Film & Video (Film & Video)

As an artist Francisco Camacho Herrera seeks ways in which his work can exist within, and challenge, official social channels. His practice revolves around the possibility of art to bear practical effects on cultural assumptions and reflects on redefining common concepts that can lead art to change the ways in which we conceive society. Camacho Herrera speculated that Chinese sailors might have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century.

Painting (Painting)

Jarrett Key’s practice combines several modes of production into a single frame, incorporating sculpture, painting, and performance. Dancing Free I , painted in wet cement, like a fresco, is part of a current series of paintings titled Leaving the City , which depicts Black people they know in lush, pastoral landscapes. Raised in rural Alabama, Key’s series grew out of a few experiments conducted with visitors to their studio.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The short film I Can Only Dance to One Song by Arash Fayez features a series of people from the migrant community in Barcelona singing along or dancing to songs of their choosing. The video begins with a man contently sings along to a song while getting his hair cut at the barber shop; a woman dances emotively to another song in an empty room full of desks, maybe a school or place of religious study; in a food market, a cashier nods his head to music while tallying customers’ orders and then later moves through the aisles of his store passionately dancing and mouthing the lyrics as if he were in a music video. Expanding on the music video aesthetic, the film then cuts to a group of young men perched in front of a graffitied wall, cheerfully dancing and rapping along with the song playing from their stereo.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Composed of five episodes, Brine Lake (A New Body) by Shen Xin is set in a fictional factory where iodine is produced as a byproduct of natural gas sourced from deep sea brine lakes. Korean, Japanese, and Russian are spoken in multiple episodes. The protagonists have multiple encounters and conversations with two unseen employees of the factory whose visions are overtaken by the camera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sofía Córdova’s film dawn_chorusiii: the fruit they don’t have here / coro_del_albaiii: la fruta que no tienen aquí weaves together six California migration stories that resist dominant social narratives that flatten the experience of migrants. Though each woman’s story is based on interviews conducted by Córdova through voice memos or phone calls, the women’s lines in the film are reinterpreted and altered by the artist as a gesture that affords them opacity and relative anonymity. The opening sequence begins with four of the women looking into the camera, reciting a poem about the transition from winter to spring in Spanish and Mandarin: the birds dropping seeds they brought from afar, planting saplings that grow into trees bearing the fruit they don’t have in their new homes.

Photography (Photography)

Vision (Bump’n’Curl) by Dannielle Bowman is from a series of photographs titled What Had Happened . The series blends a major historical event with small, personal images. The photographs retain fragments of the artist’s own heritage and investigate the concept of home, while gaining inspiration from the Great Migration, a movement in which African Americans from the South (including Bowman’s grandparents) moved to the North, and also the American West from 1916-1970.

Painting (Painting)

This untitled painting by Tirdad Hasemi presents a space that can be thought of as both a prison cell and a house. Paradoxically, in both cases the color and the importance of the walls give a feeling of confinement. Escaping from prison in Iran and finding the walls of a home in Europe has been a complex and conflicting experience for Hashemi.

Painting (Painting)

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s recent drawing of cutout figures on architectural tracing paper takes a statement by Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo, as a point of departure for the work. Stating, “migration problems can and should find their solution within the affirmation of ‘freedom of movement’ as the new inalienable right of humans. No human has chosen or chooses the place where they were born.

Photography (Photography)

N°001 Djoubi et sa meute is part of a series of photographs by Laura Henno titled Ge Ouryao! . This particular work depicts a young man named Djoubi posing proudly, surrounded by his pack of dogs, along the shoreline of Mayotte.

Photography (Photography)

Dialect by Felipe Romero Beltrán is a photographic series that follows a group of immigrants who have recently crossed the strait (the maritime border between Morocco and Spain) to avoid border controls. The young immigrants settle in Seville while their legal situation is either resolved or refused. Reflecting on his own status as a migrant, Beltra?n’s series of photographs documenting Morrocan immigrants is a tribute to their trajectories; a trace of their existences.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pasajes I is the first in a series of Sebastián Díaz Morales’s four videos Pasajes , which focuses on a solitary man walking through Buenos Aires. He walks through churches, shops, and libraries—accessing completely different interior spaces simply by going through doors. The seamless editing allows the man to transcend locations: after he enters a house from a busy intersection he emerges in the halls of a school.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Color Strip by Elsa Werth two-dimensional versions of all the national flags of the world (197 in all) are compiled into a long horizontal strip. The video is presented on a large flat-screen, approximating the size and dimensions of a national flag. As each flag slides across the screen, connections between the colors, signs, and forms of different countries and parts of the world create unexpected associations.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Blue Poisoning series , reveals the outcome of artist Tirdad Hashemi’s weary and depressed days in the winter of 2022, following their second migration from Paris to Berlin. The color blue expresses the feelings of sadness and loneliness felt by the artist in the frozen Berlin cold. In the drawing, lonely and tormented bodies seem to struggle to live; despite their suffering, they still hope.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Goicolea has made drawings based on a family album of relations that he did not know but who in one way or another contributed to his history and to the predicament in which he now finds himself as a Cuban in America. He then mounted the drawings on trees, telegraph poles or buildings and photographed them. Taken in these situations the drawings appear like advertisements for lost people or even posters for wanted criminals that of course conjures up images of loss not only of boat people but those who perished in other disasters, whether natural catastrophes or 9/11.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

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.

Photography (Photography)

In Hsu’s work, Colonia China (2014), the artist documents a Chinese cemetery of Costa Rica’s Limón Province, along the country’s Caribbean coast. Serving as the final resting place for Chinese migrants who came to Coast Rica during the late nineteenth century as indentured laborers working to construct the Transatlantic Railroad, the Colonia China speaks to a long but divided history. Hsu’s photographs of the burial ground also echo her interest in typography, with blocky black lettering and painted Chinese characters marking the cemetery as a space belonging to two different worlds.

Painting (Painting)

During a residency in 2009 at L’appartement 22 in Rabat, the artist traveled in Morocco and Senegal on the traces of the German sculptor Arno Breker. On this occasion he learned about batik, a fabric printing technique which originates not only from Indonesia but also from Senegal. It is also widespread in Africa.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair. Marshal Tie Jia is a frog god, who was born in a pond in Jiangxi, China, before fleeing to Matsu Island off the coast of Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution after his temple was destroyed. Spirit Writing attempts to reconstruct the original temple using 3D modeling software, operated in real time as Hsu asks the Marshal questions, receiving answers through a divination ritual in which the chair is swung violently around by his acolytes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

DADYAA: The Woodpeckers of Rotha by Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet illuminates a unique and seldom seen international perspective on indigenous cultures and contemporary social issues in the Nepali context. A small masterpiece, the work engages with one of the most pressing social issues in Nepal, mass migration and the dissolving of social fabric in rural areas. The story begins with an old couple, Atimaley and Devi, who live in a village in Jumla, in the highlands of Western Nepal.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wailing Requiem is the fourth and final chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

Photography (Photography)

Goicolea has made drawings based on a family album of relations that he did not know but who in one way or another contributed to his history and to the predicament in which he now finds himself as a Cuban in America. He then mounted the drawings on trees, telegraph poles or buildings and photographed them. Taken in these situations the drawings appear like advertisements for lost people or even posters for wanted criminals that of course conjures up images of loss not only of boat people but those who perished in other disasters, whether natural catastrophes or 9/11.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Installation (Installation)

In late 2017, Kiswanson stared working with Vadim, an eleven-year-old Romanian-French boy who he met during castings for a performance. Captivated by what he describes as a “hybrid voice, one that belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once”, he began working with Vadim on a regular basis. Over the course of four months, Kiswanson interviewed Vadim on a multitude of subjects concerning the human condition: from his beliefs on death, his thoughts on growing up and becoming an adult, what it feels like to breathe, talk, move and above all, what it means to be born between several cultures and languages.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tungus is the third chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Smoke and Fire is the first chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Through a seemingly haphazard layering of glass and porcelain, Dérive is part of a larger installation series that address borders and displacement. Sheets of glass and porcelain, two transformational materials of alchemy, are stacked loosely in the shape of melting glaciers that places humans, animals, and nature in the same ecosystem. Migrations of one population into another and the subsequent displacement is emphasized in sharp, jagged edges of the transparent glass—phantasmagoric dreams of a distant place—the migration of not simply physical bodies but also that of political opinions and thoughts.

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)

Binelde Hyrcan’s video “Cambeck” is a playful study of four boys on a beach in Angola playing in a chauffeured car made of sand. Weaved through the seemingly naïve game are themes of poverty, migration and inequality. Speaking of ‘the good life’ in the United States of America, the young boys discuss separated families as a result of migration, unemployment and education, poverty, the dream of leaving the slum for a building with walls made not of tin, and the luxury of the accessibility of transport.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Distorting Words is the second chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.