Installation (Installation)

Roni Mocan’s work Welcome is a floorwork comprised of a grid-like arrangement of doormats that the artist borrowed from the local community, people in his building, and even from participating artists from the exhibition where it was first presented. In a time where xenophobia, divisive border rhetorics and news of an ongoing global refugee crisis have become commonplace, instead of sitting barely noticed at a home’s entrance, Mocan transforms these ubiquitous objects into carriers of a poignant and necessary greeting message. The installation underscores issues of migration, borders and racism, and gives light to the urgent need and responsibility we have towards addressing the issues that prevent humans from being welcome everywhere.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

With Inner Child , Bady Dalloul continues his ongoing reflection on migration and belonging, putting in balance levantine and Japanese histories. The most recent in a series of works gathering images and sounds from the different countries the artist lived or worked in, this video is part of a multi-channel sound installation that aims to transport us into a meditative state. To do so, the artist worked with Mami Nakanishi, a trained hypnotherapist, to write a script that could reflect an internal and multilinguistic dialogue that alternates between Arabic, English, French, and Japanese.

Installation (Installation)

For the exhibition 1440 sunsets per 24 hours at KADIST Paris in 2017, Haig Aivazian presented a sprawling installation, which sought to enact various instances of the deployment of light and darkness within public space and sports, reflecting on the double-edged abilities of lighting systems to expose, highlight or dissimulate subjects. For the installtion 1,2,3 soleil ! the space was structured like a material index, posing limbs and skins from stadiums and public spaces —namely floodlights, electric poles and asphalt— alongside abstract drawings inspired by policing and sporting data visualization iconography.

Installation (Installation)

Ground Plan by Louisa Bufardeci is a large-scale, digitally-printed, architecturally rendered, wall drawing that pictures the permitted global flow of the world’s population. Utilizing data from UNESCO, the national census, opinion polls, and the CIA World Factbook, Bufardeci presents each country as a room in a labyrinthine building. Each room is composed of sometimes incomplete walls, with open or closed doorways, in reflection of their border immigration policies; each room is scaled according to its population density.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work is based on a temporal loop in which the stories of several duets coexist and interfere with each other. The narrative articulates itself around four key moments or four neighboring apartments that the viewer discovers progressively: an air stewardess having an argument with her unemployed husband, and old lady telling old stories that no longer interest her caregiver, a black woman who is accused of stealing jewelry just when a newcomer, of Arab origin, moves into the apartment block. The narration itself is based on a void or non-event, however its dialogues refer to subjects such as terrorism or iimmigration.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Invaders by Ghita Skali is a tale that bites you. This short film, staged in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, in a broader context of increasingly xenophobic and racist policies in western countries, uses comedy to flip the stigma. First, Skali sets the scene: Once upon a time, a virus came and changed the plan .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico. Working with this unsettled mystery, De La Torre’s video inquires into the historical and continuing tensions between Chinese and Mexicans. As such, Nuevo Dragon City depicts a symbolic act of self-entrapment in which six untrained actors of Chinese descent silently blockade themselves inside in an empty Tijuana storefront.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chinese restaurants have been a familiar feature of Swedish cities since the late 1970s, embodying the foreign and the exotic. Lap-See-Lam started the project by documenting the interiors of several Chinese restaurants in Stockholm at a time when many of them were about to be taken off the map. Her own family was selling their business in 2015.

Photography (Photography)

Previously, Ortiz produced a series of photographs related to her research on the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to domestic servants in the modernist architectural houses of South American upper class families. Following the same formal principal, she has developed a new series called Estat nacio . This work presents a critical point of view on the construction of a national sovereignty through speeches and laws concerning people who are not considered as citizens according to immigration legislation and the regulations affecting immigrants’ rights and freedom.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Photography (Photography)

In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe. They become like abstract paintings that recall Modernist formal experimentation. They are somehow symptomatic of the circulation of goods and people that is made to sound so abstract.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes. It is a study of the realities and consequences of exploited labor that simultaneously aims to record the living history of labor.

Installation (Installation)

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there. The neon translates as “this is not in Spanish,” making reference to both the famous Rene Magritte painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” as well as signs posted in the windows of Chinese establishments in Mexico.