Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kosmic Music is a musical score comprised of two parts: a single mixed media drawing titled Colors and Satellites, and a pair of mixed media drawings titled Koral Reef . Conceived of together as a single musical score, the three drawings exemplify a specific stage in the evolution of Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation Language, which he has been developing since 1967. Although at first glance the works in Kosmic Music might appear abstract compositions drawn on paper, as with other scores produced by Smith, suggestions of musical structures are revealed upon closer inspection: an entanglement of musical sheets and bright geometric forms.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Machine Music (Embroidered Tank I)

Installation (Installation)

The installation Music Stands: Free Exercise 7, 8, and 9 by Marina Rosenfeld consists of music stand-like structures and a corresponding set of panels and acoustic devices that direct, focus, obstruct, reflect and project sound in the gallery. Together the components play on the connection between aural and social relations signified by the music stands. An episodic score emanates from the work’s sound system, momentarily interrupting the atmosphere with brief eruptions of electronic sounds and vocality.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jessie Stead’s Punched Interlude works are made out of found police barricade tape that she punches holes in and then runs through a music box, the music is composed by her as audible reflection on barricades and no go zones throughout the city of New York in area of Donald Trump. The music box is attached to a gum ball machine globe which acts as a resonator, amplifying the music that results from the punched holes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Antonio Ole’s Rhythm of N’gola Rhythms (1978), is a film about the struggle for Angolan political independence. It looks at the role of popular culture and labor strikes through the 40s and 50s following the band Ngola Ritmos who embarked upon a consciousness-raising mission with their pro-independence political music. Through both their clandestine activities and their music, the band is credited with aiding political mobilization take off in Angola.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Vertical Horizon by Wito Wibowo addresses a media scandal in 2010 that took over the cultural milieu of Indonesia. Someone uploaded on a sextape of pop star Ariel Peterpan with model-actress Luna Maya recorded on a mobile phone. Several days later, another video of Ariel Peterpan and Cut Tari, an infotainment news presenter in Indonesia, surfaced on the Internet.

The San Francisco–based artist Shaun O’Dell often uses natural settings as subject matter, lending an artistic complexity to the landscapes he depicts. Stereoscopic images are dual, slightly offset identical pictures that, when seen through a special viewing device, appear three-dimensional. In Temple Creek, a branch of Escalante River, Aquarius Plateau Utah n.d. (Stereoscopic view) (2011) O’Dell has chopped each of the two side-by-side images into 10 vertical strips and mixed them up, to construct a new image.

Painting (Painting)

Shaun O’Dell’s paintings, installations, videos, sculptures, and music explore the overlapping realities of human and natural structures. Whether abstract or figurative, they often read like hieroglyphics, in that they piece together a philosophical portrait of reality. Purple Brush 8 is a painting that details a meeting of geometric forms, and the optical play that results.

Installation (Installation)

Dad is Byron is an audio work produced in collaboration between Diamond Stingily and her father, the house musician Byron Stingily. Viewers are invited to pick up a wall-mounted telephone that has been retrofitted to play a recording of a conversation between Stingily and her father. Although initially the artist planned to focus on her father’s recollections of the violence during his childhood in Chicago in the 1960s and how music helped him cope, the conversation has a natural and intimate meandering.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A moonscape is a vista of the lunar landscape or a visual representation of this, such as in a painting. The term “moonscape” is also sometimes used metaphorically for an area devastated by war. Moonscape by Mona Benyamin is inspired by and dedicated to the Lunar Embassy—a company that now sells land on a variety of planets and moons, established in 1980 by a man called Dennis M. Hope, who claimed ownership of the Moon.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Originally commissioned for the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the film Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things) depicts the subculture of Brega music, a fusion of American Hip Hop, Brazilian techno and Caribbean reggaeton that emerged in North Eastern Brazil over the last decade. Part anthropological documentary and part musical the film speaks about the realities of Brazil with its enormous social and economic tensions.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

7″ Single ‘Pop In’ by Martin Kippenbergher consisting of a vinyl record and a unique artwork drawn by the artist on the record’s sleeve. In the foreground of the album’s cover, a drawing of an empty, round vessel is framed underneath the text “POP IN”, suggesting an invitation to listen to the record, a nod to pop music, or perhaps a literal proposal to enter the vessel or the work. In the background, partly hidden by the round form, Kippenberger’s hand-drawn self portrait glares back at the viewer.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I don’t remember is a video by Yung Jake that combines his passion for both music and the visual arts. As per several of his works the video borrows from the vernacular of rap and relies on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of music videos. A humorous interpretation of the rap and hip hop genres, the video combines scenes from urban settings and snapshots of a party as the artist raps in a drowsy monotone about having forgotten the wild night.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil. The piece draws on Meireles’s first-hand contact with many indigenous groups through his father’s work with the Indian Protection Service. The recordings on the LP contain narrative accounts of massacres of native peoples, as well as indigenous music and rituals.

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)

Commissioned for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Hearsay of the Soul (2012) is Werner Herzog’s ode to the landscape paintings of the 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers. The work is a four-channel digital projection of Segers’s artworks accompanied by the emotive music of the Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger. Herzog sees Segers’s vast landscapes as powerful representations of our own interior worlds, resounding with feelings of anger, joy, fear, and loneliness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Unfollow is a music video by Yung Jake featuring a man haunted by the shadows of a former relationship. With the omnipresence of social media in our daily lives, breaking up in the physical world no longer suffices: posts by his ex-lover still appear in his newsfeed, reminding him of her presence and thus making it harder from him to let go of his relationship. As the ‘unfollow’ button on social media appears to be the only way to break up completely, Unfollow underlines the barrier between our online and offline identities and the difficulty to separate them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This dyptich installation is coming from a research/ installation Sa koša ke lerole (2016 – ongoing) started during the Montreal biennale (curated by Philippe Pirotte), then recently exhibited at Grahamstown National Arts Festival. The Polokwane Chorale Society, which was previously called Seshego Chorale Society, is based in Polokwane, Limpopo Province, South Africa. It has been in existence since 1978 – the first and longest livingadult choir in the Limpopo region.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wonderland is a music video for the Turkish hip-hop group Tahribad-I Isyan (Rebellion of Destruction). The young hip-hop artists respond with anger and defiance to their forced expulsion from Sulukule, a historic Roma settlement in Istanbul, due to a redevelopment project. Their lyrics address issues of gentrification and inequality, while their actions show the possibilities for both violent and artistic rebellion.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Photography (Photography)

In his series Tsugi no yoru e (Onto the next night) , 2010, Yamatani gives viewers access to the wild world of young rockers and skaters. He prints their idiosyncratic life in ferrotyped gelatin silver prints. Using this forgotten printing process to depict his generation, he manages successfully to reevaluate a classic approach with a fresh understanding of it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tony Cokes’s long-form, multi-channel work Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 forms a layered montage of historical and contemporary source material exploring different periods of Munich’s history. Incorporating footage and speeches from the infamous 1937 exhibitions, Degenerate Art and First Great German Art Exhibition , views of the city’s destruction from June 1945, and texts on Otl Aicher’s graphic identity for the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, the film weaves together an open-ended narrative. This visual and textual material is set to music including techno playlists, contemporary EDM tracks, and Donna Summer’s disco classic, I Feel Love (1977), which the American singer recorded in Munich’s legendary Musicland studio.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film Hustle in Hand (2014) we observe secret negotiations carried out between two characters with only their torsos visible in the frame— negotiations that consider fetishizations, meaning and symbolic value of the body and flesh. Money, food, appearances, and consumption: the viewer is pulled into a round of transactions, a rumination on our society in which art occupies a coveted position. The film’s rhythm is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a green polyhedron that, once licked by one of the mysterious protagonists, becomes golden yellow, a magical event accompanied by an intense swelling of violin music.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature. In Sisto’s work, a computer generated voice recites Brautigan’s poem while a series of digitally rendered 3D objects with a sleek, mirrored finish, float weightlessly across the screen. Sisto’s work also shares its title with the 2011 BBC documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis, which has the view that computers have failed in their task of liberating humanity and have instead created a simplified and distorted world around us.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sung Hwan Kim created the drawing push against the air 01 during a rehearsal for his eponymous 2007 performance at De Apple (as part of Prix de Rome), Amsterdam, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. For the performance, Kim interviews his frequent collaborator David Michael DiGregorio and a fellow musician, Byungjun Kwon, about love songs they have composed. The performance appears spontaneous and creates a space of vulnerability and intimacy, however in reality, the three rehearsed the performance numerous times and performed it in numerous cities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Heat Waves by Kent Chan examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of the different aesthetics of heat by drawing from the aesthetics of regions defined by hot and humid climates and associated with histories of coloniality such as ‘the global south’ and the ‘developing world’. The video takes the form of a curated broadcast or music video of historical and contemporary imagery and videos of both found and filmed footage, including media broadcasts; TikToks; DJ sets; an interview with Keanu Reeves; an excerpt of Ho Tzu Nyen’s 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art (2005); an interview with KADIST Collection artist Julian Abraham Togar; and DJ sets. The barrage of footage weaves together contrasting tropes about the tropics: depicting it as a diseased paradise; naturally abundant, yet economically poor; filled with people who are at once energetic and lazy; with dynamic aesthetics, but lacking order.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM. Shy, proud and joyful, the two boys appear to be influenced by a third person – the artist and his camera. Their play of eyes creates an atmosphere reminding one of the close scrutiny and state control of the Kurdish population.