Installation (Installation)

O (for various skies) by Jesse Chun is a two-channel video sculpture that decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing language. The project disrupts bureaucratic documents pertaining to the United States government’s lunar colonization and militarization, such as The Lunex Project of 1958 and Project Horizon of 1959, through methods of visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry, while interweaving lesser known Korean folklore about the moon, such as the precolonial Korean women’s moon dance ( ganggangsullae ) and shamanistic ritual dance for ushering the departed into another world ( gildakeum ).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Alicia Smith’s video work, Teomama , means “God Carrier” in the Aztec language of Nahuatl. It was the name given to medicine men and women who carried the bones of Huitzilopochtli—the god of war, sun, and human sacrifice in ancient Mexico, and the national deity of the Aztecs. Of the many legends featuring Huitzilopochtli, the origin story of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) is perhaps one of the most well-known.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Muted Situations #2: Muted Lion Dance by Samson Young, Chinese lion dancers perform the auspicious procession traditionally presented at special occasions such as weddings or during the Lunar New Year. Yet, the customary percussive sound of drums and cymbals are absent. Instead, it is the sound of the performers’ physical exertion that comes to the forefront, revealing the beautiful, exhaustive rhythm of their craft—their feet hitting the ground, deep inhales and exhales, and the rustling of their clothes.

Photography (Photography)

Acts of Appearance is an ongoing series by Gauri Gill consisting of lush, large-scale color portraits of the residents of a village in Maharashtra, in Western India, which is known for making Adivasi masks. Adivasi people are part of the tribal groups population of South Asia. Instead of requesting the likenesses of gods and demons, Gill asked the residents—including the master mask-makers Subhas and Bhagavan Dharam Kadu, their families, and fellow volunteers—to make masks that portray their own lives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Resiliencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience by Naomi Ricón Gallardo is a fabulation in which four characters find themselves in temporalities that overlap Mesoamerican narratives about the creation of the world with the contemporary time of accumulation by dispossession. Together, they summon the powers of fire and joy so that the opossum conjures its ability to play dead and resuscitate in extractivist areas. The work reanimates Mesoamerican fables about time and territory where the four characters—Hill, Opossum, 9 Reed (Mixtec cave deity), and Agave/Mayahuel (Moon and Pulque Goddess)—create a space for conceptual intervention through performative action and popular music.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist. The video begins with the image of a ghost-like female figure, representing La Llorona, slowly walking down a well-known street in Oaxaca, from the main square (el Zócalo) to the Teatro Macedonio Alcalá, with a painful expression on her face. According to this famous oral myth, the Weeping Woman drowned her two sons in a fit of grief and anger after her husband abandoned her.