Arpedia

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.

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Hexfluorosilicic

Danielle Dean

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.

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No Lye

Danielle Dean

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.

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True Red

Danielle Dean

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.

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Elevación [Elevation]

Ana María Millán

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

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Collaborative Mt. Tamalpais Drawings #1-8

Etel Adnan and Lynn Marie Kirby

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.

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Shisa Dog and Chicken

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva

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.

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NA CHINA!

Marie Voignier

“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.

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Tourisme International

Marie Voignier

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.

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The Rebellion of the Roots (France)

Daniela Ortiz

The Rebellion of Roots by Daniela Ortiz depicts a series of situations in which tropical plants, held hostage in the botanical gardens and greenhouses of Europe, are protected and nurtured by the spirits of racialized people who died as a result of European racism. The work is divided into four short stories: About Afghanistan and heroin , About Exposition Colonial and cow , About Jardin d’acclimatation and potato , and About Vietnam . The series of 14 painted panels draw upon the aesthetic of ex-votos, a genre of traditional religious folk painting that acts as a tribute for divine intervention in response to personal tragedy.

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General Joan Prim i Prats

Daniela Ortiz

Previously, Ortiz produced a series of photographs related to her research on the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to domestic servants in the modernist architectural houses of South American upper class families. Following the same formal principal, she has developed a new series called Estat nacio . This work presents a critical point of view on the construction of a national sovereignty through speeches and laws concerning people who are not considered as citizens according to immigration legislation and the regulations affecting immigrants’ rights and freedom.

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WTEIA3

Daniel Boyd

Daniel Boyd’s work WTEIA3 is part of a series of paintings that reference the stick charts used by indigenous communities on the Marshall Islands. These charts were made in order to navigate the Pacific ocean by canoe and thus crucially depict ocean swell patterns. These highly individualised maps were rarely intended for mass use but instead for memorising, and transmitting between the community, the maps were not taken to sea but instead memorised in advance.

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View from an apartment

Jean Claracq

View From an Apartment features 18-year-old Joland Novaj whose image was taken from Instagram. Staring vacantly at his cereal bowl, his computer is open on his own Instagram account and Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” lies open next to it, illustrated with a XV century illumination. Beyond the room there is a bay, lined with modernist buildings.

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Untitled (Celestial Motors)

Maria Taniguchi

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

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Search for the origin of the work of art or on the way to Heidegger’s cabin

Maria Bussman

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.

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Untitled

Maria Taniguchi

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.

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Typical Weapons

Alejandro Marré

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.

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Le réel est l'impasse de la formalisation ; la formalisation est le lieu de passe-en-force du réel

Benoît Maire

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.

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It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000

Jean-Luc Moulène

It rains, Paris, 1st July 2000 , which could be the refrain of a song, is the title of a photograph of a minimal moment, the vision of a Parisian pedestrian, a cut flower lying on the pavement covered in rain drops. Is this moment captured by chance or a mise en scène? There is a sort of hiatus in the image; the planes – motif and background – connect nature in full bloom, pure, fragile, ephemeral with the grey weighty tarmac.

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Adam

Jean-Charles de Quillacq

Adam is an emblematic work within Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s oeuvre. The artist has created a number of pieces entitled Adam , referring to original man, incarnated in multiple objects at once. Materially, Adam is a fluorescent yellow walking rope with an epoxy coating on one side, rendering the structure rigid, demonstrative of his sculptural practice which is both conceptual and sensual.

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Vision (Bump’n’Curl)

Dannielle Bowman

Vision (Bump’n’Curl) by Dannielle Bowman is from a series of photographs titled What Had Happened . The series blends a major historical event with small, personal images. The photographs retain fragments of the artist’s own heritage and investigate the concept of home, while gaining inspiration from the Great Migration, a movement in which African Americans from the South (including Bowman’s grandparents) moved to the North, and also the American West from 1916-1970.

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Clouds paintings

Benoît Maire

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.

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El territorio no está en venta

María Buenaventura

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.

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Maids Rooms

Daniela Ortiz

In her work, Maids Room (2012) which is part of a series, Daniela Ortiz undertakes an architectural analysis of the houses belonging to the upper class of Lima. Her research highlights the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to the domestics. The project offers an analysis of this room, its size and its position in relation to the rest of the house.

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Pavimento exterior Banco Safra (Rooftop Banco Safra)

Juan Araujo

Pavimento exterior Banco Safra (Rooftop Banco Safra)

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They/Them

Juan Obando

They/Them by Juan Obando is a video essay and deepfake that uses Adobe Stock clips, maintaining their branded watermark, but animating the scenes underneath with a narrative of self-critical awareness. It’s a meta-narrative that uses the staged scenarios (as evidence) to talk about the variable politics (and mercenary capitalism) of the stock footage industry and the misinformation dilemma we’re facing with the arrival of AI technology. In a surprising reversal, a deepfake is used to tell the truth.

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shores shored (Working Title)

Michael Dean

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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 .

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Libro Ponti II

Juan Araujo

Many of Araujo’s works depict reproductions and Libro Ponti II is a recreation of a book on Italian architect Gio Ponti. Ponti designed the Villa Planchart a private, modernist house in Caracas, Venezuela, which at the time it was built in 1956, reflected the emergence of a class increasingly globalized, both culturally and economically. Araujo’s replica of the book thus refers to the role and visibility of Venezuela in circuits of global cultural production.

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The Breaks

Juan Capistran