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.

Painting (Painting)

Taken from the title of the incredibly influential punk/hardcore record I AGAINST I by the Bad Brains, Untitled (blue) is an acrylic painting on reflective paper by Chris Duncan is part of a larger body of work titled EYE AGAINST I . This title references Duncan’s early artistic influences from the punk and hardcore music communities in tandem with his conceptual interest in perception and optics. This small painting features a glowing cluster of colorful dots on a bright blue background, also created from an accumulation of blue dots in varying tones.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leila Weefur’s two-channel video installation Between Beauty & Horror focuses on the sensorial and somatic experiences that give Blackness a distinct and inherently racialized materiality. The narrative structure of Between Beauty & Horror operates on dream logic; interspersed among the dream sequences of the video are moments that fluidly shift between violence, playfulness, tenderness, and of course, beauty and horror. Weefur’s work poses many questions about the Black experience, but it offers no easy answers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Images is a two channel video work addressing the relationship between art and ritual. On the left side, the artist is filmed in a sparse, red room with his tongue nailed onto a red table. With Lim’s freedom of movement and speech limited, the viewer focuses on the facial expressions of the artist as different streams of thoughts and realizations enter his mind.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Employing both the High Modernist technique of abstraction and monochronism, as in the work of Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, and bodily states of fetishization, Yea High (sweetpreparator) reworks the art historical canon of movement and the body to consider flesh as a physical construction of man-made matter. In the work, the artist uses perspiration as a medium on the surface, combing the man-made and the organic. The pink of the surface reflects the artist’s interest in reframing the way we understand the permeability of human skin.

Installation (Installation)

Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall. With its cushions removed to reveal its internal mechanisms, the chair’s programmed rubbing, kneading, patting, and vibrating motions create a strange sight and soundscape. The work explores the relationship between flesh and machine as they come together through technologically simulated social behaviors, challenging normative ideas about human interaction.

Painting (Painting)

Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ. Equally, there is a semblance of fruits—their succulence and fragility. While the work is sensual, the matte bronze surface refuses any expectation of softness.