Photography (Photography)

In Linda, Lee & Dorsey, Louis (1988~, 2018) Marcel Pardo Ariza draws on Bay Area queer histories that have been uncovered from local archives and queer organizations, and connects them to people currently living in the Bay, where Ariza is also based. This particular portrait features a skein of arms and legs, in both color and black and white print, intimately woven together. Tender and sensual, the tangle of limbs incorporates both stereotypically feminine and masculine traits in various skin tones.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting. As with the acrylic painting Ticket (also 2015), Person in Red Sweater could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Although typically sold today as a novelty item for flower arrangements and interior decorating flourishes, cotton can also be seen as a proxy, through synecdoche, for US slavery. Dead Zone (4) by Aria Dean presents a preserved blossom of that trade’s primary cash crop, cotton, crystalized in a state of non-decay whilst encased under protective glass. Hidden in the base of the work is a signal jammer which prevents mobile phones from broadcasting when nearby.

Installation (Installation)

Adição por subtração 4 (Addition by Subtraction, 2010) is an intervention into the white cube with both beautiful and intimidating results. The installation is a large rectangular frame created out of shards of clear and colored glass that protrude from the wall. The use of glass fragments is reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s sculpture Map of Glass (Atlantis) (1969), yet the concerns here are very different.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting, and Ticket could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s documentary Four Hundred Unquiet Graves is a powerful and vulnerable visual essay about the descendants of those who were disappeared during the Spanish Civil War from 1936–1939. The film reveals the spectrum of violence that surrounds the war, namely the impact of thousands of forced disappearances on different generations. Surviving family members are haunted not only by the absence of their grandparents, but also by the overwhelming grief that lives in their parents.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La Forma del Presente (The Shape of Now) by Manuel Correa follows a group of survivors of Colombia’s 50-year long armed conflict facing the impossible task of agreeing on a shared past. After half a century of carnage, Colombia achieved peace. Despite an agreement between the government and the Revolutionary armed forces of Colombia (FARC_EP) being rejected by popular vote, the government chose to implement the agreements regardless, further polarizing the public opinion.

Photography (Photography)

450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site. The cut shape mirrors the precise shape of the Kadist gallery floor, where the concrete was relocated as part of his residency exhibition entitled Somewhere, Elsewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere. Through this concrete graft, Cidade inextricably links the city with artwork.

Painting (Painting)

Marcelo Cidade interrogates the city, architecture and urban planning. This architectonic drawing proposes modular possibilities, adaptable variations based on the form of the concrete block (a material which is often actually integrated in his practice). The “re-definition” announced in the title is in construction, in process, under development, in flux.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power, 2010) is a mousetrap elegantly crafted in Carrara marble. Originally made for the Carrara Biennale in 2010, it re-creates the iconic form down to the piece of cheese waiting for an unsuspecting victim. In this sculpture, Cicade challenges the viewer’s participation and intervention into the artistic object.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This is a poignant and humorous self portrait that turns the camera on the artist’s own physical inability to cry. With non-stop cascades of “tears” coming down from his eyes, the impact of the work is in the contrast between the still image of the artist and the constant movement of the waterfalls flowing down. An image of impotency, it is also a beautiful “moving picture” in the formal sense.

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video animation Falling Head 2 , hand-painted by Diego Marcon in 2015, consists of a close-up of a head caught on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness or maybe from wakefulness to sleep. The film is projected as a ten-second loop where the first and last frames coincide. Working mainly in video and film, Marcon is familiar with the consequences of eyestrain.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Monelle by Diego Marcon was filmed at night inside the infamous Casa del Fascio, the headquarters of the local Fascist Party in Como Italy, designed by Giuseppe Terragni under Mussolini’s rule. The building is immersed in darkness and it is initially difficult to recognize the iconic rationalist architecture, flashes of light illuminate languid adolescent girls sleeping amidst the space for just a few seconds at a time. Next to the bodies, strange humanoids are lurking, they are CGI-generated, but the human eye does not have enough time to register their artificiality, they materialize and disappear in a flash like ghosts.

Painting (Painting)

Since Manuel Solano became blind, they developed a technique that relies on audio descriptions that allow for an assistant to place pins and threads on a grid that guides the artist’s hands through the surface. In Los Abuelos , the artist works with a canvas the size of their body, allowing intense interaction with the wet paint. This kind of tactility creates a complex entanglement of color masses alternating sharp and blurred details, giving the image an erratic and affective atmosphere just as our fond memories often appear to us.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time. Shot from an aerial vantage, the camera tracks the daily commute on a small stretch of concrete highway. The camera films the traffic below in short five-second excerpts before blacking out; time begins to collapse as the video shifts between scene, and the hours compress into minutes as daylight quickly turns into night.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nagtzaam’s medium is drawing and his repertory of forms varies from abstract hard-edge and wall drawing to the reproduction of written material that he collects from art magazines. The artist uses abstract architectural elements that he reproduces on the wall in which he inserts drawings, elements from photographs and drawings of texts collected from art magazines. The repetition, control and imperfection of the movements create a tension, a particular vibration in his geometrical drawings and in the drawings of texts.

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.

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.

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.