Arpedia

Mercedes Dorame utilizes photography to investigate, recode, and connect with her Gabrielino-Tongva tribe culture, as well as to bring current Indigenous experiences to light. The Tongva were the original inhabitants of what is now Los Angeles, and their domain stretched from Malibu to San Bernardino, including Aliso Creek. They have lived in the Los Angeles basin for over 8,000 years.

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Land Rights Now

Richard Bell

Painting (Painting)

For Richard Bell, art is not simply a vehicle through which to represent and convey political content. On one hand, art itself has an activist charge—in its very form and presence it can shake up conventional or assumed understandings, opinions, and behaviours. But on the other hand, it is deeply implicated in the actions and attitudes associated with colonialism in Australia and abroad.

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Land Mark (Foot Prints) #10

Allora & Calzadilla

This series of photographs is part of the body of work Allora & Calzadilla made regarding the situation in Vieques, an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used for the 60 years by the U. S Military and NATO forces to practice military bombing exercises. In 2000, they began a collaboration with the local activists to make the campaign more visible.

YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic. The mural contrasts and mixes multiple layers of these satellite images capturing the progressive devastation of the El Quimbo dam on the Yuma river (Magdalena), in the Department of Huila. The project was originally produced for the 8th Berlin Biennale, and developed out of the artist’s research into waterways, their political and cultural impact, and their historical development.

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Há Terra!

Ana Vaz

Há Terra! (There Is Land!) is a short film by Ana Vaz that picks up on the artist’s previous film A Idade da Pedra (2013), in which Vaz imagined premodernity in her native Brazil.

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Rubber Man

Khvay Samnang

The video Rubber Man continues exploring issues related to land use, also noticeable in his Untitled series (2011). More specifically, Rubber Man addresses the French colonial legacy of land use for the exploitation of rubber –today exploited by multiple forces such as individuals, governments, multinationals and international banks– and its effects on Cambodia’s indigenous forests and culture today. The video takes place in Ratanakiri, an area in northeastern Cambodia increasingly known in local and international news for land grabs and protests, and where the artist frequently traveled to over two years.

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Araf

Didem Pekün

The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In very slow motion, he soars through the air like a bird in a graceful dive. We never see him land.

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Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062 I (Shape God)

American Artist

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

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I Am Blue, 1

American Artist

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control. The color blue is a proxy for both sadness, and a color that is emblematic of American law enforcement services. I Am Blue, 1 by American Artist is a sculpture that fuses a school desk with a ballistic shield.

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Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062 II (The L.A. Area)

American Artist

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Octavia E. Butler Papers: mssOEB 1-9062 II (Waylin Plantation)

American Artist

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The Hole’s Journey

Ghita Skali

The Hole’s Journey by Ghita Skali follows a complex political satire involving a worn-out floor, a political activist, and the Ouled Sbita tribe of Morocco. For 23 years, the director’s chair at an international art institute in the Netherland’s scratched the wooden floor below it. For Skali’s project, a 102 cm x 120 cm section of this scratched floor was cut out and mailed to an expropriated region in Morocco.

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Winter North Summer South No. 5

Zhou Tao

Zhou Tao spent almost two years in 2017 and 2018 in an eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains in China exploring the activities of humans and other species in that particular topography between the mountain, the land and the desert. From the discovery of ancient desert villages to the billions of black chickens that will be raised under the snow-covered Kunlun Mountains, the resulting film and the photographs capture the climate and landscape, listening to the desert’s chanting and whispering, while attempting to construct a unique topology. Shot during the film production, the accompanying stunning photograph Winter North Summer South No.

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El territorio no está en venta

María Buenaventura

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

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Untitled

Francisco Herrero Peñuela

Painting (Painting)

Francisco Herrero Peñuela uses old forms to make his elaborate, richly textured surfaces. Practicing a form of marquetry common in 15th century Italy—intarsia—Peñuela pieces together fragments of wood to create abstract images in warm tones of gold, brown, and black. While original Italian intarsia would have been representational, embedding landscapes, objects, and narrative scenes directly into walls, Peñuela’s compositions hedge away from direct representation, with shapes and pattern emerging organically out of his carefully arranged wooden pieces.

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Beroana (Shell money) I

Taloi Havini

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Following her family’s political exile to Australia in 1990, Havini began to document her journey’s home to the north of Buka Island, in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. Reflecting on the still visible aftermath of conflict and changing economic factors, Havini creates traditional beroana or shell money from extracted earth materials only found on Solomon islands like Bougainville. Havini’s whirling assemblage of ceramic discs emulate the strings of shell money (still valid around the Pacific as system of payments) to examine the economic changes that occurred in her homeland.

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Yuta Nagi Panaad

Cian Dayrit

Textile (Textile)

Yuta Nagi Panaad (Promised Land) by Cian Dayrit addresses the impacts of the globalized economy and its powerful ideology on the spaces of everyday life. This tapestry work is a map that aims to visualize the expanding borders of mineral extraction, agri-business plantations, and their effects on the communities and the ecology of Mindanao, Philippines. Mindanao has a history of colonialism, exploitation and displacement of its people.

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Untitled

Mark Bradford

This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series. It’s contrasting dark and vibrant tones presage his later series of works, exhibited at L. A.’s Hammer Museum as Scorched Earth. These larger works share a map-like quality, looking like aerial views of some scarred urban landscape.

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Mobile Military Medical Clinic 9/1970

Võ An Khánh

In Mobile Military Medical Clinic 9/1970 , a stretcher carrying an injured solider is being carried through swamp-land towards a makeshift operation table.

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In the Soldier’s Head

Christine Rebet

In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier. Inspired by the artist’s father,a soldier in Algeria who then suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,the video depicts the delusions flowing from a mind ravaged by violence: a vision grown from the inside out. Like a mirage amidst a blank, desert expanse, specters are conjured as the inanimate comes to life.

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The Absolute Restoration of All Things

Miguel and Natalia Fernández de Castro and Mendoza

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.

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Preah Kunlong (The way of the spirit)

Khvay Samnang

Originally commissioned for documenta 14, Khvay Samnang’s two-channel video work Preah Kunlong (The way of the spirit) takes land politics, resource extraction and Indigenous Cambodian resistance as its primary concern. Created in collaboration with the classically-trained dancer and choreographer Nget Rady — who is also the performer in the video — Preah Kunlong powerfully utilizes a lexicon of gestures and movement to point toward the need for embodied forms of knowledge and understanding amidst the mechanistic frameworks of rapacious development, which are threatening not just forests and Indigenous communities in Southeast Asia, but also worldwide. More specifically, Preah Kunlong offers a proposal for the language of the body to exercise what political ecologist Nancy Lee Peluso has called “counter-mapping”, a form of “critical cartography” that has been practiced by Indigenous forest communities in Southeast Asia to strengthen claims on their traditional territories and resources by defying hegemonic mapmaking methods, which have long abetted strategies of colonial rule and resource extraction.

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Winter North Summer South No. 2

Zhou Tao

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Page 2123, The New World Physical Map

Hong Hao

Selected Scripture is a series of silkscreen prints that Hong Hao has been working on since the 1980s. The series includes 37 prints to date, each of which resemble pages of an ancient open cartography book. In this series, the artist reflects on the authoritative influence of ancient books that shape dominant understandings of the world.

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La Memoria Verde

Enrique Ramirez

Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible . Other well known works by Ramirez feature the movement and endless symbolism of the sea—like the simultaneous engagement and retreat of the tide—but La Memoria Verde takes the land, plant life, and its human inhabitants as its subject. The film begins with a soft, green, algae-like image that waxes and wanes in focus, then gives way to swaying treetops blowing in a soft wind.

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Esto No Es Agua / This Is Not Water

Carolina Caycedo

Carolina Caycedo’s practice conveys her very personal passion and relationship to water, as a powerful necessity and spiritual reminder. Esto No Es Agua / This Is Not Water is a portrait of the Las Damas waterfall in the town of Garzón, Huila in Southern Colombia. The video is composed of footage of the waterfall that is at times mirrored, distorted, obstructed, or kaldeiscoped in different ways.

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Let Me Be Part of a Narrative

Taus Makhacheva