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.

Painting (Painting)

Miercoles cerca de las 7 de la tarde by Caroline Fusilier portrays two quantum computers that are mobile, with human-esque legs, these are systems at the edge of biology. The floor is awash with fluid; perhaps a chemical resource consumed by the advanced computers or a heat-sink. Where their legs meet the fluid there’s a soft glow, less intense but related to the vibrant radiation on the wall above the figures.

Rachel E. Foster uses printmaking, sculpture, and photography to illuminate the nearly invisible. For her source material she combs the digital world for bits of strange information that seep into our daily reality. These clues, be they coded sequences or simple phrases, become part of her puzzle; by reframing information she makes us reconsider it through a different lens.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria. Having grown up in the urban environment of Lagos, Abraham Oghobase was struck by the tin-mining deposits and the man-made ponds and lakes that form a dominant part of the landscape in the city of Jos and its surroundings. While visually striking, the landscape also holds a complex history, excavated by the artist, who researched the prevalent mining of tin deposits that dates back to 1904 during the British colonial mineral exploration in the Northern Protectorate.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Photography (Photography)

Untitled

Photography (Photography)

Rocket Society refers to a space project led by a group of Armenian researchers at the beginning of the 1960s. They created the first Middle Eastern rocket and carried out a dozen launches. Today, there is a kind of amnesia related to this space program while at that time the newspapers would talk about it frequently; a postal stamp was even issued for the occasion.

Photography (Photography)

Materia en Reposo II (Brasil)

Photography (Photography)

The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together. These houses are more than just places of survival; they are a physical embodiment of radical queer expression that encourage solidarity. The Royal House of Allure was initially conceived following an investigation of how social media influences celebrity culture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war.

Photography (Photography)

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an artist and a militant; her photos combine intimate views of her relation with her parents and grandparents with the history of the Afro-American community of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where she grew up and where her family still live. She reports upon the decline of this steel-producing town, which was once prosperous and where the local population today is devastated by poverty, unemployment and health problems linked to pollution. The town has currently closed the hospital which increases unemployment and makes access to treatment complicated for the residents of one of the most polluted towns in the USA.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Painting (Painting)

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters. While Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) does not depict any actual women, it nevertheless alludes to gender roles and the power of the female gaze. Apparently playful, this scene of two animals has an ominous quality: A bird and a hedgehog confront at each other and the bird appears to be poking, even eating the hedgehog’s eye.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

He Xiangyu’s Terminal 3 presents excerpts from the lives of young African acrobats attending the Hebei Wuqiao Acrobatic Arts School in China. Acrobatics, which had a rich history as a court display in imperial China, is now integral to the cultural industries and tourism sector in Wuqiao, continuing a legacy of expending bodies for monetary gain. From 2016 to 2019, He intermittently went to Wuqiao Acrobatics School in Hebei Province to record the daily lives of the students who study a variety of acrobatic skills during their year-long program.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Soufiane Ababri’s desire to construct a historical family and a genealogy of queer kinships in Bedwork / Yes I AM sees him conjuring up a pantheon of gay writers and artists whose intellect has changed the course of human history and development, despite their outsider status. Figures as disparate as Michel Foucault, Glenn Ligon, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and André Gide populate Ababri’s drawing series in the artist’s signature naïf style, their homosexuality the thread that connects them. The series of over forty drawings are part of Bedwork, a larger project that Ababri began in 2015.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages. The work’s connection to Amazon deforestation is difficult to ignore. Yet still, it also engages in broader issues about the country’s fractures, such as the 2018 fire at Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum and the ongoing erasure of its past.

Photography (Photography)

“Weight & velocity (cat on router)” is a duo of two humorous photographs of a cat lying on a computer router. The weight of the cat that voluptuously outspreads on the router contrasts with the speed of the information circulating in the object—the two subjects are opposing in their essential existence. In a pragmatic way, the cat stretches on the router for the heat that emerges.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

With Roca Carbon ( Charcoal Rock , 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks. Traces of art history reverberate through the sculptures; their mediums reflect traditional materials for drawing and sketching, and the simplicity of their forms gesture toward minimalism. But López dislocates these common objects from their ordinary utility by replicating their component parts in paper, graphite, and charcoal, thus drawing attention to mechanisms of representation and translation.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This selection of poster prints of Wong Ping’s animations includes the films Jungle of Desire, Doggy Love, Slow Sex, An Emo Nose, and Stop Peeping . They serve as a glimpse into the discourse and intricacy of the artist’s imagined, yet responsive approach to his realities. The series of posters echoes the once-vibrant aura of movie posters, when they were designed by artists and designers to encapsulate the tone, story, and visual style of a film in one large image, and were often as iconic as the movie itself.

Photography (Photography)

A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California. In the past a photograph of marijuana would more likely be found in an evidence file than an art museum or gallery, but today continued debates about the legality of marijuana and the industry surrounding it has brought the substance into common public view. Green Box is a strong example of the current sociopolitical state of California and the grey areas that exist in legislature and at the same time illustrates the unavoidable commercialization of once underground cultures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Mika Tajima’s Pranayama sculptures are built from carved wood and chromed Jacuzzi jets and are presented as artefacts. The title refers to the control of the breath, ‘prana’ in Ayurvedic practice, as the regulation of the vital life force. According to the artist, the sculptures, mediating between two spaces, serve “as membrane, portal or filter between the immediate and the beyond.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs, Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas (On Equality and Differences: Twin Houses) , taken in Havana in 2005, belongs to a wider group of works that the artist has been developing over many years, generally titled Bifurcaciones y encrucijadas (Forking Paths and Crossroads) . These works are dedicated to the collection and investigation of similarities and singularities. Some focus on things that are supposed or expected to be identical, but end up being slightly different.

Photography (Photography)

Young men are often found together in uniform, already influenced by ideology and bodily and style stereotypes. The majority of these photographs are linked to the memory of the military coup d’état in 2014 when the artist was very young. The imagination always remains at the center of Harit Srikhao’s work and may be defined as an arm against convention.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Laís Amaral abstract paintings dialogue with the feminine power. Just like the flow of a river, Laís produces her paintings as a flux that emerges from within, an inner force that relates to all the women in her life, family, and ones who know the medicinal powers of nature; who are part of this feminine force latent in the earth. In order to discover elements about herself, Laís Amaral understands painting as a gesture of leakage.

Photography (Photography)

For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road , Lin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou. He then took bricks from the sidewalk end of the wall and moved them to the street side, slowly extending the wall into the street. Repeating the same gesture for hours, he leapfrogged the whole wall across the street.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kubra Khademi’s work celebrates the female body and in her detailed drawings and paintings she portrays female bodies floating on white paper. Specifically she portrays the two bodies she had access to when she learned how to draw: herself and on occasion her mother. She represents women as warriors, goddesses and shameless playful heroines in search of pleasure and discovery.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Godville Portraits Ten illustrated short stories

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A woman you thought you knew by Sin Wai Kin originates from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere . Wearing exquisite hair and makeup and a pair of silicone breasts under shimmering diamanté lingerie, Sin Wai Kin’s former persona, Victoria Sin, assumes an alluring, inviting, and intimidating pose. Through subtle and slow movements, this atemporal courtesan appears as a living deity, whose presence embodies codes of representation found in brothels from the turn of the century, burlesque, and Beaux Arts female nude painting.