Welcome to Xijing – Xijing Olympics is the third of five chapters in the Xijing series. Produced concurrently to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Xijing Men stage their own versions of the Olympics, comprising events such as shot-put throwing with eggs, relay races with cigarettes instead of batons and marathon naps, often umpired by family members and children. Through slapstick skits they satirize the spectacle of stately ceremonies by playing on the absurdity of state pomp, for a reflection on modern society.
The video work Si Señor by Abigail Reyes is about the typical representation of women in Latin American office culture. Collaging together a chorus of subservient snapshots of women responding to an off-screen man with “si señor”, the accumulative effect of these spliced together scenes weighs heavy as the film plays on both humour and collective discomfort. In order to complete the work the artist watched hours upon hours of telenovelas, the impact of which on the collective consciousness is explored through her film.
For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders. The series of looping three-dimensional animated videos are only seconds long—a timespan familiar to gif and online meme culture—and feature global dictators, strongmen and strongwomen, kings and queens, princes and princesses, emirs, sheikhs and sheikhas, sultans, shahs, emperors and empresses, popes, ayatollahs, presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and GOATs. The subject of cakes has a specific personal meaning for Raad, whose first job as an adolescent was photographing pastries at a bakery in Beirut.
Fly was first commissioned as an immersive video experience for Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2016, imitating the mosaic structure of a fly’s eyes with a patchwork of projectors. As a single channel video, this work focuses more on the succession of sequences, shot in Bennani’s hometown of Rabat, showing interviews with relatives, an open-air market or a wedding, and jamming them with surreal digital manipulations. A recurrence throughout the film is a fly that accompanies us along the journey, as a childish motif or the symbol of a vanitas , able to sing Rihanna’s song.
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China. For this video, Wong accompanied six male friends from art school to a group show of their work titled “Inside Looking Out” at Osage Gallery in Beijing. Throughout her visit, she was rarely acknowledged for her own creative accomplishments and was more frequently introduced as an artist’s girlfriend, and often without name.
The photograph Monologic – Yo-Yo 1, 2 (U. F. O. ), (1982), shows Koller playing with a big white Yo-Yo in a drab concrete building among a group of tower blocks.
Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house, where Motoyuki Daifu grew up in Yokohama. This young photographer’s Family Project series documents the chaos of his family’s home life. Viewers of Daifu’s color photographs peer into the cramped, cluttered, and intimate world of their living quarters, what would normally be hidden from outsiders.
Walid Raad is a Lebanese artist whose work investigates the way historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, culture, and memory...
Wong Wai Yin is an interdisciplinary artist who experiments with a variety of media ranging from painting, sculpture, collage, performance, video, installations and photography...
Abigail Reyes’s work is deeply ingrained in the feminist discourse of Latin America...
Tarrop & Galbel is a group of artists working together since 1993 and whose main objective see to challenge the more prevalent social values...
The work of Meriem Bennani traverses video, sculpture, multimedia installation, drawing, and instagram...
The Xijing Men hail, conceptually, from the fictitious city of Xijing, an imagined state in East Asia...
Welcome to Xijing – Xijing Olympics is the third of five chapters in the Xijing series...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house, where Motoyuki Daifu grew up in Yokohama...
The video work Si Señor by Abigail Reyes is about the typical representation of women in Latin American office culture...
For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders...