Photography (Photography)

Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram. Bold shapes, and the breaks between them, create a rhythm and compose an engaging abstract image. At the same time, the work deals with the conditions of the photograph’s manufacture.

Textile (Textile)

The title of this work by Egle Jauncems, The Paler King I , is taken from an unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace called The Pale King, published posthumously in 2015. Jauncems notes that the book is fragmented, following unrelated characters struggling with ennui and depression, navigating the pressures of modern reality. In her art practice, Jauncems has been interested in the lives of powerful and influential men for many years.

Photography (Photography)

Fathers #18 and Fathers #27 is part of a series of photographs and videos made in recent years in Gaza. Batniji addresses the representation of the over-identified human and physical space with the geographical and political situation in the region. He distinguishes himself from the fictions that have been previously created in the Middle East and offers a quieter and more retained vision of the of the intertwining tensions and oppositions in this area.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Camil has made numerous paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (she calls them “highway follies”), and of abandoned billboards that look like theater curtains dramatizing failed capitalist strategies. (Espectacular, the colloquial Spanish term for “billboard,” also translates more literally as “spectacle,” and of course recalls Guy Debord’s famous 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle .) In Mexico, the urban landscape has been taken over by billboards; they are totally integrated into the landscape.

Painting (Painting)

Simon & Gus by Bobo is a binaural and fantastical artwork that tells the story of a sea steading maker-hobbyist as told from the perspective of an arduino board, and a mars dwelling stop motion animator as told from the perspective of a stop motion armature. The stop motion animator attends an artist residency on the red planet, and eventually sets out to start his own artist colony (a martian animation studio) with stupefying hubris. The result has disastrous consequences, with the martian ghosts eventually swallowing his soul, and his armature gaining full access to the animator’s motor skills and control of his ability to move.

Painting (Painting)

Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior. Rasgado wanders through the urban landscape in Mexico City and other major cities, looking for moments of intrigue in the dirt and debris. He captures these details by extracting materials from the sites and deploying them in the gallery.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

By Way of Revolution is a series that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. Tapestry (Gewel) is one of a series of tapestries that are all subtitled with names of traditional storytellers from across the African continent.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Postcards from the Desert Island is a remake of a 50s educational film Holiday from the rules in which four children interact with an omniscient narrator who teleports them to a tropical island where there are no rules. As in Lord of the Flies , the little children’s anarchistic society quickly breaks down. Finally, when the narrator asks the children if they want to leave the island they answer unhesitatingly: “instead of making up a lot of rules, why don’t we go home where we already have them?”.

Photography (Photography)

Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances. Not to be mistaken as mere portraiture, however, Simmons’ works are explorations of the Black body in relation to landscape and other dimensions of non-linear space and time. Concealing and flattening her subjects with costumes and collage-like, abstract pictorial devices, the artist arranges archival photographs, printed textiles, and anthropological artifacts in configurations that highlight the power of visual culture to shape contemporary understandings of the self.

Installation (Installation)

The work Sarta (String) by Reyes Santiago Roja is part of a larger series of works that examine the commercialization of the tobacco plant and its relationship to the meaning and use of tobacco by Native American tribes such as the Mayas, Aztecs, Incas or Tainos, which attributed spiritual qualities to tobacco such as the smoke carrying one’s thoughts and prayers to the sprits. In this work the artist studied the forms of tobacco leaves native to Latin America and recreated their shapes with commercial tobacco packaging from such global brands as Marlboro or Camel to the most popular Colombian brand Pielroja. The leaves made of the packaging material are lined up on a string as if they are hung out to dry as in traditional tobacco making processes.

In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste. There is a missing organ in our social metabolism which would work as a stomach or intestines. The Recyclone is a device made of plastic containers that fit into each other.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yu Honglei’s video and mixed media works riff on familiar motifs from the Western art historical canon and reimagine them through a playful but subversive culture jamming of their original meaning. Life (2013), for example, depicts a tiled backdrop of various images and stills associated with the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol. Digital reproductions of his silkscreens featuring public figures like Elizabeth Taylor, Chairman Mao, and Debbie Harry form an amalgamation of modern art iconography, while repeated images of Warhol himself serve as a constant reminder that even after his death, the artist is still decidedly present in our art historical consciousness.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A series of works from 2016 document his neighborhood, replicating buildings and businesses he frequents within four blocks of his New York apartment. Made out of foam, paper, glue, and paint, these miniaturized buildings (a bank, a bar, a Laundromat, and the Rite Aid building where Buffon shops) impart a tenderness and a nostalgia that outsizes their diminutive scale. Like works by other artists who recreate objects or elements from their everyday life, Buffon’s storefronts are perfectly imperfect, the wobbled lines reiterating their handmade quality.

Photography (Photography)

Rotation presents the image of a crowd, a re-appropriation of 19th or beginning of 20th century photographs published in newspapers and magazines. This artwork is composed of the same image repeated four times with different resolutions. The last image in Rotation is less focused than the original one.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

David is a five-minute pseudo music video that features an upbeat melodic soundtrack with a duet by the artist Guan Xiao and frequent collaborator (and KADIST collection) artist Yu Honglei. Three screens display a collection of home videos filmed and uploaded by tourists at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence capturing Michelangelo’s eponymous masterpiece. The mass popularity and commodification of this artwork is further exaggerated with the numerous forms that we encounter and consume the image or likeness of the sculpture in our daily lives.

Photography (Photography)

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery.

Painting (Painting)

In Ad Minoliti’s expansive three-panel painting Abstracción geométrico-galáctica the artist’s hallmark geometric abstractions serve as playful substitutes for more straightforward depictions of the world. A departure from previous bodies of work that explore the modern interiors of 1960’s-era American homes, porn sets, and jungles, Abstracción geométrico-galáctica launches the artist’s geometric characters into space for the first time. The work draws directly from Minoliti’s experience with The Feminist School of Painting .

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family was contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal, then one of the four British colonies in South Africa. These indentured servants, derogatorily called ‘coolies’, were employees by title, but were effectually slaves.

Installation (Installation)

Blue time is a song co-written by artists Saâdane Afif and Lili Reynaud Dewar. Collaborations are frequent in the work of the Afif, as is the case of the exhibition “Lyrics” which opened at the Palais de Tokyo in 2005, in which Saâdane Afif asked artists and musicians to translate his artworks into song lyrics and interpret them. The lyrics written on the wall produced a silent story, in a musical way that remains implicit (unlike certain installations by the artist where lyrics can be heard on headphones).

Installation (Installation)

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner. Its tiled effect can perhaps be seen as a vertical Carl Andre work and also bears some resemblance to another work in the Kadist Collection, Jedediah Caesar’s JCA-25-SC. McGee’s installation also echoes the votive altars in the chapels he visited during his residency in Brazil in 1993.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. The Call is an ongoing video project of performances by descendants of prominent civil rights activists across the United States.

Painting (Painting)

Adjamé, Charbon reflects on both global environmental discourses and domestic impacts of the use and trade of coal. Adjamé is one of ten urban communes of the city of Abidjan, the economic capital and city with the largest French-speaking populous in the Côte d’Ivoire. Employing vibrant colors to contrast the plastic jerrycans, children toys and clothing strewn randomly throughout the shanty settlement with the darkness of coal is a challenging articulation of the image of progress and its environmental consequences today.

Photography (Photography)

Ryan Gander is a collector. He keeps all sorts of documents to create from. His studio is full of found images, personal images, documents copied from internet or cutout of newspapers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell. In the video, a woman, dressed in black with a white over shirt, stands in front of a long blackboard. The classroom’s rear walls and floor are covered in taut white fabric, given the room the sinister appearance of a sanitarium or a crime scene.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Fig. 33. 9 Your Love is a King by Yeni Mao is a sculpture made of blackened steel, brass, glazed ceramic, and leather.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Xu’s works provide a satiric and provocative alternative to the official system and make publicly visible images of many realities.

Painting (Painting)

Liu Yin brings the tension of a small but imminent catastrophe into the gallery with a raw egg balanced on the edge of a folding table.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain. Because individual movement through the maze echoes the movement of neurons and a larger aggregated whole, visitors can be seen to enact a model of sociality and public space that both embodies and metaphorizes social consciousness. Capote’s model shows not just the proposed structure, but features figurines as well, to illustrate the possible scale and interactivity of the final piece.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nagtzaam’s medium is drawing and his repertory of forms varies from abstract hard-edge and wall drawing to the reproduction of written material that he collects from art magazines. The artist uses abstract architectural elements that he reproduces on the wall in which he inserts drawings, elements from photographs and drawings of texts collected from art magazines. The repetition, control and imperfection of the movements create a tension, a particular vibration in his geometrical drawings and in the drawings of texts.