Installation (Installation)

In the hologram “Mano con hojas” (”Hand with Leaves”, 2013), nature is portrayed simultaneously as an interconnected system of processes and the essence of the universe. A change in the understanding of nature challenges the understanding of our own natures. The visual metaphor of the human hand enmeshed and inextricably entangled with leaves suggests that humans cannot be divorced from nature, and moreover that they are always engaging with the problematic of overtaking nature or being overtaken by it.

Painting (Painting)

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.

Painting (Painting)

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.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. By using Carrara marble, a material usually associated with heroic public sculptures, Martinez casts the history of African-American revolutionaries into the artistic tradition of monumentality. Like the artist’s earlier work included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an interactive piece made up with pins that read, “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE,” A meditation on the possibility… continues Martinez’s effort to expose cultural contradictions and increase public awareness.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

If Only God Had Invented Coca Cola Sooner! Or, The Death of My Pet Monkey

Photography (Photography)

For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied. Against a bare white background, the men appear unexpectedly vulnerable, caught between performance and rehearsal, public and private. While they present themselves deliberately as exemplars of strength, they also inadvertently expose something about the value system that underlies their endeavors—whatever drove them to keep building by tearing tissue, and whatever makes flexing feel like the most honest pose possible.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To make the video installation Soft Staycation (Gaze Track Edit) , the artist, playing the role of ‘job creator’, hired a group of unemployed and expat freelancers through Craigslist to watch a 30 minute compilation of national tourism ads. These ads, which are generally sponsored by various publicly funded tourism boards and screened in airports for example, were found on the Internet by Keller. He used a gaze-tracking camera to measure the eye movements of the people participating in the experiment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways. The video begins with the pedestrian traversing a seemingly idyllic ivy lined stone and concrete thoroughfare. As his pace begins to accelerate, the camera follows him with greater urgency, slowly settling and become stable again as his pace decelerates.

Painting (Painting)

Parrot Drawings or Paintings look like children’s drawings and seem quite innocent. The parrot in both the Garden of Eden and the harems are associated with the symbol of purity and innocence. These symbols are found in Renaissance painting, especially in the Annunciations or the Virgins and child and later in Flemish portraits.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Birdstones is a series of flat concrete slabs made from moldings of different shapes, each with two small holes. They stand vertically in space in a precarious stance. Heavy by the density of the concrete, they are also airy and floating.

Installation (Installation)

Executed in 2012, A World Undone revolves around a single, metaphorically rich substance, drawing on geological research into an ancient mineral, Zircon, unearthed in remote Western Australia. These rocks are now studied, like a time capsule, revealing intriguing clues about the state of the planet more than 4 billion years ago. Mangan procured a sample of the material and reduced it to a fine dust that he then filmed, in flux, with a high-speed video camera.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Superb production values and special effects that in the hands of Miguel Angel Rios do not get in the way or distracts from the content and deep essay of this work. The shadow of Modernity represented via a clear cube floats over and through a barren landscape in Latin America. Juxtaposing the corrupt politics of the land, with the artist’s struggles and questioning of the effects and burden of influence of Modernity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Piedras Blancas , arguably his most ambitious and visually arresting video to date, Miguel Angel Ríos made 3,000 “piedras” out of a concrete/stone composite. The video is shot in arid, mountainous locations in Mexico (his adopted country) and Argentina (his home country). Over several months, Ríos scouted locations for natural-worn tributaries where he eventually allowed these balls to then thunder down the mountain.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

David Gustav Cramer’s are composed of simple, descriptive texts accompanied by found photographs, letters or other materials. The elements juxtaposed in each work operate like the lines of a Haiku. It is the tension between them that opens space for thought.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Got Your Back by Gisela McDaniel depicts two women of color from different ethnic backgrounds who share similar violent experiences. However, the sitters never met and were depicted separately by artist Gisela McDaniel. The painting is thus an artificial construct, whose warm, gentle and seemingly benign look Is undermined by the accompanying soundtrack detailing their horrific experiences.

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)

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.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his paper-based work, Medellin-New York , Rojas uses coca leaves and dollar bills to spell out the words of the two cities, tied together through the illicit exchange of materials used to make the word, gesturing towards the uncomfortable reality of the drug trafficking trade and the complicity of both America and Colombia within that economic system.