Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco.

NFT (NFT)

Gregory Halpern spent five years shooting ZZYZX , and another year editing the results, from an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after his Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to live in California. According to Halpern, the series “is grounded in reality, but it occupies an in-between space, between documentary and a certain sense of mystery.” …“I see ZZYZX as part of a continuum but edging a little closer towards fiction.” The series title is borrowed from the village Zzyzx (pronounced zye-zix), formerly Soda Springs, but rechristened by the mineral water pioneer, Curtis Howe Springer, in 1944. The eccentric Springer named it after what he claimed to be the last word in the English language.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part of a series of videos called LIFE, where Shay Arik videos that re-enact iconic journalistic photographs. As explained by the video’s title, the departure point for LIFE #1 is the iconic 1943 photograph published by Life magazine that captures Japanese officer Yasuno Chikao from the Imperial Japanese Navy as he raises his sword, seconds before publically beheading Australian war commando Leonard Siffleet in the shores of Papua New Guinea. In Arick’s restaging there are no onlookers in the scene, the only two figures represented are Chikao and Siffleet: the perpetrator and victim of this fatal act of violence.

Installation (Installation)

Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall. With its cushions removed to reveal its internal mechanisms, the chair’s programmed rubbing, kneading, patting, and vibrating motions create a strange sight and soundscape. The work explores the relationship between flesh and machine as they come together through technologically simulated social behaviors, challenging normative ideas about human interaction.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant shows a looped scene where a robotic hand touches a “sensitive plant” — Mimosa Pudica, a species characteristic for closing on itself when touched. The name of the plant was derived from Carl Linnaeus sexual taxonomy of plants: pudica referring both to the external sexual organs, shyness and modesty. In a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) titled The Loves of the Plants (1789), this plant is associated, jokingly, with British Botanist Joseph Banks’s famous sexual adventures during his botanical expedition to the tropics.

Photography (Photography)

Acts of Appearance is an ongoing series by Gauri Gill consisting of lush, large-scale color portraits of the residents of a village in Maharashtra, in Western India, which is known for making Adivasi masks. Adivasi people are part of the tribal groups population of South Asia. Instead of requesting the likenesses of gods and demons, Gill asked the residents—including the master mask-makers Subhas and Bhagavan Dharam Kadu, their families, and fellow volunteers—to make masks that portray their own lives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.

Textile (Textile)

Maori barkcloth making is the central artistic form in the Pacific, and still at the core of cultural expression in many Pacific countries. However, Maori barkcloth making ceased to be practiced in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the arrival of European colonists. Completed barkcloth works often represent another complex Pacific Indigenous accomplishment, the sophisticated system of celestial mapping used in the cross-Pacific navigation that led to the expansion of a vivid pan-Pacific civilisation, thriving before colonial disruption.

Installation (Installation)

In Anthony Discenza’s 23-minute audio loop that makes up A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats , a nondescript male voice narrates a series of unlikely pairings: “think Dune meets South Pacific;” “think dubstep meets the Magna Carta;” “think the Food Network meets Igmar Bergman.” Given without inflection or emotion, this recitation uses the structure of a Hollywood elevator pitch to sketch out an unknown project, idea, or structure, conflating and collapsing cultural referents into an implausible mass of contradictions.

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.

Installation (Installation)

(Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notations by Newell Harry brings together a litany of contemporary politics—mobilization around enduring racism, the legacies of Indigenous and independence struggle, and the prospects of global solidarity against neocolonialism and social injustice. Yet what makes his stance unique is his idiosyncratic ‘anarchival’ method, developed over twenty years of living, working, and gathering in and around the South Pacific. From the resulting miscellany, Harry elicits thought-provoking new connections between collected artefacts; photographs and impressions authored by himself; and items drawn from journalist, activist, and documentary archives.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

Matt Kane initiated the project Right Place & Right Time – Bitcoin Volatility Art in 2019. Estimated to run for the next 10 years, the series of NFT artworks speaks to the volatility of the bitcoin market and the political, social, and financial events that led to it. Every day, a new composition is generated autonomously using a data feed of Bitcoin’s last 24 hours of price action.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As an artist Francisco Camacho Herrera seeks ways in which his work can exist within, and challenge, official social channels. His practice revolves around the possibility of art to bear practical effects on cultural assumptions and reflects on redefining common concepts that can lead art to change the ways in which we conceive society. Camacho Herrera speculated that Chinese sailors might have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century.