Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tomorrow by Jung Yoonsuk is a two-channel video installation, observing the two different sites of factories, one in the mannequin reform factory in Seoul, Korea, and the other in a sex doll factory in Shenzhen, China. The artist’s research began in 2016 when he encountered articles, and some dystopian images, about a “retired sex doll”, a spooky, deformed dummy with big breasts, that stood in an agricultural field backdrop of a high-rise apartment complex in Chengdu, China. Jung’s work explores the factory scene, the (mostly female) workers and their labor, the doll’s artificiality, and human-like eccentricities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Destinos Posibles Garciga performs a service in Havana, Cuba by offering strangers in the streets a “ride” to wherever they are going for free, in exchange he demands that the passengers address the question “what do they want from life?” A poignant video within the context of the limitations the Cubans have in terms of choices, desires, fantasies, and longing.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leonardogillesfleur describes Myself as a Fountain : “The couple kissing in the park. Pedestrian pass by with boom box, fire truck sirens and baseball-bat sounds suggest they are in New York. But the kiss is not accomplished and saliva drips from the lover’s open mouth like a fountain of unfulfilled desire.”

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. Conversations with a Tropical Vulture is an experimental narrative video, co-directed by both artists, and blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all-too-real life approach, which creates and inspires a counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality. The video, shot on location in Acapulco, utilizes a “lo-fi” aesthetic and playful use of non-professional actors.

Photography (Photography)

For this series, Philip-Lorca diCorcia walked along Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles in search of models who would be prepared to pose in hotel rooms according to pre- planned scenarios. The artist explained that: “I went back to the street just like the ordinary clients of these prostitutes. I went up to them and mentioned the following: ‘I would like to take a photo of you, I will pay you exactly what you are paid for a pass’”.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film Hustle in Hand (2014) we observe secret negotiations carried out between two characters with only their torsos visible in the frame— negotiations that consider fetishizations, meaning and symbolic value of the body and flesh. Money, food, appearances, and consumption: the viewer is pulled into a round of transactions, a rumination on our society in which art occupies a coveted position. The film’s rhythm is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a green polyhedron that, once licked by one of the mysterious protagonists, becomes golden yellow, a magical event accompanied by an intense swelling of violin music.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Los amantes (The lovers) Diana Fonseca Quiñones uses simple, commonplace objects and experiences that she derives from daily life to develop narratives that mix reality and fiction. Drawing on seemingly everyday moments, such as lighting a match, Quiñones creates poetic metaphors that cleverly comment on broader social issues, as well as politics, and universal human desires. In her profound work Los amantes, the humblest of materials, a pair of burning matches, becomes a parable for the sharing, longing, restraint, and death that everyone faces in life.

Photography (Photography)

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light. The architect’s longtime studio and residence, which he built in Los Angeles in 1922, exemplifies this philosophy, and has since become an influential part of the modernist architectural canon. In Untitled (Schindler House #01) (2007), Luisa Lambri describes Schindler’s studio by capturing its aftereffects—the play of light and shadow cast through branches onto a surface.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sung Hwan Kim created the drawing push against the air 01 during a rehearsal for his eponymous 2007 performance at De Apple (as part of Prix de Rome), Amsterdam, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. For the performance, Kim interviews his frequent collaborator David Michael DiGregorio and a fellow musician, Byungjun Kwon, about love songs they have composed. The performance appears spontaneous and creates a space of vulnerability and intimacy, however in reality, the three rehearsed the performance numerous times and performed it in numerous cities.

Installation (Installation)

“On April 13 a painting was lost at JFK airport while going through the security screening. On April 19 a painting was lost at CDG airport while going through the security screening. On April 20 a painting was lost at DUB airport while going through the security screening.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lightning 01 (2014) parodies our contemporary relationship to screen-based media and the absurdity of aestheticizing boredom. The video depicts a computer user aimlessly taking photos of himself, seemingly numb to external stimuli or intervention. Set on a loop, the video produces the illusion of an endless state of bored selfies and disaffected gazes.

Photography (Photography)

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California. Commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller, and built by Richard Neutra in 1937, the Miller house’s open and flowing layout expands upon modernist architectural traditions. It features a flat roof, stone and glass walls, with rooms configured beneath a grid pattern of skylights and supporting cruciform steel columns.

Photography (Photography)

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

Installation (Installation)

Peter Friedl’s projects place aesthetic questions within an expanded field that takes into account the social, political and philosophical context. This textile piece quotes and diverts a flag with a red background and the central star of the Kurdistan National Liberation Front (ERNK, a military organization linked to PKK, founded in 1985 and disbanded in 2000), and not the national flag of Kurdistan. The artist became interested as from 1994, when the town of Lice was destroyed by the Turkish army and the PKK was expelled from Germany.