Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fade In (the whole title of the film is actually the entire five page script) is a collaboration with the Danish artist collective Superflex (group of freelance artist–designer–activists committed to social and economic change, founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen). There are several time layers to understand the story behind this film. In 1601, the San Jago set sail from Goa for Lisbon; the cargo included the first consignment of South East Asian porcelain destined for the European market.

Photography (Photography)

This image is an extract from a notebook in the archives of doctor Fakhouri that lists the cars that have been used for bombs between 1975 and 1991. Each page of the notebook contains a collage of an image of a car with the same make, model and color as the exploded car with a text in Arabic that gives the details of the place, time and date of the explosion, the number of people in the accident, the perimeter of destruction, the weight and the type of explosive. The images of the cars made visible are only equivalents since the cars that actually exploded are totally destroyed.

Photography (Photography)

It is a little known fact that Lebanese historians were also gamblers during the war. They met every Sunday at the race courses. Race after race, the historians were positioned behind the press photographers who were there to take a picture of the winning horse passing the finishing line.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

SUPERFLEX makes a distinction between two types of projects with different temporalities: works that occur during an exhibition and other that evolved over several years. Thus, since 1997, they are working on a biogas system (SUPERGAS), first installed in Kenya, then Thailand and today in Mexico, perfecting at each stage the means of production, utilization and commercialization of this system. GUARANA POWER is one of these sustainable projects that create a real economy.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

One Day in the Mountain is a bilingual calligraphic performance piece written in ink superimposed with food leftover from a meal. The eponymous text: “One day in mountain is worth two thousands years in the world.” is written horizontally from left to right in both English and Chinese, following the writing order of modern Chinese instead of the traditional vertical right to left. With the word “is” migrating from the middle of the English phrase to be surrounded by Chinese characters, the resultant text appears to be spatially illustrating the meaning of being isolated in the mountain.

Photography (Photography)

For the last few years, Che Onejoon has been focusing on the relationships between African countries and North Korea. He has attempted to interpret the ongoing Cold War in the Korean peninsula from a new geopolitical perspective. His resulting body of work focuses on the memorial monuments, statues and architectures that were built in 13 different African countries by North Korean government.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The sculpture And Shadows Will Follow is an angle piece that articulates a space since its appearance highly changes depending on the point of view. Initially conceived for an exhibition with natural light, this work diffracts light and projects a shadow like a cut-out. Surprisingly the work stands like a drawing in space, a graph and its imprint, a line and a point.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Photography (Photography)

Mooi indie (which translates to “Beautiful Indies”) is a term used to depict the beauty of nature in the East Indies during the period of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. The term is usually used to describe a painting, romanticising the alluring tropics through the lens of European imperialism. Later in the 1950s, the prominent Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono, who is known as one of the founding fathers of Indonesian Modern Art, publicly rejected the Mooi Indie genre as Indonesian art.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

There is no there by Gabriella and Silvana Mangano is a black and white looped video with sound, in conjunction with a live performance. The work is inspired by the Blue Blouse, a political propaganda theater movement which spread across the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. More specifically, the work takes the form of ‘Living Newspapers’, which were performances based on topical news events.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Wheat Mollah ( 2011) is one of Slavs and Tatars composite object. The title Wheat Mollah has various interpretations, from “master” or spiritual authority for Shiites and “friend” for Sunnis. The turban is also worn in a diversity of cultures and religions in Africa, Asia and India.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les Chenilles by Michelle and Noël Keserwany is a sensual film that translates the source of women’s oppression into the means for their liberation. In this narrative film, protagonists Asma and Sarah meet while working as waitresses in France. They both come from the Levant and, each in their own way, carry burdens of the past and the consequences of colonialism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented. The artists used disposable spoons as catapults to shoot thousands of plastic bottle caps at a hole in a concrete platform. The platform was once part of a U. S. military installation in the Panama Canal Zone, and it is now an observation deck in a nature park.

Painting (Painting)

Nepal and China signed an agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017. The BRI is a strategy that was set forth by China in 2013 to expand its influence by building a network of economic corridors around the globe. BRI projects in Nepal include the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway, the Galchhi-Rasuwagadhi-Kerung 400 kilovolt transmission line, the 762 megawatt Tamor hydroelectric dam, and the 426 megawatt Phukot Karnali run-of-the-river hydropower project.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda remake a clip from the 1970s they found on the internet, and without really changing this archive material, displace it by imitating the staging and the acting with scrupulous precision. The slightest details are reproduced identically with great minutiae. The facial expressions are absurd, the prim attitude makes no sense.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

DADYAA: The Woodpeckers of Rotha by Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet illuminates a unique and seldom seen international perspective on indigenous cultures and contemporary social issues in the Nepali context. A small masterpiece, the work engages with one of the most pressing social issues in Nepal, mass migration and the dissolving of social fabric in rural areas. The story begins with an old couple, Atimaley and Devi, who live in a village in Jumla, in the highlands of Western Nepal.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Addressing the legacy of colonialism, The Guestbook by Musquiqui Chihying and Gregor Kasper is a slow-paced, black-and-white film exploring the German colony of Togoland, now the Republic of Togo. The guestbook in question—a thin, battered copy that Do Do, the Togolese protagonist of the film, finds in Berlin’s State Library—is filled with the signatures of colonial-era explorers. The plot follows Do Do as he seeks out Treptower Park, where the JAZZ musician Kwassi Bruce was once exhibited in a human zoo in the first German Colonial Exhibition.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Nepal and China signed an agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017. The BRI is a strategy that was set forth by China in 2013 to expand its influence by building a network of economic corridors around the globe. BRI projects in Nepal include the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway, the Galchhi-Rasuwagadhi-Kerung 400 kilovolt transmission line, the 762 megawatt Tamor hydroelectric dam, and the 426 megawatt Phukot Karnali run-of-the-river hydropower project.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letters of the Greek alphabet glisten on a black background. When a letter appears, there is a sound. Each letter corresponds to a star in the sky.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Many of Chaves and Gilda’s works use recycled cardboard. For Partituras, they arranged stacks of cardboard into long rectangles on the ground, which are visually analogous to fields of graphite in Chaves’s pencil drawings. While the blocks have a spare presence in space, they exist more full solidity within their borders, and the recycled nature of the cardboard adds some play into the clean minimalist rectangles and cubes.

Photography (Photography)

Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways. “Tiko drink-Kumba drunk” is an adage that is commonly used in the Southwest province of Cameroon to speak of how one’s actions affect others. Civil liberties are next to non-existent in Cameroon, the law is lawless, and structured in a way that is intended to attack its citizens’ human rights.

Photography (Photography)

Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways. “Tiko drink-Kumba drunk” is an adage that is commonly used in the Southwest province of Cameroon to speak of how one’s actions affect others. Civil liberties are next to non-existent in Cameroon, the law is lawless, and structured in a way that is intended to attack its citizens’ human rights.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province. It begins with sound – perhaps a hammer, or a gong – the lack of image making its identification difficult. A landscape emerges of an open field where a farmer tends his grazing cow herd.

Installation (Installation)

Landscape Series no. 1 presents landscape as a “quiet witness of history.” It began with searches of online archives of Vietnamese news-media, for images of figures in landscapes “pointing, to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing.” The uniformity is striking but the sequence is subtly structured: the typology hints at narrative progression, though of an uninformative narrative, lacking details.

Photography (Photography)

Ha Tae-Bum’s “White” series, started in 2008, begins with photographic images from the mainstream media depicting sites of conflict or crisis. The artist eliminates human presence, miscellaneous details, and all color from the images, then “rebuilds” them into quiet, achromatic models with thin white paper. Once complete, the models are photographed in a nearly identical composition as the original image.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

He Xiangyu’s Terminal 3 presents excerpts from the lives of young African acrobats attending the Hebei Wuqiao Acrobatic Arts School in China. Acrobatics, which had a rich history as a court display in imperial China, is now integral to the cultural industries and tourism sector in Wuqiao, continuing a legacy of expending bodies for monetary gain. From 2016 to 2019, He intermittently went to Wuqiao Acrobatics School in Hebei Province to record the daily lives of the students who study a variety of acrobatic skills during their year-long program.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524. Each choir was filmed separately, and the artists weave together the audio while the video features each choir individually. The juxtaposition of different contexts in which singing occurs functions as an embedded sociological study of various communities throughout the region.