Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video installation Le Fou Postcolonial Insane by Guy Woueté is a series of five videos that examine the concept of insanity in the post-colonial Democratic Republic of Congo. The first three videos in the series were shot in a market place in Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Congo, where several psychoanalysts explore mental health in the context of the Congolese public sphere. Throughout the video series, Woueté links this public health examination to memories of colonial history.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nos visages ( Our Faces ) continues Nidhal Chamekh’s research around visual souvenirs of figures of the past and the light they might shed on our contemporary era. For this series of drawings, the artist draws from articles of French colonial propaganda, specifically the magazine Le Miroir , founded in 1910. In these documents Senegalese and Berber “infantrymen” participating in the First World War were represented in a way that situates them “somewhere between the ethnographical survey and the hackneyed colonial and orientalist image” says Morad Montazami.

Installation (Installation)

O (for various skies) by Jesse Chun is a two-channel video sculpture that decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing language. The project disrupts bureaucratic documents pertaining to the United States government’s lunar colonization and militarization, such as The Lunex Project of 1958 and Project Horizon of 1959, through methods of visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry, while interweaving lesser known Korean folklore about the moon, such as the precolonial Korean women’s moon dance ( ganggangsullae ) and shamanistic ritual dance for ushering the departed into another world ( gildakeum ).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Anointed by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Dan Lin is a poem recital/video that addresses the American nuclear testing legacy in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 to 1958 in Bikini and Enewetak Atolls. The artist’s words of resilience and healing are uttered as she travels across the northeastern atolls of her vast island nation. The climax of the short film takes place when the artist, holding white coral stones (a Marshallese funeral ritual) stands on top of the massive concrete dome erected on Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll to contain 73,000 square meters of radioactive waste—only a small fraction of the debris generated by the nuclear tests, the rest of which was never cleaned up.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Castigos del caucho by Santiago Yahuarcani originates in the oral memory transmitted by the artist’s grandfather, who was a survivor of the Putumayo genocide where thousands of Indigenous people were annihilated and enslaved to extract rubber from the Amazon forest between 1879 and 1912. Yahuarcani’s complex narrative paintings on tree bark highlight a long history of colonial violence against the Uitoto and other Indigenous communities. They also show the destruction of the rainforest under Western models of extraction, privatization, and development.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Secteur IX B is full of ghosts: some that you can see, briefly appearing at the turn of a statue in an under construction museum, some that you only dream of when you switch from day to night, of one space to another. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc invites us to follow a main character, Betty, an ethnographer currently leading research in the archives of the Theodore Monod Museum for African Arts, in Dakar. Punctuated by an anguished soundtrack and borrowing tropes from thriller genre films to create a sense of oddity, the film comments on the contemporary effects of colonial legacy in cultural institutions.

Photography (Photography)

Mooi indie (which translates to “Beautiful Indies”) is a term used to depict the beauty of nature in the East Indies during the period of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. The term is usually used to describe a painting, romanticising the alluring tropics through the lens of European imperialism. Later in the 1950s, the prominent Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono, who is known as one of the founding fathers of Indonesian Modern Art, publicly rejected the Mooi Indie genre as Indonesian art.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part-skyscraper, part-pyramid, part-citadel, this unfinished and ragged twelve-story building stands, incongruously, among the industrial environment of Limete. Towering above this desultory landscape and defying gravitational laws and urban zoning rules, this uncommon architectural proposition forms one of the strangest and most enigmatic landmarks of the city. A giant question mark, it begs for profound reflection on the nature of the city, the heritage of its colonial modernist architecture, the dystopian nature of its infrastructure, and the capacity for utopian urban dreams and lines of flight that it nonetheless continues to generate.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her film Retiro (2019), Natalia Lassalle-Morillo considers how women pass down memories to their kin as they age. A film within a film, the three-channel portrait combines the scripted film she and her mother made together, behind-the-scenes shots of that film’s production, and interviews with her mother on gendered familial expectations and aging in Puerto Rico. Lassalle-Morillo’s meta approach to story-telling unpacks her relationship to her mother, demonstrating how maternal trauma, history, and myth are made and inherited through disjointed narratives.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

silentstar, delicacy by Duane Linklater is a replica of a baby pink hoodie that the artist wore as a teenager, embellished with hand-painted elements and band patches. From associations with punk and hip-hop to skater culture, the hoodie has a history of being adopted by youth-driven communities once relegated to the fringes, and being embraced by mainstream fashion as a practical article of clothing, which Linklater’s work complicates even further. The reproduction is made with dye extracted from cochineal insects.

Photography (Photography)

“Maqe II” is at first glance a romantic image of three diaphanous angels hovering in the luminous sky over a South African township. A closer inspection reveals that the apparition is the appropriated figure of Marie Antoinette from the artist’s Ciao Bella series (2001) with the addition of a butchered cake. The figure is Rose herself dressed in costumed made of trash bags holding a haunting paper mâché mask.

Installation (Installation)

The Chair (2012) foregrounds media-based tensions between analog and digital imaging technologies as a means of challenging the continued circulation of visual ephemera from India’s colonial past. A mix of found photographs and staged studio portraits deliberately made to look older, The Chair features multiple portraits of figures dressed in period costumes that reference the ornate fashions popular during Great Britain’s imperial rule of India. A hybrid frame wraps around this assemblage, a composite of variously ornate and simple wood finishes culled from disused and forgotten pictures.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Great Game is a series of works composed of a number of card combinations illustrated by the faces of key political figures shaping the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East. Each reconstituted ‘hand of play’ corresponds to a diplomatic treaty establishing or modifying geographical borders. The plastic form of a poker hand chosen by the artist highlights the randomness of the process of fixing boundaries and the way in which they do not account for the lives of those located there.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

El gran pacto de Chile (The Great Pact) and La balserita de Puerto Gala (The Raft) were part of the “Museo Futuro”, an exhibition in which the artist presented nine miniature dioramas staging fragments of Chile’s history, from its colonial invasions to the present. Through the episodes he chose to depict, the artist focused on historical narratives, the way the story is told, and the supposed irrefutability of historical facts. Museo Futuro (“Future Museum”) stands within a tradition of artists who re-read history and offer their interpretation of it through the distopic lens of the museum display.

Installation (Installation)

Corey McCorkle’s 2016 installation Pendulum is developed around the Cavendish family and their role in importing bananas to Europe. Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. In 1834, Cavendish received a shipment of bananas from Mauritius, and developed these bananas in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House with his gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, and were later given to missionary John Williams to take to Samoa.

Photography (Photography)

From Green to Orange is a series of silver films immersed in a bath of dye and rust. While the perception of the subject is made difficult by the chemical reaction, vegetation becomes discernible at a closer look. Thu Van Tran interferes in the depths of a mystery, in the density of a hallucinated dream.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The performance title A Gente Combinamos De Não Morrer (BANDEIRA #1) / Us Agreed Not To Die (FLAG #1) is taken from a short story by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, whose work addresses violence, resilience, and necropolitics with an Afro-diasporic lens. This artwork by Jota Mombaça articulates connections between black and trans people’s challenges and struggles. Mombaça points out that an ongoing genocide of these minorities underscores the established power structures, and their resistance is to survive.

Photography (Photography)

Em’kal Eyongakpa was born in Cameroon in 1981. After obtaining a postgraduate diploma in Botany and Ecology, he decided to concentrate exclusively on visual and sound art. His use of poetic, symbolic and surrealistic imagery is often sprinkled with paradoxes that challenge the obvious.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

dawn chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta is a work produced in Sofía Córdova native Puerto Rico and was largely shaped by the financial crisis, the islands’ histories under colonial rule and most recently, the climate-change related natural disasters which have affected the island. The latest of which, hurricane Maria, and the subsequent political mishandling of the situation, gave the project its ending. Prior to the hurricane, this work also engaged in conversation with blackness and anti-blackness in the Caribbean, syncretic religion and dance music as modes of survival and liberation, and fantasy and science-fictional strategies as means to break out of our current arc of history.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s video installation Rewilding consists of three large-scale projections placed across the exhibition space. The poetic footage filmed by the artist portrays three interconnected worlds: a colony of termites; a piano repair workshop in the outskirts of Manila; and an empty concert theatre. Their interconnectivity is shaped by the voice-over of three narrators: a musician discussing the balance between order and chaos found in classical music; a piano repairman describing termite infestations in an instrument of European origin; and a scientist describing the unique social structures of this tropical parasite.

Painting (Painting)

Daniel Boyd’s work WTEIA3 is part of a series of paintings that reference the stick charts used by indigenous communities on the Marshall Islands. These charts were made in order to navigate the Pacific ocean by canoe and thus crucially depict ocean swell patterns. These highly individualised maps were rarely intended for mass use but instead for memorising, and transmitting between the community, the maps were not taken to sea but instead memorised in advance.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Music While We Work (2011) is the first part/work of a long-term research project started in 2010. The project revolves around and beyond the history of sugar in the small town Huwei in central Taiwan (the artist’s hometown). The town was nicknamed as the “Capital of Sugar” during the Japanese colonial ruling (1895-1945) of Taiwan.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Landslides is a cinematographic essay/poem by Caroline Déodat in which fictional images are the result of research into the memories of a Mauritian dance born during colonial slavery, the Sega. In the film, the contemporary Mauritian dancer Jean-Renat Anamah crosses mythical landscapes of the Sega that merge with intimate territories. From the pixels of the digital image and the signals of electronic music, this film exhumes in layers of landscapes the spectres of a ritual erased by history through a personal genealogy: between haunting memory and deferred archive.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Sometimes It Was Beautiful by Christian Nyampeta poetically addresses the systemic conditions leading and emerging from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which had lasting and profound effects on Rwanda and neighbouring countries like Congo. The divergent opinions of the characters, as well as suggestive gestures, settings, and marks inscribed in the landscape highlight the different approaches in addressing the slow violence linked to the enduring impact of colonialism and imperialism, the pursuit of knowledge, and the conservation of heritage, culture, and object repatriation. Structured into six chapters, the film imagines a meeting between improbable friends and interlaces dialogues, with choreography of dancers, places and objects.

Installation (Installation)

De sino à sina (From Bell to Fate) is a six-channel sound installation by Carla Zaccagnini exploring the relationship between modern Brazil and its colonial past. The sound installation is made from a recording of the bell at Capela de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Brancos, a Baroque-style chapel that is one of the first chapels in Ouro Preto (previously Vila Rica) in the region of Minas Gerais. The work references the execution of José da Silva Xavier (1746-1792), also known as “Tiradentes”.

Photography (Photography)

The Black Canyon Deep Semantic Image Segments by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision. In order to take this photograph, Paglen traveled to the Black Canyon, south of the Hoover Dam. Only accessible by water, Paglen piloted a boat up the Colorado river into the canyon.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G. I. character, personified through an action figure that comes to life. The protagonist breaks into Chicago’s Oriental Institute to “liberate” Mesopotamian votive statues, who are likewise animated through voice-over narration, from their imprisonment in the museum’s vitrines. This set-up allows for meditations on various war and colonial histories; as a barbed twist on the Bush-era rhetoric of promoting “democracy” in the Middle East through regime change, the G. I. cannot understand why the statues wish to remain in the museum and not return to their (currently war torn) “homelands”.

Photography (Photography)

Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision. This photograph was taken at Half Dome, a frequently visited granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park, California. For this work, Paglen created a digital file of the 8 x 10 inch photographic negative so that the artificial intelligence program can apply computer vision to evaluate the content of the image.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China. In this animation, layers of images, abstract forms, meaning, and metaphorical associations slowly unfold at the same time that more visual myths are created. The identity of the protagonist, a red-coated official, is indeterminate and suggestive of both the mercantilist policies that led to the Opium Wars with China and the cultural authority claimed by the Company school of painting over colonial India.