Arpedia

The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city. This images reflect on a dystopian future of the country, perhaps drawing parallel with the political changes in Malaysia.

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Do ut des (I give that you may give back)

Mariana Castillo Deball

Do ut des (2009) is part of an ongoing series of books that Castillo Deball has altered with perforations, starting from the front page and working inward, forming symmetrical patterns when each spread is opened. The books belong to O Mundo dos Museus (The World of Museums), a collection conceived by the Brazilian designer Eugênio Hirsch in the 1970s. More than simply a catalogue of artworks, each offers the reader a promenade through a different world museum and its functioning, starting with photo reportage of the building, its urban landscape and architecture, the management and restoration of works, and visitors walking though the galleries.

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Mosaic Collage (Fang Banger)

Nathan Mabry

Mosaic Collage (Fang Banger)

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Masks (Merkel F6.1)

Simon Fujiwara

Painting (Painting)

Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face. Masks (Merkel F6.1) was created in consultation with Merkel’s personal make-up artist; it features the special makeup that Merkel wears for HD cameras applied onto canvas. The image has been magnified to a near-microscopic level, rendering an ambiguous skin tone across which the makeup’s denser patches produce an abstract composition.

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September 2007

Mario Garcia Torres

September 2007

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Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam

An-My LE

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars creates a division of space implying a separation the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation.

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Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother

Wong Hoy Cheong

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.

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Untitled (Ruby Downing sitting between two Unidentified Men in a Room), Damaged series

Lisa Oppenheim

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

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ONE MILLION (Japanese Yen)

Kwan Sheung Chi

Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills. Divided into three versions, the video first shows a number of Japanese ten-thousand-yen bills being counted without in an orderly, efficient manner. In Two Million , a similar counting of one-thousand-dollar bills from Hong Kong follows.

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Drawn and Quartered

Claudia Joskowicz

The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television. Video plays a role in the relation between the use of her locations and the stories of actual figures depicted as central in the frame. The meaning behind these historical icons such as Che and Cassidy, speak to their stories as itinerant figures whom traveled in a preglobalized era through borders and cultures in order to escape the law or overthrow it.

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Ghost games

Anri Sala

Ghost Games , follows the enigmatic dance of crabs “steered” by a flashlight in the night of darkness of a South American beach. The video produces a surreal impression, typical of Sala’s work, with no plot in the classical sense, no story being told. Like in Blindfold (2002), in which a sunrise is reflected in urban billboards, and Time After Time (2001), in which the figure of a horse emerges from darkness lit by the headlights of an automobile, Sala likes to explore the phenomenon of light and its effects; In Ghost Games , he uses the threatening reflection of the flash light through the darkness of the beach.

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The Cloud of Unknowing

Ho Tzu Nyen

The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind. In the video, eight protagonists act out their daily lives. The setting is a soon-to-be-demolished public housing facility in Singapore, a country in transition from a mindset of Eastern collectivism to global neoliberalism.

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Useless Wonder

Carlos Amorales

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

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Undocumented Intervention

Julio Cesar Morales

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation. Morales drew inspiration from both his childhood near the United States-Mexico border as well as from photographic documentation on U. S. government websites.

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Until It Makes Sense

Mario Garcia Torres

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

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The Transparencies of the Non-Act

Mario Garcia Torres

Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969. This article, which is the only trace of his work, is indicative of a lack of interest by Neuestern to leave his name in history; to “defend an artistic activity that has little or no interest to last.” Oscar Neuestern could only remember the previous 24 hours, of which his life and his work are in constant erasure and reconstruction. His practice was “to let things be done with time and the unconscious,” while “not fearing the void.” He looked for the absolute through transparency and symmetry.

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There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

Julio Cesar Morales

There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

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n°5 The International Sail

Enrique Ramirez

Installation (Installation)

Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail. These works epitomize the idea of perpetual movement and migration while carrying a deep personal meaning in the creative process, as the artist’s father himself, still living in Chile, mends and sends the sails to his son, living in Europe. The reversed position of the sail recalls both the shape of South America itself and the Eurocentric view that in the Southern Hemisphere, everything is “upside-down.” The stitches themselves create an illusion of an alternative political geography, and the framed-cuts impose a cartographic grid.

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Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark my Creativity

Mario Garcia Torres

In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel. The long-exposure capture depicts García Torres at multiple stages of brainstorming, devising, and introspection, his ethereal figure connected with artistic giants of the past. Yet, there is also an insipid tone beyond mere insomnia or frustration at the lack of being able to garner inspiration.

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Why fear the future?

Carlos Amorales

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object.

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8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America

Kara Walker

In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America. Her use of contour and silhouette accentuate emotion with rigor, she reduces the narrative to black and white as gruesome acts of sex and violence address trauma, fear and suffering through a majestic play of shadow and light.

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If Only God Had Invented Coca Cola Sooner! Or, The Death of My Pet Monkey

Daniel Joseph Martinez

If Only God Had Invented Coca Cola Sooner! Or, The Death of My Pet Monkey

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New Town Ghost

Minouk Lim

New Town Ghost (2005) is one of Lim’s trio of large-scale video installations. (The other two are S. O. S—Adoptive Dissensus [2009] and The Weight of Hands [2010].) The series grew out of her interest in capturing lost memories and the collective unconscious in rapidly globalizing cities such as Seoul.

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Contrabando

Julio Cesar Morales

Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes. It is a study of the realities and consequences of exploited labor that simultaneously aims to record the living history of labor.

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El hombre que hizo todas las cosas prohibidas

Carlos Amorales

Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance. Central in his work is the construction and alteration of what he calls his Liquid Archive, a collection of images, narratives, drawings, shapes, and ideas that he uses to construct his unique visual language—a critical and stimulating space for fantasy, reality, and the blurring of the two. Amorales creates tensions between revealing and hiding the personal and the universal in his often-ambiguous and fluid constructions.

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Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion)

Adrian Wong

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong. Intrigued by the accidental preservation of historical building material by renovations and rebuilding, Wong began paying attention to the experience conveyed by layered forms accreted to affect the visual historicity of a space. The geometric forms in the piece are welded together as a composite replica of a metal grate from a children’s playground next to Wong’s studio, a security grate door from his apartment complex, and the latticework that holds an air conditioner from an electronic store, and a front grate from an elementary school on his bus route.

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Les Fleurs d’intérieur

Danh Vo

The work “Les Fleurs d’intérieur” (which gives its name to the exhibiton presented at Kadist Art Foundation from May 30 to July 13, 2009) is a brass plate engraved with the inventory list of the works included in the show. From this moment, Dahn Vo will use this brass plates as a systematic element for all his exhibitions.

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South Africa Righteous Space

Hank Willis Thomas

Installation (Installation)

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race.

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Untitled (City Limits)

Allen Ruppersberg