Les princes de la rue by Clarisse Hahn is part of Boyzone , a long term project in which the artist observes how men’s bodies reflect their relationships to public and private spaces. Hahn’s photographs move beyond gazing at the Other; they demonstrate how outcast, among themselves, can reproduce the gaze that is cast on them as a means of expression. As such, this series makes space for Hahn’s subjects to intimately express their strength, fragility, and pain, as well as their history.
COVID-19 May 2020 by Hikaru Fujii was filmed during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic. For this work Fujii filmed the group exhibition Things Entangling, the final phase of a collaboration between KADIST and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. At the time that the first Covid-19 lockdowns were instated in Japan, the exhibition was fully installed, but it was not accessible to the public for an indeterminate duration.
Mixed clips from her collection of thousands of images found online, the three-channel video Weather Forecast is an inquiry into the necessity of a physical movement (a travel) for our identity to transform or change. The question “Why can’t we view Europe from a chair?” periodically punctuates the video, suggesting that a similar personal transformation could occur by experiencing a place through the Internet and staying in the same place. Few episodes appear, each being a transformation process in itself, either by correlation, juxtaposition, combinations of specific matters such as iconography, texts, landscapes, events.
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.
Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers. These novels were mostly written by Taiwanese and Hong Kong writers in the 1980s to the 1990s to meet the cultural needs of the new social classes before being imported into China after the Chinese economic reform in the late 1980s. As contemporary China industry developed, a large number of workers became readers of this new pulp fiction.
Anne Samat’s Puteri 3 references Ulek Mayang, a classical Malay dance, performed in a ritualistic pre-Islamic context. It is based on the myth of a princess from the sea who steals the soul of a fisherman she falls in love with, leaving his body lifeless. A battle ensues for the soul of the fisherman, between a shaman (bomoh) trying to bring back the spirit into the earthly flesh and the princess aided by five of her sisters.
In Excerpts from the Analects of Confucius , Peng Hung-Chih explores the relationship between Confucianism and religion. Specifically, the piece questions the influence of Confucian teachings on the role of the intellectual in contemporary Chinese society. While Confucianism has its own ritual systems and temples, it is not known to be overly concerned with supernatural beings such as gods and demons.
In Kids , Song Ta has made reports to the information desk at the Guangzhou Zoo in order for missing children announcements to be broadcast throughout the zoo. Instead, the names of members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Guangdong Province were called in place of these fictitious children. Song Ta facetiously subverts the status of these powerful men, later jailed for corruption, to that of children and zoo animals, whilst constructing a narrative that closely mimics and reflects upon political reality in China.
Fog and Smoke is the first video Jeamin Cha made after returning to Seoul from London where she studied and started as an investigation into the meaning of “otherness” in documentary filmmaking. The opening scene depicts an abandoned construction site that had once been part of the Songdo International Business District in Incheon, near Seoul. In the dark of the night, the sounds of a countdown and piano notes fill an empty apartment building and echoes far into the unknown corners and hollows of a newly built city.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture. The subject in Dulu atas pedestal, sekarang dalampedestal / Before on pedestal, now inside (2005), a ball point pen and charcoal rendering of a bald figure with a wide-eyed stare, appears caught in a distressingly static state, at once both uncomfortable and yet incapable of ameliorating his condition. Sulaiman’s subject here becomes an almost frightening sight, the emotive brush strokes replaced by the ball point pen’s erratic black lines, the eyes and mouth scribbled over in a deliberately defacing gesture.
“Ship of Fools” is a literary term derived from Sebastian Brant’s 1949 satirical allegory of the same name. The work tells the story of a wandering vessel with 111 fools aboard; each of whom represents a social issue. The Ship of Fools Mooring at the Train Station is a two-channel video work by artist Liu Yu, concerning the community of people residing on the fringes of society at Taipei Main Station.
Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture. The green acrylic paint used for the subject’s skin in Maka Panau / Tinea Vesicolor (2005), for example, evokes cultural associations between phenotype and diseases such as hypochromic anemia, a blood-related illness historically diagnosed by the green-hued tone it produced in a patient’s pallor. Staring at the viewer a forlorn gaze, Sulaiman’s subject appears caught in a distressingly static state, at once both uncomfortable and yet incapable of ameliorating his condition.
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people. The opening of the film presents us with a dramatic process that transforms the documentary image. The lack of human presence makes creates a strange atmosphere in the film.
The chapter Ayousha , of Judith Barry’s Cairo Stories , is a portrait-like work that consists of one plasma screen and one framed photograph. The project developed out of oral archives made from 215 interviews, which Barry conducted with women of varying social and economic classes in Cairo between 2003 and 2011. Her research started at the beginning of the Iraq War and concluded just after the Arab Spring.
As with so many other colonized geographies, the ways in which violence has become a natural and expected component of Santo Domingo reflects the forced friendship between the beneficiaries and residues of Modernism. What distinguishes these two communities? What separates them?
In Untitled (after Paul Schultze Nuremberg’s Kunst) (2006), from a larger series of diptychs, Gmelin addresses the notion of entartete kunst ( “Degenerate Art”) . Each diptych juxtaposes a portrait of a person considered to be mentally handicapped with a painting that was branded by the Nazi regime as degenerate. Gmelin’s source for these images is Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), a book by Paul Schultze Naumburg published in 1928.
In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made the TV series: “France / tour / detour / two / children”, in which they aimed to identify the lifestyle of French people in 12 episodes of 26 minutes each. On each episode a little boy and girl are firstly asked about their daily lives. By broadening the scope of the interview, the questions of Godard and Mieville gradually bring the protagonists to think of themselves as subjects in the history of the world, to “live and see themselves on television” with a critical point of view.
The video I am protesting against myself presents a puppet in a garbage can citing numerous reasons why one should protest against it. Ciprian Muresan utilizes the comic effects typical of popular culture and the media. Progressively during the video, one appropriates the reasons for this characters discontent.
Flowers for Africa is a protocol project started in 2014, which questions the material that history is made of: its fragility, its infallibility, its visibility and its hierarchy. Starting with extensive research into visual archives related to decolonization, Kapwani Kiwanga focused upon the floral arrangements that were omnipresent in the images of ceremonies or events related to the independence of African countries. In the work’s protocol, the artist enumerates the bouquet’s components in order to reproduce them as found in the images.
The lecture performance, Screen Green takes the telecast of a speech made by the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, during which he was pictured against a homogenous green backdrop commonly used for visual effects or post-production in film, as a point of departure. Taking the lush, botanical landscape of Singapore, administered through a series of governmental gardening efforts, Ho offers a speculative narrative through the metaphor of a space of future possibilities that are simultaneously a method to limit and modulate its citizens.
Jonas Staal’s installation is based on the thesis written by Fleur Agema and titled “Closed Architecture”. The paper, written by the second most important person of Geert Wilderds’ Freedom Party, concerns an ambitious model for a new prison that focuses on the reconditioning of prisoners by means of four phases. Staal’s work is developed through a book, a plan and a 3d virtual tour in the social imagery of a current minister of the State of the Netherlands.
A cat, standing like a human being, is looking at us with round and dazed eyes and holds a gun. In the background, we notice a range of unwelcoming buildings, closed in with barbwire. A sentence is inscribed inside of one of the clouds, as if it were a speech bubble, and comments ?with hope or disillusion?
In this film is the story of two neighboring yet philosophically opposing nations: Russia and Norway. Taken through a love-story of the main character Tanja and her newfound Norwegian husband, the film challenges cultural and social norms of both places through the format of a musical. Dealing with issues of individual in society, family and moral values, Chto Delat entices the audience to consider the nuances of these two contexts.
Turtle Walk is a video installation that documents two performers carrying large white disks on their backs as they walk through the urban environment of Seoul. The simple disks disrupt normal social behaviors in urban space, acting like parabolic antennae that cause the performers to interact and communicate unusually with their surroundings. The performance causes viewers to reflect on their expectations for normal behaviors within the social space of the city.
“While taking the picture it was challenging to make the boys sit properly without moving. Sometimes a member of the family whould hide behind, holding the child.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.
Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948. Like all studio photographers his subjects came to him. The studio was a constant flux of visitors.
Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power, 2010) is a mousetrap elegantly crafted in Carrara marble. Originally made for the Carrara Biennale in 2010, it re-creates the iconic form down to the piece of cheese waiting for an unsuspecting victim. In this sculpture, Cicade challenges the viewer’s participation and intervention into the artistic object.
Shooshie Sulaiman is one of the leading creative practitioners in Southeast Asia...
Through her films, photographs and video installations, Clarisse Hahn continues a documentary research on communities, behavioral codes and the social role of the body...
The artist, writer, and researcher Ho Rui An probes histories of globalization and governance, performing a detournement of dominant semiotic systems across text, film, installation, and lecture...
There is a palpable urgency in the work of Taiwan-based Peng Hung-Chih, who uses video, sculpture, installation, and painting as means to criticize society...
Jeamin Cha’s questions exist in the gyre between individual and social environment, stepping over conspicuous strands of relation between the two in favor of cultivating characters that dwell in the night, under-noticed or otherwise surplus figures outside of mainstream societal representation...
Hikaru Fujii utilizes film to bridge art and social activism...
Uche Okpa Iroha documents the living conditions of those on the margins of society...
Liu Yu has developed a multifaceted artistic practice that takes field documentation as its point of departure...
Jonas Staal ‘s work includes interventions in public spaces, exhibitions, lectures and publications...
Working with various mediums, from sculpture to installation, site-specific interventions, and readymades, Leonardo Engel addresses issues related to the climate, nature, traditional crafts, architecture, and popular culture of the Caribbean...
With a degree in painting and inspired by so-called institutional criticism, Felix Gmelin is interested in the possibilities of painting as a form of resistance and its direct relation to a form of socio-political reality...
Chto Delat was founded in 2003 and consists of a group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod...
An exuberant and precise sculptor, Anne Samat blends the aesthetic of international queer cultures – which she proudly represents as a transgender activist – with various textile and bricolage influences from South East Asia and beyond...
Song Ta engages various mediums, including video art, installation, drawing, sculpture, photography, and calligraphy in his practice...
Ciprian Muresan appropriates historical, political, social and cultural (essentially artistic, literary and cinematographic) references which he re-contextualizes...
Guan Xiao is known for her videos composed primarily of found images and videos and her sculptures that explore the logic by which things relate to one another...
The American artist, writer, and educator Judith Barry is known for her audiovisual installations and her critical essays...
James Weeks, born in 1922, was an important figure in the Bay Area figurative painter tradition, with contemporaries such as Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park...
“While taking the picture it was challenging to make the boys sit properly without moving...
“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls...
This work is one of Koller’s many variations which he began to use from 1970 to describe the ‘cultural situations’ he created...
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people...
A cat, standing like a human being, is looking at us with round and dazed eyes and holds a gun...
Drawing & Print
Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture...
Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture...
This series of photographs, Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas (On Equality and Differences: Twin Houses) , taken in Havana in 2005, belongs to a wider group of works that the artist has been developing over many years, generally titled Bifurcaciones y encrucijadas (Forking Paths and Crossroads) ...
The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...
In Untitled (after Paul Schultze Nuremberg’s Kunst) (2006), from a larger series of diptychs, Gmelin addresses the notion of entartete kunst ( “Degenerate Art”) ...
In Excerpts from the Analects of Confucius , Peng Hung-Chih explores the relationship between Confucianism and religion...
Jonas Staal’s installation is based on the thesis written by Fleur Agema and titled “Closed Architecture”...
Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power, 2010) is a mousetrap elegantly crafted in Carrara marble...
As with so many other colonized geographies, the ways in which violence has become a natural and expected component of Santo Domingo reflects the forced friendship between the beneficiaries and residues of Modernism...
In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made the TV series: “France / tour / detour / two / children”, in which they aimed to identify the lifestyle of French people in 12 episodes of 26 minutes each...
The video I am protesting against myself presents a puppet in a garbage can citing numerous reasons why one should protest against it...
In the fictional narrative Plantation Boy (2012), Irhoa places himself inside imagery from Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal The Godfather (1972)...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
Fog and Smoke is the first video Jeamin Cha made after returning to Seoul from London where she studied and started as an investigation into the meaning of “otherness” in documentary filmmaking...
Burak Delier’s sculpture Homage to Balotelli’s Missed Trick is a symbol of resistance to the demand for success and performance...
Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers...
Flowers for Africa is a protocol project started in 2014, which questions the material that history is made of: its fragility, its infallibility, its visibility and its hierarchy...
Anne Samat’s Puteri 3 references Ulek Mayang, a classical Malay dance, performed in a ritualistic pre-Islamic context...
Les princes de la rue by Clarisse Hahn is part of Boyzone , a long term project in which the artist observes how men’s bodies reflect their relationships to public and private spaces...
COVID-19 May 2020 by Hikaru Fujii was filmed during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic...