Sculpture (Sculpture)

For the work Wigan Pit-Brow Women: Intersections with the Caribbean (mobile) , Candice Lin studied English Victorian Arthur Munby’s racialized and masculinized drawings of working-class white female miners. Specifically, Lin’s work critically addresses Munby’s observations about the laborers’ femininity that was more concerned with the modesty of the women, than that they toiled in life-threatening situations. “Pit brow women” or “pit brow lasses” were female surface laborers at British collieries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Something Other Than What You Are by Camel Collective is formed by two works: a multi-channel video installation with controlled lighting, and a single-channel version with stereo sound. In both works, the 36 minute video depicts a narrative taking place outside of a live theater performance in the form of monologues that moves between the production and technical crew. There is a set of three different characters—a lighting technician, a lighting designer, and a professor all played by the same actress who share in their personal experiences and attitudes the precariousness of their work, the problems and myths of collaboration, and the obsolescence of theatrical technology.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part of an installation commissioned by National Gallery Singapore, The Weaver’s Lament by Erika Tan addresses the invisibility of women textile artists and their labor. Tan’s video focuses on the story of a forgotten weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom. A minor figure in the exhibition histories of what was formerly known as Malaya, Abdullah’s loom was left behind at the end of the exhibition, now residing in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In her new series titled Ninas Peruanas Cusquenas , Teresa Burga depicts young indigenous women from Peru’s Andean region, dressed in traditional garments. Sourcing imagery from the internet, the drawings recall an untitled series of drawings from 1974, in which Burga selected images of women at random from various print media, and then rendered the images on paper. Those drawings, like the newer ones, suggest the perils of images without context––how assumptions are made, stereotypes are formed, and knowledge is gathered.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tomorrow by Jung Yoonsuk is a two-channel video installation, observing the two different sites of factories, one in the mannequin reform factory in Seoul, Korea, and the other in a sex doll factory in Shenzhen, China. The artist’s research began in 2016 when he encountered articles, and some dystopian images, about a “retired sex doll”, a spooky, deformed dummy with big breasts, that stood in an agricultural field backdrop of a high-rise apartment complex in Chengdu, China. Jung’s work explores the factory scene, the (mostly female) workers and their labor, the doll’s artificiality, and human-like eccentricities.

Installation (Installation)

Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana. The forests were felled and immigrants from northern Bihar and South India were brought to exploit the mineral resources. The Indigenous people were then dispersed to live nomadically, engaging themselves as seasonal workers in farms and industries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Combined into a single two-channel HD video, Li Xiaofei’s Ponytail and Chongming Island II are silent portraits of the women assembly line workers at a Chinese kitchenware factory. Close-up shots of women’s heads—most notably of the rear with their hair in the similar updo fashion—and faces occupy the frame amidst a backdrop of a revolving steel conveyor. In lieu of dialogue or humming of the machinery, a ringing score of chimes and bells provides a tranquil soundtrack.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

RUINER III by Nikita Gale is part of an on-going numbered series of abstract sculptures in which various ancillary materials necessary for sound production and recording such as towels, foam, and audio cables, are riddled around piping resembling crowd control bollards, lighting trusses, and other like stage architecture. While these muscular works evoke the forms and dynamism of mid-century modernism, they can also be seen as a translation of Goethe’s idea that “architecture is frozen music”. RUINER III is exemplary of how the artist’s disembodied sets typically evoke a sense of longing through absence, and in so doing, draw out an extended mediation on how audiences project mental or emotional energy onto a person, object, or idea.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In On Guard by Jeamin Cha, a security guard receives safety training, juxtaposed against his patrol of an empty building as he tries to give care instructions for his ailing mother over the phone. The film dismantles the binary oppositions between “caring” and “guarding,” two actions that parallel one another in their emphasis on attentiveness without a logical conclusion. Cha’s exploration of the relationship between these two focuses is channeled through nocturnal urban space, drawing attention to the labor that each requires.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana. The forests were felled and immigrants from northern Bihar and South India were brought to exploit the mineral resources. The Indigenous people were then dispersed to live nomadically, engaging themselves as seasonal workers in farms and industries.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

Photography (Photography)

In 2015, while in residence at the Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF) located in the village of Jatisura in Jatiwangi, West Java, Indonesia, Togar initiated the Jatiwangi Cup in which the artist, together with communities in the area, established an annual bodybuilding contest. The area is renowned for its roof tile factories, and the cup aims to celebrate the factory worker’s physiques, sculpted by intense, daily, physical labor. Togar based the idea of the cup on the simple notion of collectivity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dhuwã (term used by indentured people of Natal for ‘smoke’), is a single-channel film by Sancintya Mohini Simpson that traces back to the lived experiences of indentured labourers taken from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) to work on sugar plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family were contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal. Filmed originally in 16mm film, Dhuwã captures sugarcane plantations in North Queensland, initially in moments of stillness that are gradually disrupted by a crescendo of repetitive sounds and fast camera movements that culminate in the fields being engulfed by flames.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Argentum is part of Li Li Xiaofei’s Assembly Line series. The film was shot in Dongchuan, a small town 180 km from Kunming. Ten years ago, in order to attract foreign investment, Dongchuan officially became a district of Kunming, thus giving it access to preferential policies.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yoshinori Niwa’s investigation into the monetary system and material goods is witnessed across a range of his works. As the title of this work indicates, Niwa visits several currency exchanges in the market in Istanbul and proceeds to continually exchange from one currency into another until he has no money left, going against the grain of the economy. The laborious act of exchanging the currency back and forth does not create any profit.

Installation (Installation)

he woke up with seeds in his lungs by Prajakta Potnis is a set of x-ray films presented through backlit light boxes of found objects constructed to evoke the body or organs that turns the host into a foreign element. The title of the work is inspired by a story the artist came across during her research, according to which a man had swallowed seeds that started to grow inside his organs. In the work, interior scapes of the body appear as radioactive rays pass through various materials.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the performance video Vitrina , María Teresa Hincapié stood inside a storefront window in downtown Bogota, unannounced, for eight hours a day, wearing a uniform and initially carrying out cleaning chores. As the day and passers went by, the routine became more playful: she would send kisses to bus drivers on the busy Avenida Jiménez who would return them, use the newspaper with which she was shining the glass to flirtatiously hide and engage with an improvised audience or draw the shape of her body with soap and a sponge. She would interrupt these chores to carry out other ‘feminine’ activities, like brushing her hair or applying make-up, only to return to frantically cleaning the transparent surface that separated her from the public.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

Photography (Photography)

In 2015, while in residence at the Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF) located in the village of Jatisura in Jatiwangi, West Java, Indonesia, Togar initiated the Jatiwangi Cup in which the artist, together with communities in the area, established an annual bodybuilding contest. The area is renowned for its roof tile factories, and the cup aims to celebrate the factory worker’s physiques, sculpted by intense, daily, physical labor. Togar based the idea of the cup on the simple notion of collectivity.

Painting (Painting)

On the artwork, Rommel states: “I was reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Purity, where they take a lot of walks through the jungle in Uruguay, or Paraguay, I can’t remember. One of the characters takes a walk and jumps off a cliff; it’s kind of dark. The painting reminded me of a long, dark, and very serious walks in beautiful places.” With references to Howard Hodgkin in the incorporation of the stretcher into the painting and certain kinds of mark making, to Matisse’s cut outs and to the history of Cubist collage, Rommel has created a dreamy oeuvre that manifests her strong conceptual interest in process and unmapped journeys.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La libertad is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life at the Navarro´s, counting threads and time, wondering and wandering around words as emancipation, labor, and freedom (la libertad), the word that most appeared in our conversations. The “greca”, the meander, is the main symbol weaved in the textiles made by the Navarro sisters, from Santo Tomás Jalieza, México. A geometrical form of an endless braid of diamonds, the “greca” represents corn, an entity worshiped by the pre-hispanic civilisations of Mesoamerica.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Las Bambas by Elena Tejada-Herrera takes the name of a copper mine in the Andean department of Apurímac, Peru. The operations of this mining project were resisted by the local peasant communities, whose protests forced it to paralyze its operations. As of 2023, this is the most serious unresolved social conflict in the country.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.