Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
Mutant Garden Autobreeder by Harm van den Dorpel is a generative animated artwork based on evolutionary programming that never appears the same twice. The work is based on an existing algorithm called Cartesian Genetic Programming, invented by Julian F. Miller and Peter Thomson in 1997, the system itself having been finely tuned by van den Dorpel to produce a very particular quality of qualia. The software has been carefully constructed to produce a stream of new and unpredictable mutations that build and react to each previous generation of image.
Indiscreet Units by Harm van den Dorpel is a group of more than 266 hue-rotating flags, stored on the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS. This is a project about the indeterminacy of color, and that variability as a metaphor for larger social and political forces. Each NFT in the series is the official flag design for nations (and related entities) around the world.
Emmanuel van der Auwera visited Miami at the end of 2017 and was working on a project relating to school shootings. Two months later, on 14 February 2018, 19 year old Nicolas Cruz killed 17 people and injured 17 others in a shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Van de Auwera began to follow videos uploaded to the Periscope App, a live broadcasting channel that closed in March 2021, downloading them and creating a bank of data that would otherwise disappear, as material on Periscope was self-deleting after a short period of time.
From Green to Orange is a series of silver films immersed in a bath of dye and rust. While the perception of the subject is made difficult by the chemical reaction, vegetation becomes discernible at a closer look. Thu Van Tran interferes in the depths of a mystery, in the density of a hallucinated dream.
The work is a speech composed of excerpts from autobiographies of well-known political characters. From each book an excerpts that describes a childhood event and one that describes a political event or statement was selected. The former, in most cases, functions as an alibi or explanation of the latter.
Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey. At once attractive and repulsive, the sculpture combines objects of adornment with what appears to be viscera. The sculpture’s curious delicacy evokes a ritualistic catharsis, in response to persistent forms of medical racial violence and objectification for Black people in America and around the world.
Jonas Van and Juno B’s video work Kebranto is anchored by the figure of Boitatá, a snake that is part of the imaginary Guaraní communities that live between the current nation-states of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The mythical figure Boitatá is a protector of jungles and forests. In GuaraníBoitatá is the union of two words: Mbói (snake) and tatá (fire).
wombmate! by Mithu Sen is part of a project called AºVOID. In this fragmented mental map, the landscape is fleeting, embossed, and ethereal; there are moments of recognition and also a near-violent sudden emptying of memory.
To the Cardinal Gods: Central Axial Consecration (Site 6) is from a 2017 series made by Ren Zi during a residency in the Arctic Circle. The work reflects upon the serious ecological issues we face today. During the residency Ren Zi was joined by other artists, scientists, architects and educators exploring the high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago in an interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavour to create work addressing such issues.
In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers. Danielle Dean’s work True Red examines how a large corporation co-opted a historical fiction (the vampire), in addition to the traditional red and black colors of radical politics and the avant-garde. The animated video considers how capitalism can gentrify notions of radicality and the mutable nature of advertising.
Ken Okiishi’s work Being and/or Time consists of every image taken with Okiishi’s iPhone over the period of three years in his hometown of New York. Flickering in chronological order at 24 images per second with 25,000 images in total. A visual diary of the digital age it simultaneously stages the city itself as a time-image continuously remade by its own resident-users.
APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma is one of three works Erika Tan filmed within exhibition spaces during the final stages of their transition from colonial period law courts to the National Gallery Singapore. Part of an on-going body of work, this video focuses on the figure of a forgotten weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom. A minor figure in the exhibition histories of what was formerly known as Malaya (today, Singapore and Malaysia), Halimah exists as a series of footnotes, gaining historical attention only for the act of a premature death from pneumonia, in London and away from home.
Há Terra! (There Is Land!) is a short film by Ana Vaz that picks up on the artist’s previous film A Idade da Pedra (2013), in which Vaz imagined premodernity in her native Brazil.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Shanghai Biennale, Awaiting Your Arrival is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the marketing posters of official biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.)
Part of an installation commissioned by National Gallery Singapore, The Weaver’s Lament by Erika Tan addresses the invisibility of women textile artists and their labor. Tan’s video focuses on the story of a forgotten weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom. A minor figure in the exhibition histories of what was formerly known as Malaya, Abdullah’s loom was left behind at the end of the exhibition, now residing in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.
In Kan Xuan’s four-channel video Island , a series of objects like nail clippers, hairbrush, toothpaste, and house decorations are shot in close-ups. These highly polished and aestheticized images create a poetic visual flow. However, in front of each object lies a coin of different value—two yuan, one pound, one euro, one dollar—that silently reveals the material value of the household supplies.
Iván Argote’s As Far As We Could Get comprises a series of video chapters made in the municipality of Palembang, Indonesia and the small town of Neiva, Colombia. The two cities are exact antipodes. The geographical usage of the term antipode – designating points diametrically opposite one another on the globe – stems from the ancient belief that the other side of the earth held a kind of netherworld, where everything was inverted, causing the men who lived there to walk backwards.
In True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle) , Danielle Dean uses archival documents to re-imagine colonial history from the 1400s, while also referencing her own personal history. Elmina Castle was built in Ghana in 1482 as a Portuguese trading post, and later became a key location in the Atlantic slave trade. Dean’s re-enactment is set in an affordable housing community in Houston, Texas, where her half-sister Ashstress Agwunobi lives, and who also performs the role of “the native.” Dean plays the role of “the prospector,” who plans to “colonize” her sister’s home by bringing a wobbly red cardboard castle into the grounds of the community and getting the locals to help build it and work there.
Sexy shows Yan Xing unsuccessfully trying to reach orgasm in freezing temperatures among the falling rocks and howling winds of a precarious canyon. His erotic failure leaves the voyeur-viewer unfulfilled and disappointed. The work explores notions of identity, masculinity, sexuality, voyeurism, and cultural taboos.
Hexafluorosilicic acid is a type of sodium fluoride waste product that can be found in a large amount of widely available products such as cleaning fluids, toothpaste, rat poison, and drinking water. In Danielle Dean’s video Hexafluorosilicic , she mulls on this substance and its troubling co-option by modern society. In an indistinct US city, in an empty apartment, three characters (one of whom, unusually for Dean, is a white male) all wear brightly colored medical scrubs and undertake seemingly trivial and nonsensical experiments.
No Lye by Danielle Dean documents a group of five women, including Dean herself, confined to a small, cramped bathroom, communicating only by using slogans culled from beauty advertisements (“beauty is skin deep”, “naturalise, it’s in our nature to be strong and balanced”) and quotes from political speeches (“we must protect our borders”, “we are fighting for our way of life and our ability to fight for freedom”). The result is a fragmented conversation that defies legibility. As sounds of a possible conflict rise from outside, the characters work together producing what looks like explosives from soap, towels, and an unmarked blue liquid.
Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.
The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .
The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine.
The sculpture shores shored (Working Title) makes reference to the human form. The two sides of the sculpture are distinctively different, with the rear showing an anamorphic-corrugated structure, the front suggesting the human form, making perhaps an unconscious reference to Giacometti or Barnett Newman. But whereas their work suggests immanence, Michael Dean refuses any notion of transcendence, remaining rooted in presentness .
Ian Cheng’s project 3FACE is based on a model that is derived from both the artist’s extensive readings on psychology and cognition, and his own intuitive understanding of how people function. 3FACE positions the process of minting a generative NFT as a metaphor for personality development. While part of a series, because of the responsive coding, each NFT is unique and is informed by the contents of the owner’s wallet.
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless). The work uses collage techniques—it is stapled down and has a thick strip of contact sheet paper taped over it—that convert the media coverage on Godard’s film into a filmic object itself. The black paper enacts a kind of cinematic “jump cut” on the article, while simultaneously drawing attention to the medium of the film, as well as the photograph reproduced in this newspaper article.
The archive proposes to examine the difference between helping others in the context of an artistic project and in the context of social work in order to question authorship. The first part of Digger Dug made in 2004 was reactivated during the Kadist exhibition, for instance as an exchange with an anthropologist concerning ethics in projects that are both artistic and social. Thus the archive contained a new text and a series of photographs, videos and notes made during the exhibition.
Gan Chin Lee is a Malaysian artist of Chinese descent known across Southeast Asia for his realist paintings that painstakingly register the ethnic and religious complexities of Malaysia...
The work of Ian Cheng explores evolutionary processes, including mutation and adaptation in response to changing conditions...
Danielle Dean creates videos that use appropriated language from archives of advertisements, political speeches, newscasts, and pop culture to create dialogues to investigate capitalism, post-colonialism, and patriarchy...
The artist, writer, and researcher Ho Rui An probes histories of globalization and governance, performing a detournement of dominant semiotic systems across text, film, installation, and lecture...
Harm van den Dorpel’s practice focuses on emergent systems and the role technology plays in their development and meaning...
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker whose works speculate on the relationships between self and other, and myth and history, through a cosmology of signs, references, and perspectives...
Erika Tan’s practice is primarily research-driven with a focus on the moving image, referencing distributed media in the form of cinema, gallery-based works, Internet and digital practices...
Sergio De La Torre has worked with and documented the manifold ways in which citizens reinvent themselves in the city they inhabit, as well as the site-specific strategies they deploy to move “in and out modernity.” De La Torre often collaborates with his subjects, resulting in both intimate and critical reflections on topics like housing, immigration, and labor...
Mithu Sen’s writing is central to her practice, as a poet from West Bengal, a region of great Indian literary history, poetic and visual tropes giving ground to her challenge of semiotics...
Jes Fan is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong...
Ren Zi turned to art after having spent his working life in the business of words, having previously worked in advertising...
Chia-En Jao’s artwork approaches issues of identity, political regimes, coded sign systems, and his own experiences as a migrant...
Thu Van Tran grew up in the paradox of the dismantlement of the French colonial empire in Vietnam...
Artist Jean-Charles de Quillacq erects works which have a complicated relationship to remaining upright...
davi de jesus do nascimento grew up in Pirapora, a town in the north of Minas Gerais, which guides the narratives of his work, as does the heritage of his family of fishermen, laundresses, and Carranca masters...
Hit Man Gurung was born in Lamjung, Nepal and is currently based in Kathmandu...
Lenora de Barros studied linguistics and started her artistic career in the 1970s...
The Xijing Men hail, conceptually, from the fictitious city of Xijing, an imagined state in East Asia...
Tan Zi Hao is a multi-disciplinary artist who works predominantly with installation and performance art...
Michael Dean (b...
For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
Drawing & Print
Shanghai Biennale, Awaiting Your Arrival is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
Drawing & Print
Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions...
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people...
The archive proposes to examine the difference between helping others in the context of an artistic project and in the context of social work in order to question authorship...
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...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
Eight opens with a close up of a painting by Hubert Robert of the Chateau de Chamarande where the film was shot...
The work is a speech composed of excerpts from autobiographies of well-known political characters...
“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective...
Welcome to Xijing – Xijing Olympics is the third of five chapters in the Xijing series...
Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...
30 Proposals of Flag explores the relationships between signs, meanings, aesthetics, and nations...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
In Extra Curriculum Political Science Class 7/1972 , a group of women walk bare-foot and single file towards Dat Mui Mangrove in Ca Mau Province to attend ‘political science class’...
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...
No Lye by Danielle Dean documents a group of five women, including Dean herself, confined to a small, cramped bathroom, communicating only by using slogans culled from beauty advertisements (“beauty is skin deep”, “naturalise, it’s in our nature to be strong and balanced”) and quotes from political speeches (“we must protect our borders”, “we are fighting for our way of life and our ability to fight for freedom”)...
Contrast to the bustling and unrelenting experience of a city such as Hong Kong, Chris Huen Sin Kan paints the tranquil interiors of his apartment, where he leads a modest and almost hermit-like life...
Tan Zi Hao produced Pest Control 1110, 709, 428 (or, a Myth for Another) , in response to the Bersih social movement, that catalyzed three rallies on 10th November 2007, 9th July 2011 and 28th April 2012, respectively, to demand a clean electoral roll...
Caetano de Almeida’s abstract compositions in acrylic use delicately-rendered swirls of overlapping, colorful lines...
Adam is an emblematic work within Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s oeuvre...
From Green to Orange is a series of silver films immersed in a bath of dye and rust...
Hexafluorosilicic acid is a type of sodium fluoride waste product that can be found in a large amount of widely available products such as cleaning fluids, toothpaste, rat poison, and drinking water...
Jorge de León most well-known work was a radical gesture, and one of his earliest artworks: in his 2000 performance, The Circle, de León sewed his own mouth closed as a protest against the silencing of citizens in the face of social corruption...
In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers...
Originally commissioned for the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the film Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things) depicts the subculture of Brega music, a fusion of American Hip Hop, Brazilian techno and Caribbean reggaeton that emerged in North Eastern Brazil over the last decade...
Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey...
In True Red Ruin (Elmina Castle) , Danielle Dean uses archival documents to re-imagine colonial history from the 1400s, while also referencing her own personal history...
Following a series of related works, Brutalismo Americano by Marlon de Azambuja is a site-specific sculptural installation produced during the artist’s residency at Kadist, San Francisco in 2017...
Emmanuel van der Auwera visited Miami at the end of 2017 and was working on a project relating to school shootings...
Iván Argote’s As Far As We Could Get comprises a series of video chapters made in the municipality of Palembang, Indonesia and the small town of Neiva, Colombia...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
Drawing & Print
In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory...
The Diagram series relates broadly both to Jes Fan’s interests in body modification and gender hacking as well as the artist’s investment in destabilizing hegemonic categories such as gender, monogamy, and the classical individuated subject in favor of more creative, egalitarian, and communal modes of envisioning ourselves...
Advanced Technology
Mutant Garden Autobreeder by Harm van den Dorpel is a generative animated artwork based on evolutionary programming that never appears the same twice...
Jonas Van and Juno B’s video work Kebranto is anchored by the figure of Boitatá, a snake that is part of the imaginary Guaraní communities that live between the current nation-states of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay...
Lenora de Barros’s poetics are known for setting in motion an intimate relationship between image and the written word...
Indiscreet Units by Harm van den Dorpel is a group of more than 266 hue-rotating flags, stored on the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS...
Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species...
Ecotone by Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a video work presented in six chapters, each beginning and ending with a one-sided telephone dialog with an informal, friendly and conversational tone, that leads quickly into complex philosophical subjects...
Drawing & Print
davi de jesus do nascimento’s earthy paintings, from the series sorvedouro , recall his memories as an essentially organic matter...
The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza...