Photography (Photography)

Bhanwari and Lichhma from the Balika Mela series by Gauri Gill explores human expression through the medium of photography, bringing questions of agency, the role of photography, and feminism together through its portraits of adolescent girls from rural Rajasthan, India. Balika Mela is an annual fair for girls aimed at uplifting a population severely maligned in Rajasthan. Having set up a stall in this fair, Gill invited local girls to voluntarily pose for photographs which they were allowed to keep, expressing their performative individuality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video work Any Resemblance is Coincidental , CHEN Zhexiang mined portraits of real Asian criminals that were abandoned on the Internet. In order to form a database of the portraits, he saved the files under the original names retrieved from the Internet. CHEN used digital facial recognition technology to build a lexicon of the criminals’ facial characteristics in order to analyze them.

Photography (Photography)

It is a little known fact that Lebanese historians were also gamblers during the war. They met every Sunday at the race courses. Race after race, the historians were positioned behind the press photographers who were there to take a picture of the winning horse passing the finishing line.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The End of Time

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jonn Herschend’s short film Discussion Questions subverts the familiar motifs of contemporary media-based pedagogy through a playful intervention that invites more engaged and active viewership. Commissioned for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the film is a text-based PowerPoint presentation that becomes a cathartic dance party. Originally screened as part of an extended program with other video works at the Biennial, Discussion Questions is initially presented as a set of questions designed to inspire audience conversation around these films.

Photography (Photography)

In the fictional narrative Plantation Boy (2012), Irhoa places himself inside imagery from Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal The Godfather (1972). Inflected with humor, the series examines race in society. According to the artist, the 40 images collectively question structures of power and the hegemony of Western culture.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

David Gustav Cramer’s are composed of simple, descriptive texts accompanied by found photographs, letters or other materials. The elements juxtaposed in each work operate like the lines of a Haiku. It is the tension between them that opens space for thought.

Painting (Painting)

The series Clouds paintings by Benoît Maire features oil on canvas works in varying format, in which the artist depicts clouds, using a variety of tools, including a spray gun, paintbrush, or palette knife. The cloud motif in this series of paintings questions the limits of abstraction by playing with the concept of pareidolia—a psychological phenomenon by which we recognize familiar shapes in landscapes, clouds, or ink stains. Through his careful composition and use of pentimenti, Maire invites the viewer to project their imagination onto these colorful clouds.

Photography (Photography)

In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition. Elad Lassry explores how visual languages are constructed across multiple disciplines and media. His larger body of work responds to the relationship between artistic mediums and their forms, and his prints question familiar modes of viewership and our continuous desire to find and identify clear narratives in photographs.

Photography (Photography)

The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits. It is unclear if these subjects are related, despite the obvious doubling of visual cues, and Lassry offers few hints to suggest that these men have any association beyond their sitting for the same picture. By extension, Lassry subverts conventions in portrait photography by identifying his subjects with numbers, erasing the familiarity inherent in the act of naming, Men (055, 065) functions as an anti-portrait in which anonymity supplants intimacy.