Film & Video (Film & Video)

Composed of five episodes, Brine Lake (A New Body) by Shen Xin is set in a fictional factory where iodine is produced as a byproduct of natural gas sourced from deep sea brine lakes. Korean, Japanese, and Russian are spoken in multiple episodes. The protagonists have multiple encounters and conversations with two unseen employees of the factory whose visions are overtaken by the camera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Lonely Age by Connie Zheng is the first chapter in a trilogy of short experimental films about the complex temporalities of navigating ongoing environmental crises, as seen through the lens of seeds real and imagined. The film is set in a highly toxic and ecologically ravaged near future, in which people begin to hear rumors of seeds that have washed up on the shores of California after escaping from a factory in China. The seeds are rumored to possess curative properties, but they are also said to be sentient.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments. The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015. The sculpture, employing the technique of traditional Atzompa pottery originating from Oaxaca, Mexico, is an examination of the way in which archaeological heritage is remembered in the earthenware made by Atzompa potters today. Accompanied by the publication ‘Ixiptla Vol.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

An early work in Sung Hwang Kim’s career, the video Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 is a fictional documentary, the film is based on a non-fiction travelogue, In Korean Wilds and Villages , written by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman, who lived in Korea from 1935 to 1937. In Kim’s film, a Dutch female protagonist traces Bergman’s path in the present-day Seoul (Keijo was the Japanese name for Gyeongseong, currently Seoul). The protagonist navigates through spaces that have been rebuilt since the 1950s onwards, and the scenes are narrated by a voice-over based on Bergman’s written description of the modern city in 1937.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In the early 2000s, as urban redevelopment accelerated and intense construction significantly diminished public space in Tehran, state-funded murals began to represent imaginary landscapes on building facades. The municipality of Tehran uses such pictorial representation to to exert influence over and come to terms with the flow of communal desire. The protrusion of the unreal onto the real interrupts the values, independence, and functionality of one over the other.

Installation (Installation)

In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs. Although the imagery present in her work might seem nostalgic upon first encounter, Biernoff’s complex tableaux often reveal the artist’s skeptical look towards her subjects matters. They Were Here (2010), constitutes a clear example.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation. Glen is a simple silhouette, genderless and inspired by a found photo of a crime scene, in whom we recognize the generic sign of the universal symbol of a self-portrait. Mullican continually projects himself, sometimes physically, into the silhouette that he has created, allowing the artist to pass from one reality to another.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Bady Dalloul’s Scrapbook is a 48 minute video beginning from his birth, tracing major global events of the 20 th century, including the beginning and current Occupation and colonization of Palestine, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assassination of family members and the Syrian diaspora. A voice over follows these moments as the camera traces over the collage that includes text; photos; postcards; origami birds; and inserted videos of world leaders. The film is a letter to the viewer, imploring the witnessing of what we assume, but cannot know, to be the artist speaking.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed in Morocco, the film Atlas by Karthik Pandian continues his investigation into history, site and monument. The film explores fundamental notions of movement, freedom and the cinematic imaginary through the figure of the camel. Rather than focusing on the Moroccan patrimonial landscape, which is itself full of simulations and fantasies conjured for the touristic imagination, Pandian shot the video in Ouarzazate, Hollywood’s go-to location to stage the desert — from Lawrence of Arabia to The Mummy.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Clemens von Wedemeyer has imagined a trip back in time at Breitenau. Starting with events that happened there from 1933 to 1945, the German artist has composed three stories that reach the years of the women’s reformatory, in the 1970s, with a different protagonist for each era. A work that attempts to bring out the “pathology” of the site, as the artist tells Bert Rebhandl, and at the same time its “unforgettable” status as a black hole in the history of Germany, that sucked up innocent lives for almost a century.

Installation (Installation)

This research-based artwork acts as a memorial to early twentieth century European exploration of China. An antique open suitcase reveals a pile of rubbings and an air-dried peony, while projected photographs of the Chinese landscape appear as a slideshow on the gallery wall. The artifacts refer to a 1908-1909 expedition of naturalists, missionaries, and colonists to the west of China, which ended abruptly with the death of one of the travelers by unusual circumstances.

Photography (Photography)

In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions. An example of this is Floor, Legs (2013), a gelatin silver print in which a large black rectangle obscures the upper half of a candid photograph with two figures that are ultimately only identifiable by their legs and feet, which are even then indiscernibly crossed and posed beyond easy recognition. Even though its unclear if Lassry’s source image is a found photograph or an original composition, the underlying themes – of the photograph’s function as an object, and the impossibility of discerning “the real” through its representation – continue to resonate.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. The video takes the form of a channeled message from Adama, High Priest and spiritual leader of the Lemurians.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Making Fantasies animates scenes based upon photographs by Nan Goldin, Larry Sultan, Richard Billingham, Yasuyoshi Chiba and famous photojournalism images such as Jeff Widener’s photograph of Tiananmen Square and Kevin Carter’s photograph of a Sudanese child being stalked by a vulture. By fabricating narrative and aesthetic connections between the images on three channels, Pei-Shih questions the objectivity and truth telling of photography.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By testing the limits of identification with the camera’s point of view, Delphi Falls cycles through multiple subjectivities. The film misuses more traditional narrative conventions -the suggestion of a story, the anchoring of actors as characters- to have the viewer constantly questioning who or what they are, and where they are located in the film’s world. Delphi Falls was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial film program.

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’”.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

El gran pacto de Chile (The Great Pact) and La balserita de Puerto Gala (The Raft) were part of the “Museo Futuro”, an exhibition in which the artist presented nine miniature dioramas staging fragments of Chile’s history, from its colonial invasions to the present. Through the episodes he chose to depict, the artist focused on historical narratives, the way the story is told, and the supposed irrefutability of historical facts. Museo Futuro (“Future Museum”) stands within a tradition of artists who re-read history and offer their interpretation of it through the distopic lens of the museum display.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work consists of a work inside a work. The spectator is presented with a commissioned documentary on a flat-screen Tv on the subject of the production of the making of an artwork that doesn’t exist entitled The magic and the meaning (2008). The imaginary film, The magic and the meaning , is described only within the documentary, which follows parts of the making of the film, extracts from interviews with the writer and film maker Dan Fox and the artist and maker of the work Ryan Gander; as well as showing short slow-motion sections of the film that does not exist.

Photography (Photography)

Wordplay was a central focus of Koller’s work, in particular the acronym U. F. O, which he adapted in his diagrammatic drawings to stand variously for Univerzálna Futurologická Organizácia (Universal Futurological Organization, 1972–3), Univerzálny Filozoficky Ornament (Universal Philosophical Ornament, 1978) or Underground Fantastic Organization (1975), and which also appeared in a series of slapsticky self-portraits titled ‘U. F. O.–naut’ (1970–2007). These infinite variations on a common cipher constituted an insistent incantation of the Utopian principle.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Watching the films of Omer Fast confounds our expectations of the medium. 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, is presented like a conventional big-budget Hollywood movie and has similarly high production values. Yet Fast frustrates the narrative element that Hollywood teaches us to expect: While stories unfold, repetitions and obscurities challenge the idea of a central controlling account.

Photography (Photography)

Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression. As a challenging artist who marches to her own drum, Mary Reid Kelley is in the vanguard of a generation that blends the digital and the analog to dialogue with history. From 2009 to the present, she has made videos that fuse live performance, animation, drawing, sculpture, and digital design.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Mohawk, the emblematic Frontier river in the period of American colonisation, is here a cable of data transmission, and the 7 Sultans Casino is a virtual destination, one of the three hundred online casinos hosted by the servers located in Kahnawake, a small native american indian reserve to the south of Montreal. Incorporating poker, challenges to the law, a struggle for the control of a new territory where the stakes are high, our film ‘La Nouvelle Kahnawake’, between fiction and documentary, pushes these analogies with the Western to explore both our relationship to the figure of the ‘Indian’ and the confusion of our perception of space that new information technology has brought about. As the artists state: “We are neither anthropologists nor journalists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth. Set in an empty, derelict room with nothing but an old mattress on the floor, the film features a series of actors independently performing a demonic possession, or at least their interpretation of what one would look like. Although each reenactment is slightly different, actor after actor, the viewer is confronted with a common thread: a near archetypal response that binds them all together.

Performance (Performance)

In Fiction on Auction , the site of the auction is used to stage a fiction where the right to appear as character in Looking for Headless is offered to the highest bidder: the name of the successful biddder as registered for the auction will form the name or identity of the character appearing in the novel. Looking for Headless is written by the fictitious author K. D and tells the story of two artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby who collaborate with an author, John Barlow. Goldin and Senneby investigate an offshore company on the Bahamas called Headless Ltd whilst Barlow writes a docu-fictional murder-mystery, also called Headless, based on these investigations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Artist Wong Kit Yi’s A River in the Freezer combines directed and found footage to meditate upon glacial memory, cryogenics, and frozen fiction. She synthesizes disparate subjects—ranging from Longyearbyen, Norway (a town where no one is allowed to die), the fair-haired manga character Cygnus Hyoga, 19th-century global trading in ice, and color wavelength theory, among others—within a karaoke-inspired sing-along format.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964). Ezawa uses his signature cartoon-like style to remix and reenact these crime scenes, leaving only the artworks as “real” objects (as they are depicted in the films), rather than illustrating them. Reversing fiction and reality in an unexpected way, this gesture invites the viewer to question the reliability of the visual footage.

Photography (Photography)

Like many contemporary photographers who play with the codes of realism, Valérie Jouve composes her images, having already a more or less predetermined result in mind, in order to deliver a complex representation of the world instead of a bold presentation of facts. A part of the series “Les Figures”, this “portrait’ of P. Faure carries a strong ambiguity, typical of the photographer’s images, between realism and mise-en-scene . This photograph is exemplary of Valérie Jouve’s work: inscription of an inidual within an urban landscape, relation to architecture, simplicity of composition and strong, yet imprecise narrativity – related in part to seemingly familiar characters or places.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In a post-apocalyptic setting, a layer of dust petrifies everything in an eternal state of latency. Thick as it is, a rocking chair becomes imponent and can no longer rock. The growth of vegetation has been hampered by concrete and could be mistaken for rocks.