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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ghost 1: Drowning is not a poem but is not not a poem either by Jota Mombaça is part of a series of sculptures exploring water’s restless, elemental properties and what the artist describes as “the radicality of sinking”. For this project, Mombaça produced three sculptural linen works in collaboration with the waters of the San Francisco Bay (in Berkeley), the San Pablo Bay (in Richmond), and the Pacific Ocean (in Bolinas), wherein the artist submerged linen in these local waters for three to seven weeks, then dried, and installed the materials on metal armatures. Mombaça’s subsequent video waterwill (2023) is composed of various footage from the sinking, floating, and unsinking of these sculptures and those from previous connected performances.

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.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria. Having grown up in the urban environment of Lagos, Abraham Oghobase was struck by the tin-mining deposits and the man-made ponds and lakes that form a dominant part of the landscape in the city of Jos and its surroundings. While visually striking, the landscape also holds a complex history, excavated by the artist, who researched the prevalent mining of tin deposits that dates back to 1904 during the British colonial mineral exploration in the Northern Protectorate.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria. Having grown up in the urban environment of Lagos, Abraham Oghobase was struck by the tin-mining deposits and the man-made ponds and lakes that form a dominant part of the landscape in the city of Jos and its surroundings. While visually striking, the landscape also holds a complex history, excavated by the artist, who researched the prevalent mining of tin deposits that dates back to 1904 during the British colonial mineral exploration in the Northern Protectorate.

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.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

This anarchist flag is made from Huayruro seeds, a native plant of South and Central American tropical areas. In some cases, the Huayruro seeds are used in the preparation of psychotropic plants such as Ayahuasca (Tohé). These plants occupy a central place in Amazon biopolitics.

Textile (Textile)

During the years of President Senghor, Papa Ibra Tall was influential in the cultural dimension of Senegalese politics, participating in the implementation of the Dakar School, a movement of artistic renewal born at the dawn of the country’s independence between 1960 and 1974 and which was encouraged by President Senghor. The artist set out to transcribe ‘negritude’ in his works, according to Senghor’s definition in Problème de la Négritude: “To assume the values of civilization of the Black world, to actualize them and to fertilize them, if necessary with the foreign contributions, to live by oneself and for oneself, but also to make them live by and for others, thus bringing the contribution of the new Negroes to the civilization of the universal.”

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les Chenilles by Michelle and Noël Keserwany is a sensual film that translates the source of women’s oppression into the means for their liberation. In this narrative film, protagonists Asma and Sarah meet while working as waitresses in France. They both come from the Levant and, each in their own way, carry burdens of the past and the consequences of colonialism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Another curious element is that it seemed that I was seeing images from the dreams I had that afternoon. But these images were appearing from end to beginning, like a film reel running backwards. I also couldn’t properly situate them.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Há Terra! (There Is Land!) is a short film by Ana Vaz that picks up on the artist’s previous film A Idade da Pedra (2013), in which Vaz imagined premodernity in her native Brazil.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

As a discipline born at the same time as colonialism, archeology is struggling to rid itself of this sad context. It is simultaneously the science of the creation and the restoration of ruins. Ali Cherri is interested in auctions of archaeological objects and the desire they inspire in this context.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Carolina Caycedo’s practice conveys her very personal passion and relationship to water, as a powerful necessity and spiritual reminder. Esto No Es Agua / This Is Not Water is a portrait of the Las Damas waterfall in the town of Garzón, Huila in Southern Colombia. The video is composed of footage of the waterfall that is at times mirrored, distorted, obstructed, or kaldeiscoped in different ways.

Painting (Painting)

Carib Carnival illustrates Aubrey Willams’s unique artistic language, combining Pre-Columbian iconography with abstraction. A series of abstracted shapes that resemble bones, masks and serpent-like images surrounded by fiery vapors and gases, illustrate the destruction of culture as one of the predominant themes of Williams’s work. He considered the Mayan and Aztec cultures to exemplify a number of present-day faults; according to Williams they developed technologies that would eventually lead to their own destruction.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

First exhibited as part of the recent multidisciplinary project Code Switching and Other Work , at Art Mûr, Berlin in late 2018, Nadia Myre’s Untitled (Tobacco Barrel) takes inspiration from the cylindrical vessels used to import tobacco from North America to Europe during periods of early colonial settlement. Responding to the history of clay pipe production in the ports of London, Bristol, and Glasgow by weaving together the literal detritus of the colonial tobacco trade, Myre’s work poetically untangles material links between the British Empire, Canada, and Indigenous peoples. Following contact with the so-called New World in the 1600s, the growing popularity of tobacco use in Europe led to the design and widespread manufacturing of disposable, pre-stuffed clay tobacco pipes in Britain.

Installation (Installation)

Ofrenda [Offering] by Elyla includes a single-channel video and the mask used in the performance. The video is a recorded action of the artist, who appears removing a sieve mask that was pinned to the skin of their face, leaving a trail of blood that falls on their naked, mud-covered body. Worn in El Baile de las Negras , a colorful dance performed by men dressed as women, the mask originates from Indigenous celebrations in Monimbó, Nicaragua.

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.

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)

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 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.

Installation (Installation)

Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon by Cici Wu is delicate, but physically much more robust than Cici Wu’s earlier works. What continues is the sense of longing, of something unresolved; it is haunting, like the images from a dream that we try to remember upon waking up. Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon revolves around the story of a developmentally challenged young boy, who purportedly disappeared during the handover of Hong Kong by the British to Chinese governance.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant shows a looped scene where a robotic hand touches a “sensitive plant” — Mimosa Pudica, a species characteristic for closing on itself when touched. The name of the plant was derived from Carl Linnaeus sexual taxonomy of plants: pudica referring both to the external sexual organs, shyness and modesty. In a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) titled The Loves of the Plants (1789), this plant is associated, jokingly, with British Botanist Joseph Banks’s famous sexual adventures during his botanical expedition to the tropics.

Painting (Painting)

Karla Dickens’s collage Beneath the skim board addresses issues of discrimination and racism towards Indigenous communities in Australia through a constellation of historical and current events. Dickens spent over a year collecting and modifying ubiquitous objects into sculptural collages that commemorate former circus performers of Indigenous Australian descent. Assembled from various fabrics, knick-knacks and other materials, these frenetic compositions celebrate the campy glamour of circus performers, but also articulates the hidden mistreatment experienced by the performers, and more broadly, the lives of Indigenous communities in Australia.

Installation (Installation)

Icaro Lira has been developing the project “Museum of the Foreigner” since 2015, in which he recounts the trajectories of populations inside Brazil, from the north to the big cities of the south. The artist is himself Nordestin and moved to Rio to study cinema before enrolling at art school. The term “museum” is ironic, it evokes the institution and with it, the official history that the artist seeks to deconstruct by creating multiple stories that intertwine.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Rubber Man continues exploring issues related to land use, also noticeable in his Untitled series (2011). More specifically, Rubber Man addresses the French colonial legacy of land use for the exploitation of rubber –today exploited by multiple forces such as individuals, governments, multinationals and international banks– and its effects on Cambodia’s indigenous forests and culture today. The video takes place in Ratanakiri, an area in northeastern Cambodia increasingly known in local and international news for land grabs and protests, and where the artist frequently traveled to over two years.

Installation (Installation)

The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition is a collateral project within the larger body of work around the Indian Ocean, entitled “Wharfage” (2009-13) which has included over the years a radio event, several books and a film. “Boat Modes” (2009-12) dealt with the modalities of maritime life on ships and in ports between UAE, Southern Iran, India and Somalia, using photographs, texts and film based on mobile phone videos made by sailors. CAMP sees this work as a kind of historical intervention on the same subject.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel. The video is largely silent until violent crashes and female voices overwhelm the viewer, portraying the inner voice of a woman who is brutally gang raped. Malani addresses the fatal place of women in Indian society and the geo-politics of national identity.