Film & Video (Film & Video)

Um Al Dhabaab (Mother of Fog) by Farah Al Qasimi addresses the myth of Al Qasimi tribe-instigated piracy in the Gulf, perpetuated by the British Empire and upheld by contemporary western academia. This narrative is contested through a fictional retelling of the 1819 siege of Al Dhayah fort and the subsequent Pax Britannica treaty that solidified Britain’s military presence in the Trucial States. Relayed across various locations and times in Ras Al Khaimah through the perspectives of an ancient jinn, the ghost of an Al Qasimi pirate, two RAK-based sisters, a Jack Sparrow impersonator and ship captain, and an 1819 British naval officer, the film challenges Western-centric historiographies of the Gulf and the lingering imperialist interests at play across Asia’s modern-day trade hubs.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Fauna is a figurative sculpture by Auriea Harvey that is characteristic of the artist’s practice—both serious and somewhat whimsical. Making use of old and new technologies, the work is a self-portrait. The sculpture features a soft and gentle human face made of 3D printed composite, sprouting from a clutter of clay and other materials.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

davi de jesus do nascimento’s earthy paintings, from the series sorvedouro , recall his memories as an essentially organic matter. Watercolor painting carries water as its foundational element and was the first technique that the artist applied to base his painting research on the river. He used to dip the brush on the prow of the boats: “I realized that the water is in deep dialogue with the flows of the river that I descend”.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables. Referencing iconic folklore such as Alice in Wonderland, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharata, Ganesh’s video illustrates the story of a hero’s journey and transformation that is not driven by the glory of violent conquest or saving a damsel in distress. Ganesh’s short video features a colorful style of illustration specific to the artist’s comic works.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In 1872, a German scientist, Sir Julius von Haast, found the fossilized remains of a giant bird in New Zealand, that was soon connected to the Maori legend of the Hokioi. The Maori folklore recounts the story of an eagle of immense proportions that was said to be capable of devouring human beings. The bones uncovered by the scientist included a femur, one rib, and two claws.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town. While it is not named in the film itself, the town at the center of Mythological Time is a re-imagined incarnation of Sun’s hometown of Fuxin, in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Sandwiched between North Korea and Inner Mongolia, Fuxin is a poor coal-mining region that used to contain one of China’s largest open-pit mines and has historically been the site of significant conflict, thanks to its rich mineral resources.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his posters, prints, and installations, Erick Beltrán employs the language and tools of graphic design, linguistics, typography, and variations in alphabetical forms across cultures; he is specifically interested in how language and meaning form structures that can be misconstrued as universal. In The Individual Is a Mirage (2010), Beltrán offers up a graphic chart mapping the myth of individual identity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Through the language of dance and choreography, Void by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity. Serafin’s research into the making of this dance video is centered around creation myth stories of pre-colonial animistic religions from the Philippines, which were suppressed by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism. Through movement, the materiality of his bodily presence on the screen, and the accompanying sci-fi soundtrack, this work proposes the foundation of a queer mythology; the nascent moment of a ‘queer spiritual force’ coming out of an apocalyptic era, perhaps our current one, that has arrived to refund a new kind of humanity.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Polanszky’s sculpture is made from raw, found materials that have the patina of age. He brings together disparate material discarded by society to form aggregates. Although it is not his intention to make works of meaning the viewer endows them with poetic meanings and constructs.

Installation (Installation)

Named after a book that artist Shubigi Rao read growing up, The Yellow Scarf explores the history of the Thuggee cult in India in relation to the colonial British administration that ‘discovered’ but also ultimately exterminated this cult of assassins. The modern term ‘thug’ is said to be derived from Thuggee. Rao’s fascination with the Thuggee is interwoven with her parallel research into the strangler tree, found throughout South and Southeast Asia.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream . This series by artist Chitra Ganesh comprises a large-scale narrative suite inspired by a 1905 feminist utopian (eponymous) text written by a Bengali writer and social reformer, Rokeya Sakhhawat Hossain. Educated thanks to the support of her elite family, Hossain was one of the few Bengali women of her generation writing in English.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This work includes sketches for Extrastellar Evaluations , the project she produced at Kadist. Extrastellar Evaluations introduces Plato’s mythical state of Atlantis as the theoretical birthplace of conceptual art. Well-known and obscure epistemological notions from the annals of cosmology and mysticism guided and informed her research in the Bay Area during the Kadist residency at the beginning of 2016.

Photography (Photography)

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light. The architect’s longtime studio and residence, which he built in Los Angeles in 1922, exemplifies this philosophy, and has since become an influential part of the modernist architectural canon. In Untitled (Schindler House #01) (2007), Luisa Lambri describes Schindler’s studio by capturing its aftereffects—the play of light and shadow cast through branches onto a surface.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

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.

Installation (Installation)

“On April 13 a painting was lost at JFK airport while going through the security screening. On April 19 a painting was lost at CDG airport while going through the security screening. On April 20 a painting was lost at DUB airport while going through the security screening.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lightning 01 (2014) parodies our contemporary relationship to screen-based media and the absurdity of aestheticizing boredom. The video depicts a computer user aimlessly taking photos of himself, seemingly numb to external stimuli or intervention. Set on a loop, the video produces the illusion of an endless state of bored selfies and disaffected gazes.

Photography (Photography)

Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California. Commissioned by industrialist J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller, and built by Richard Neutra in 1937, the Miller house’s open and flowing layout expands upon modernist architectural traditions. It features a flat roof, stone and glass walls, with rooms configured beneath a grid pattern of skylights and supporting cruciform steel columns.

Photography (Photography)

Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.

Installation (Installation)

Peter Friedl’s projects place aesthetic questions within an expanded field that takes into account the social, political and philosophical context. This textile piece quotes and diverts a flag with a red background and the central star of the Kurdistan National Liberation Front (ERNK, a military organization linked to PKK, founded in 1985 and disbanded in 2000), and not the national flag of Kurdistan. The artist became interested as from 1994, when the town of Lice was destroyed by the Turkish army and the PKK was expelled from Germany.