Photography (Photography)

Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo. Tsai placed live hermit crabs and shells in a sandy enclosure at the site, writing fragments of The One China policy and the Taiwanese Independence statements on each shell. As the hermit crabs moved and swapped shells, they formed new connections between the statements.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The performance title A Gente Combinamos De Não Morrer (BANDEIRA #1) / Us Agreed Not To Die (FLAG #1) is taken from a short story by Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo, whose work addresses violence, resilience, and necropolitics with an Afro-diasporic lens. This artwork by Jota Mombaça articulates connections between black and trans people’s challenges and struggles. Mombaça points out that an ongoing genocide of these minorities underscores the established power structures, and their resistance is to survive.

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.

This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.

Painting (Painting)

El Hadji Sy is an important figure in the critical movement that followed Lépold Sedar Senghor´s Négritude ideology. Senghor supported El Hadji’s work from the start and continued to follow it, but they came together again in another cultural policy initiative, inaugurated by Senghor: the famous Villages des Arts. The village is a co-operative for artists in Dakar where each one has a professional studio.

Performance (Performance)

Furthering Alexandra Pirici’s enquiry into the economy and circulation of artworks, Parthenon Marbles is an immaterial version of the sculptural ensemble embodied by five performers. This ongoing performative action presents and addresses the challenges in the financial and legal implications and value of the original sculptures as cultural capital. The original Parthenon Marbles are a collection of Classical Greek marble sculpture inscriptions and architectural pieces that were originally part of the temple of the Parthenon and other buildings in the Acropolis of Athens, Greece.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the islands of the Strait of Hormuz off the southern coast of Iran, a distinctive local culture has emerged as the result of many centuries of cultural and economic exchange, the traces of which are seen not only in the material culture of these islands but also in the customs and beliefs of their inhabitants. Central to these is a belief in the existence of winds—generally thought of as harmful—that may possess a person, causing her to experience illness or disease, and a corresponding ritual practice involving incense, music and movement in which an hereditary cult leader speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in one of many local or foreign tongues in order to negotiate its exit. While their exact origins are unclear, the existence of similar beliefs and practices in many African countries suggests that the cult may have been brought to the south of Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab slave trade.

The various distinct but connected lineages of Himalayan painting remain thriving languages employed by artists from across the region to express their unique perspective in our shared contemporary world. In Bhutan in particular, this language is prevalent and its maintenance is seen through the political prism of preserving Bhutan’s identity in the global world. That being said, o ffering by Gyempo Wangchuk presented an attempt to bring a critical dimension within the traditional Himalayan forms of expression.