Photography (Photography)

Hand Study (Making in Whiteness) IIII by Carmen Winant is part of a series of five collages. For this series, Winant hand cut approximately 3000 images from manuals of craft (mostly pottery) dating from the 1930s-1990s. The artist selected this period of time before the advent of digital photography, when many of the books were handset by artists and artisans, embedded with minor imprecisions and printed affordably.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Diagram series relates broadly both to Jes Fan’s interests in body modification and gender hacking as well as the artist’s investment in destabilizing hegemonic categories such as gender, monogamy, and the classical individuated subject in favor of more creative, egalitarian, and communal modes of envisioning ourselves. As a whole, the series consists of forms which originate from the bodies of Fan’s milieu of friends and collaborators in New York. Fan first creates a mould of a concrete anatomical feature on a specific body which captures their attention (for example: the pectorals or biceps).

Photography (Photography)

In the fictional narrative Plantation Boy (2012), Irhoa places himself inside imagery from Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal The Godfather (1972). Inflected with humor, the series examines race in society. According to the artist, the 40 images collectively question structures of power and the hegemony of Western culture.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This screen-print by Dread Scott titled Imagine a World Without America shows a map without the landmass that is the USA, as if the continents have drifted, or as if it never existed in the first place. Artist Dread Scott’s work is founded upon challenging “American patriotism as a unifying value,” and as such he claims that it is necessary to “burn the US Constitution (an outmoded impediment to freedom), and position the police as successors to lynch mob terror.” Perhaps one must imagine a structurally different world to produce new and freer modes of thought. While not explicitly related to Afro-Futurism, one of the key sub-genres of science-fiction and related thought is speculative revisionism; asking ‘how would the world be different if X never happened?” This modest work is a call to our daily imaginary, an invitation to zoom out to the scale of the global human condition, and implicitly America’s role in trade, war, cultural exchange, and the spread of western values.

Installation (Installation)

Flowers for Africa is a protocol project started in 2014, which questions the material that history is made of: its fragility, its infallibility, its visibility and its hierarchy. Starting with extensive research into visual archives related to decolonization, Kapwani Kiwanga focused upon the floral arrangements that were omnipresent in the images of ceremonies or events related to the independence of African countries. In the work’s protocol, the artist enumerates the bouquet’s components in order to reproduce them as found in the images.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s video installation Rewilding consists of three large-scale projections placed across the exhibition space. The poetic footage filmed by the artist portrays three interconnected worlds: a colony of termites; a piano repair workshop in the outskirts of Manila; and an empty concert theatre. Their interconnectivity is shaped by the voice-over of three narrators: a musician discussing the balance between order and chaos found in classical music; a piano repairman describing termite infestations in an instrument of European origin; and a scientist describing the unique social structures of this tropical parasite.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Wind by Antonio Pichillá is a textile piece depicting the glyph that represents the element wind in the Mayan tradition. It is woven in the four colors of each of the cardinal points which, together, symbolize the entire universe. It is woven mostly with knots that the artist refers to as a “bond between two or more systems that also represents a closure […] the knot in the throat that submerges the voice.” This piece, like other works in Pichillá’s practice, is an attempt to reconcile the Maya Tz’utujil symbolic tradition with Western art historical categories and practices.

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.