Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Now; 1992 is Ali Yass’s attempt to remake his childhood drawings, which were lost after he was forced to leave Iraq following the 2003 US occupation. The drawings are chimeric compositions of animated limbs, animal, human, and machine, that seem to hurl in all directions and mediums, unified as colorful figurations posed against blank backgrounds, rendering the curious characters suspended in time. This suspension materializes the artist’s view on violence and temporality, on which he has claimed: “I will not talk about war because it is from the past.
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war.
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions. This work by Native Art Department International signals a reminder that we–the audience and institution–are located on and occupy traditional territories. The work appropriates and twists white artist Sam Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) in response to his work Scaffold (2012) installed in 2016-7 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message. The viewer is faced with the familiar image of political power seen in our homes on the television, yet this time located in a whimsical abstract landscape. The speaker appears as a shadow in front of a crowd that is responding to him by holding bubbles containing images of animals and plants.
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.
In 2011, Mounira Al Solh began a series of drawings that documented her meetings and conversations with displaced Syrian refugees in Lebanon and various European countries. The oral histories she collected are very different from those told in administrative interviews or police interviews. My specialty was to make a peasants’ haircut, but they obliged me work till midnight often (2017) is part of a series of embroideries that speaks to how personal stories in this political context create collective history.
Redefining The Power (with Didi Fernandes) is a metaphor of how reflections on history and society during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) are largely ignored within the canon of history. Resulting from Kia Henda’s research on the Fortaleza de São Miguel built by the Portuguese in the 15th century in Luanda, Angola, the Redefining The Power series was created 10 years after the Angolan Civil War as a reflection on the reactivation of memory surrounding historical monuments. Through this work, the artist aims to replace the memorialized colonial heroes and war symbols through re-appropriation, determining traumatized lands as forms of resistance and pride.
Got Your Back by Gisela McDaniel depicts two women of color from different ethnic backgrounds who share similar violent experiences. However, the sitters never met and were depicted separately by artist Gisela McDaniel. The painting is thus an artificial construct, whose warm, gentle and seemingly benign look Is undermined by the accompanying soundtrack detailing their horrific experiences.
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.
Tropical Siesta begins in a rural landscape of Vietnam. Very quickly, painted images of students sleeping on their school benches appear. A text speaking of how the communist regime has placed agriculture at the center of its economy reads alongside the images.
The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices describing histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints. This work by Jane Jin Kasen and Guston Sondin-Kung explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted.
Gikan Sa Ngitngit Nga Kinailadman (From The Dark Depths) by Kiri Dalena is a stylistically collaged film inspired by the true story of a young activist’s drowning. Moving between reality and fantasy, it depicts the story of a dead communist who sinks to the bottom of the ocean into a dreamlike subaquatic utopia. In the film a young woman mourns the death of an activist that took place years ago.
In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.
246247596248914102516… And then there were none narrates a semi fictional account centered around the ambiguous history of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, and on the aftermath of the 1973 demonstration of 400,000 people who marched against the military junta from Thammasat University to the monument. Built on archival and oral history, the story interweaves the personal with grand historical narratives to consider the complicated history behind the monument – symbolic of the unrest and violence that led to the Thammasat University massacre on October 6, 1976.
Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds series was made following a transformative encounter with the craters left over from 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped by U. S. forces during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1973. Dissatisfied with the level of documentation on the bombing and its repercussions, the artist began to study the historiography of his country. He travelled to the ten most severely bombed provinces, engaging villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters, and how they are lived with today.
Eamon Ore-Giron’s new commissioned video project Bite Work, is an experimental genre breaking video that is part-performance, part-conceptual and part-comical addressing issues of mediation, surveillance and trust. The main characters in the video wear traditional dance masks of “La Chonguinada” rituals from Peru and attempt to dance while being bitten by trained attacked dogs. Through this act, the dogs simultaneously become sculptural obstacles and dancers.
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In very slow motion, he soars through the air like a bird in a graceful dive. We never see him land.
The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked . Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions.
Although the objects depicted in Titus Kaphar’s diptych 2016/1963 might not be immediately recognizable, the work’s title and the inscriptions ‘Alabama 1963’ and ‘North Dakota 2016’ reveal their use as tools of brutal force. The work with the inscription ‘Alabama 1963’ is a painting of the nozzle of a high-pressure water jet that the Birmingham Police used against black protesters, including children, during a non-violent campaign against racial segregation led by Martin Luther King JR. during the civil rights movement. The second painting depicts the nozzles used against protestors that in 2016 opposed the plans to build the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, many of whom were seriously hurt and left soaking wet during freezing temperatures.
In his series Hanging and Beheading Paintings Mike Cloud speaks to the suffering of a series of named (and occasionally unnamed) individuals, addressing their trauma within the language of abstraction. They offer the viewer an aesthetic account of individuality, death, and the empathic space of communion in absence via avant-garde portraiture, unbound by the rules of anatomy or even representation, but instead by purely expressive compositional and aesthetic goals. Untitled (Beheading) embraces the individual subjectivities of notable and mundane contemporaries — from pop stars to serial killers — in cryptic ways, connected only by the physical circumstances of their deaths.
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.
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.
Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible . Other well known works by Ramirez feature the movement and endless symbolism of the sea—like the simultaneous engagement and retreat of the tide—but La Memoria Verde takes the land, plant life, and its human inhabitants as its subject. The film begins with a soft, green, algae-like image that waxes and wanes in focus, then gives way to swaying treetops blowing in a soft wind.
Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a multidisciplinary artist who’s work is informed by the diasporic journey of her ancestors...
Shooshie Sulaiman is one of the leading creative practitioners in Southeast Asia...
Sancintya Mohini Simpson is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work addresses the impact of colonization on the historical and lived experiences of her family and broader diasporic communities...
Born just after the Islamic Revolution, Elham Rokni (b...
Chamorro artist Gisela McDaniel depicts Native American and mixed-race women from the USA’s former, as well as current, Pacific territories...
A self-taught photographer, Vandy Rattana has focused on challenging conditions in Cambodia, his home country, by documenting natural and manmade disasters...
Wah Nu and Tun Win Aung, respectively born in 1977 and 1975, Yangon, Myanmar...
Titus Kaphar’s work is often discussed as socially and politically oriented, however, the artist describes it as a series of deeply personal responses to situations, narratives or histories...
Arin Rungjang’s practice is known to revisit historical and political narratives, both major and minor, as a means to consider the past, present and future...
Kiri Dalena is an acclaimed visual artist, filmmaker, and activist...
In his research-based and process-oriented practice Uriel Orlow’s work is concerned with “spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and forms of haunting”...
Aubrey Williams was one of the founding members of the Caribbean Artists Movement, formed in the 1960s in the United Kingdom, after settling there in the early 1950s...
UK-based artist, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami was born in Gutu, Zimbabwe in 1993 and lived in South Africa from the ages of 9 to 17...
Humanity is not ontologically transcendent, artist Som Supaparinya’s work makes adamantly clear: actions energetically create impacts, experience dictated not only by our perceptions but equally the world that surrounds us, tethered inextricably...
Eamon Ore-Giron’s paintings, works on paper and installations blend contemporary graphic design, folk and tourist art, and surrealism in a hybridity of Mexican, South American, Native-American, and other American cultures...
Virlani Hallberg is a video and photographic artist living and working in Berlin...
Working with narrative experimental film, multi-channel video installation, performative video art, photography, and text, Jane Jin Kaisen engages themes of memory, trauma, migration and translation at the intersection of personal and collective histories...
Artist Mike Cloud builds irregularly shaped canvases and frames into unique sculptural objects...
Native Art Department International is a collaborative project created in 2016 and administered by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan...
The oeuvre of Moshekwa Langa (b...
Dana Kavelina is an artist and activist who works with video, animation, painting, illustration, and text...
Mounira Al Solh’s art practice embraces inter alia drawing, painting, embroidery, performative gestures, video and video installations...
Michael Armitage (b...
A self-taught artist, Kiluanji Kia Henda employs a strong sense of humour in his work, which often hones in on themes of identity, politics, and perceptions of post-colonialism and modernism in Africa...
Aki Kondo utilizes animation, video, and mixed media to explore such varied topics as intimacy, loss, and the human body...
Ali Yass is a painter and filmmaker whose work entangles personal and collective memory in its psycho-affective interrogation of power...
“These are negatives that were scratched because of a jealous husband from the Baqari family, who never let his wife out by herself...
Carib Carnival illustrates Aubrey Willams’s unique artistic language, combining Pre-Columbian iconography with abstraction...
Hybridized drawing is a continued exploration in Moshekwa’s practice, integrating elements of graffiti, thread and yarn to enrich his abstract drawings of maps and space...
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...
In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role...
Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...
Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds series was made following a transformative encounter with the craters left over from 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped by U...
The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices describing histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced...
Eamon Ore-Giron’s new commissioned video project Bite Work, is an experimental genre breaking video that is part-performance, part-conceptual and part-comical addressing issues of mediation, surveillance and trust...
Redefining The Power (with Didi Fernandes) is a metaphor of how reflections on history and society during the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) are largely ignored within the canon of history...
Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu initiated the series 1000 Pieces (of White) in 2009, as a way to produce objects and images as a portrait of their shared life as partners and collaborators...
The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams...
In collaboration with psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Leon Tan, Receding Triangular Square explores traditional Chinese and Taiwanese modalities of psychological healing as alternatives to dominant Western psychiatric and therapeutic practices...
In the video, the artist follows her grandmother, Aldona, during her daily walk through the Grutas Park in Lithuania...
In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message...
“The Wedding” is the centerpiece of a series of works centered on a film of the artist’s parents’ wedding in 1978, the year before the Iranian revolution that gave power to a religious fundamentalist regime...
Although the objects depicted in Titus Kaphar’s diptych 2016/1963 might not be immediately recognizable, the work’s title and the inscriptions ‘Alabama 1963’ and ‘North Dakota 2016’ reveal their use as tools of brutal force...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
The series The Memory of Trees is specifically about trees, and what trees have witnessed in South Africa: for example, trees that were used as locations for slave trading, or trees that was during the anti-Apartheid struggle as a kind of identifier for a safe house for activists who were fleeing from security forces...
In 2011, Mounira Al Solh began a series of drawings that documented her meetings and conversations with displaced Syrian refugees in Lebanon and various European countries...
Gikan Sa Ngitngit Nga Kinailadman (From The Dark Depths) by Kiri Dalena is a stylistically collaged film inspired by the true story of a young activist’s drowning...
246247596248914102516… And then there were none narrates a semi fictional account centered around the ambiguous history of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, and on the aftermath of the 1973 demonstration of 400,000 people who marched against the military junta from Thammasat University to the monument...
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions...
Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible ...
Drawing & Print
Now; 1992 is Ali Yass’s attempt to remake his childhood drawings, which were lost after he was forced to leave Iraq following the 2003 US occupation...
Drawing & Print
And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition...
This painting is the direct result of the artist’s research into her roots...
Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist...
Got Your Back by Gisela McDaniel depicts two women of color from different ethnic backgrounds who share similar violent experiences...
In his series Hanging and Beheading Paintings Mike Cloud speaks to the suffering of a series of named (and occasionally unnamed) individuals, addressing their trauma within the language of abstraction...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...
Dhuwã (term used by indentured people of Natal for ‘smoke’), is a single-channel film by Sancintya Mohini Simpson that traces back to the lived experiences of indentured labourers taken from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) to work on sugar plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s...
Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015)...