etc. The display is a collection of selected objects chosen in response to the reading of a text by Alain Badiou (the first chapter of the seminar “Le réel est l’impasse de la formalisation; la formalisation est le lieu de passe en force du réel” from February 4, 1975). The elements are a visual way to question the transposition of an idea into reality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.

Painting (Painting)

The series Clouds paintings by Benoît Maire features oil on canvas works in varying format, in which the artist depicts clouds, using a variety of tools, including a spray gun, paintbrush, or palette knife. The cloud motif in this series of paintings questions the limits of abstraction by playing with the concept of pareidolia—a psychological phenomenon by which we recognize familiar shapes in landscapes, clouds, or ink stains. Through his careful composition and use of pentimenti, Maire invites the viewer to project their imagination onto these colorful clouds.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.

Photography (Photography)

Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.

Photography (Photography)

In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel. The long-exposure capture depicts García Torres at multiple stages of brainstorming, devising, and introspection, his ethereal figure connected with artistic giants of the past. Yet, there is also an insipid tone beyond mere insomnia or frustration at the lack of being able to garner inspiration.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.)

Installation (Installation)

Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model. The work takes as its departure point the history of Wilmington, Ybarra’s native hometown in southern Los Angeles. The piece refers to a Civil War era ammunition store that Ybarra found at the heart of the harbor close to Long Beach.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle. Her careful meditations in fabric reflect Plata’s ongoing interest in the relationship between people and their environments, in fragility, systems, and destruction.

Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the performance video Vitrina , María Teresa Hincapié stood inside a storefront window in downtown Bogota, unannounced, for eight hours a day, wearing a uniform and initially carrying out cleaning chores. As the day and passers went by, the routine became more playful: she would send kisses to bus drivers on the busy Avenida Jiménez who would return them, use the newspaper with which she was shining the glass to flirtatiously hide and engage with an improvised audience or draw the shape of her body with soap and a sponge. She would interrupt these chores to carry out other ‘feminine’ activities, like brushing her hair or applying make-up, only to return to frantically cleaning the transparent surface that separated her from the public.

September 2007

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969. This article, which is the only trace of his work, is indicative of a lack of interest by Neuestern to leave his name in history; to “defend an artistic activity that has little or no interest to last.” Oscar Neuestern could only remember the previous 24 hours, of which his life and his work are in constant erasure and reconstruction. His practice was “to let things be done with time and the unconscious,” while “not fearing the void.” He looked for the absolute through transparency and symmetry.