The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars creates a division of space implying a separation the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation.
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.
In Action no. 1 Yang Guangnan reflects on the interiority and exteriority of human-technological experience with mechanical gestures that are semi-human and semi-machine. A hanged shirt mounted upon the artist’s machine rhythmically bounces and rotates in a way that suggests a skeletal interior.
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects. Capitalizing and commenting on the ubiquity of homemade video, the short film replicates with banal proximity the amateur special effects that thrive on the web. This rather cliched visual trick recalls a funhouse mirror, or, perhaps more aligned with Cortright’s frame of reference, a dream-sequence cue from after-school 90s television.
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.
In the work Cinema , Fang Lu explores in a meticulous yet un-dramatic — almost casual — way of how “the self” in our today’s life is a controlled and staged construction of oneself. What appears at first sight to be a not unusual performance of self-choreography, becomes at a second glance a disturbing portrait of a – female – persona brought to life under contemporary conditions of attractiveness, anxiety and narcissism. Unlike her previous works, which duel more on the internal, surrealistic human conditions, this seven-channel work elevates the individual relationship with its socio-political environment to a more recognizable and appealing set of behavioral actions of self-awareness and self-inflicted anguish.
Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time. Shot from an aerial vantage, the camera tracks the daily commute on a small stretch of concrete highway. The camera films the traffic below in short five-second excerpts before blacking out; time begins to collapse as the video shifts between scene, and the hours compress into minutes as daylight quickly turns into night.
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky. The women in the photograph exist ambiguously here. The photograph’s title, the subject’s outfits, and their environment suggest that they are both trapped and glorified within their position.
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands.
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter. The room seems messy and in disrepair, but simultaneously romanticizes the scene. The fruit and the sitter suggest a robustness in contrast with the mise-en-scene.
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.
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.
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole. Despite its dismantled form, the screen still functions, a simple, mountain-range desktop background clearly visible with no distortion. As with much of Beshty’s work, Office Work thematizes its own construction, in this case, through a clearly deconstructive action that preserves the technological ontology present through the monitor.
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city. Okón focuse d on Ciudad Juárez as a site for many ‘ maquiladoras ’ ( factories) and on its role within the global context. A mixed media and video installation , the work takes the form of a fictitious factory that produces canned laughter for sitcoms.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints. Though simple, each contains a nested stack of historical and self-referential quotations. Both black-and-white prints depict a version of Ligon’s 1988 painting, Untitled (I Am A Man) , which declares the words of the parenthetical in blocky black letters.
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.
Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name. Assembled from the remnants and found objects from a hotel room, including a collage, shelf and small lamp, this playful piece—a satirical shrine of sorts—echoes the decidedly un-modern spirit of San Francisco’s bohemian culture. Kienholz’s works, with their critical and anti-establishment content, are often linked to the 1960s Funk Art movement in the Bay Area.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights. The protesters and their supporters carried signs and wore t-shirts whose messages are highlighted in the drawings. However, in them, Bowers isolates the images of the protesters from the multitude that surrounds them in the original photographs, and, therefore amplifies their messages.
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red. Two muscular men with sledgehammers simultaneously pummel the blocks where Gilmore attempts to stand. Although we can only see the artist from the waist down, her body language reveals apprehension: her hands, tense, press against the wall in an attempt to maintain balance while the men come dangerously close to smashing her bare legs.
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.
Fang Lu uses intimacy as a place for self-expression in her videos and draws out mundane moments from everyday life as a strategy to heighten one’s awareness of existence from the rest of the world...
Pascal Shirley’s photographs portray a California of beaches, music festivals, families, and hipsters wandering through the hills...
Zanele Muholi’s Potent Portrait of South Africa’s Queer Community | AnOther As their new exhibition opens in San Francisco, Zanele Muholi talks about their powerful photos of queer survivors of hate crimes, couples in everyday moments, and self-portraits referencing history February 02, 2024 Text Emily Steer Zanele Muholi creates potent portraits...
For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....
Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts Catherine Opie in the RA Collection Gallery Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Read more Become a Friend Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Published 8 September 2023 Catherine Opie discusses her portraits of David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing, Isaac Julien and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, featured in our free display in the Collection Gallery...
In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity ...
Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth...
In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain...
Like many of Opie’s works, Mike and Sky presents female masculinity to defy a binary understanding of gender...
Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
Drawing & Print
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Drawing & Print
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
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...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Drawing & Print
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Drawing & Print
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
In the flash animation SpringValle_ber_girls , Petra Cortright collages together surreal scenes out of unnaturally idyllic desktop screensavers with equally unreal computer-generated women that pop in and out of the landscape...
Drawing & Print
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Drawing & Print
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa...
Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Drawing & Print
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...
Drawing & Print
Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film...
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...
For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...