Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Creole Portraits III alludes to the 18th century practice by slave women on Caribbean plantations of using tropical plants as natural abortifacients. As an act of political resistance against their exploitation as “breeders” of new slaves and to protest the inhumanity of slavery, some slave women chose to either abort or kill their offspring. Armed with practical knowledge passed on orally from their African ancestors and/or Amerindian counterparts, enslaved Creole women collected the seeds, bark, flowers, sap, and roots from various plants which allowed them to secretly put an end to their pregnancies.

Photography (Photography)

The Caste Portraits Series by Leah Gordon investigates the practice of grading skin color from black to white, which marked the extent of racial mixing in 18th century Haiti. Médéric Moreau de St Mery (1750-1819), a French créole slave owner and freemason living in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), created a taxonomy of race classifying skin color from black to white using names derived from mythology, natural history, and bestial miscegenation. His Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789) hierarchizes 128 possible combinations of black-white miscegenation into nine categories (the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulâtre, the quarteron, the métis, the mamelouk, the quarteronné, and the sang-melé).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Godville Portraits Ten illustrated short stories

Photography (Photography)

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth. Opie is known for her honest portraits of diverse individuals, from LGBT people to football players, and the self-portrait has also been a long-standing and important part of her practice. Instead of hiding her sexuality and interest in sadomasochism, Opie wears it proudly.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. Central Station shows a character reaching to wipe a tear from her face as the blues of her wardrobe seem to blend in with the dismal blue of the background.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The figure in Alignment slouches with his head in his hands in a gesture of failure or despair, speaking to the difficult task of balancing individual freedom and societal rules.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The two characters in Argument interact in an ambiguous gesture of conflict or embrace as the world around them pulsates in agitated waves.

Photography (Photography)

Susan Sontag, the author of On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, was captured through Hujar’s now-iconic photograph in a relaxed yet pensive pose. A friend and supporter of his work as well as his subject, Sontag wrote the introduction for Hujar’s only book published during his lifetime: Portraits in Life and Death.

Photography (Photography)

Alistair Fate (1994) depicts, presumably, a member of the LGBT community. Catherine Opie is known for her portraits of LGBT, queer, and outsider people; she intends them to come off not as shocking or different, but as human despite their deviance from societal norms. This image is one of several works by Opie in the Kadist Collection that show marginalized people, filtered through the artist’s signature appropriation of formal and classical portraiture in the interest of both documentation and reframing.

Photography (Photography)

In the Collage II (Marie) (2013), Shorr seems to have an ostensibly clear subject, a female subject identified in the work’s title as “Marie,” a slim but athletic woman with brown hair pictured reclining atop a brilliantly white sheet draped against a marbled tan-and-white backdrop. Although photographed topless, Marie is depicted in slightly contorted poses that emphasize the curves of her figure while also obstructing the viewer’s gaze. Printed on high gloss paper, Marie’s portrait has the polished veneer of magazine spread, and the two portraits on display offer different vantages of the same subject.

Photography (Photography)

Acts of Appearance is an ongoing series by Gauri Gill consisting of lush, large-scale color portraits of the residents of a village in Maharashtra, in Western India, which is known for making Adivasi masks. Adivasi people are part of the tribal groups population of South Asia. Instead of requesting the likenesses of gods and demons, Gill asked the residents—including the master mask-makers Subhas and Bhagavan Dharam Kadu, their families, and fellow volunteers—to make masks that portray their own lives.

Photography (Photography)

Noticing the lack of archives on the queens of various African kingdoms, artist Ishola Akpo created several series of work that retrace their history. Akpo uses different mediums in these projects, as a metaphor to the complex stories of the figures and their true political weight. One part of the project, the Agbara Women photographic series, employs fictional portraits that sheds light on the queens’ histories.

Installation (Installation)

The Chair (2012) foregrounds media-based tensions between analog and digital imaging technologies as a means of challenging the continued circulation of visual ephemera from India’s colonial past. A mix of found photographs and staged studio portraits deliberately made to look older, The Chair features multiple portraits of figures dressed in period costumes that reference the ornate fashions popular during Great Britain’s imperial rule of India. A hybrid frame wraps around this assemblage, a composite of variously ornate and simple wood finishes culled from disused and forgotten pictures.

Photography (Photography)

The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits. It is unclear if these subjects are related, despite the obvious doubling of visual cues, and Lassry offers few hints to suggest that these men have any association beyond their sitting for the same picture. By extension, Lassry subverts conventions in portrait photography by identifying his subjects with numbers, erasing the familiarity inherent in the act of naming, Men (055, 065) functions as an anti-portrait in which anonymity supplants intimacy.

Photography (Photography)

Fathers #18 and Fathers #27 is part of a series of photographs and videos made in recent years in Gaza. Batniji addresses the representation of the over-identified human and physical space with the geographical and political situation in the region. He distinguishes himself from the fictions that have been previously created in the Middle East and offers a quieter and more retained vision of the of the intertwining tensions and oppositions in this area.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video work Any Resemblance is Coincidental , CHEN Zhexiang mined portraits of real Asian criminals that were abandoned on the Internet. In order to form a database of the portraits, he saved the files under the original names retrieved from the Internet. CHEN used digital facial recognition technology to build a lexicon of the criminals’ facial characteristics in order to analyze them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The path of the fox, from galleries containing 16th, 17th and 18th century portraits of historic figures from British history hung on plush walls, is circuitous and seemingly random. The fox tracks back and forth, sometimes inspecting the gallery furniture, often walking through the middle of the room but sometimes around its perimeter until eventually it climbs on top of a showcase, covered in fabric where he settles down to sleep.

Photography (Photography)

In the Family Portrait series, Akiq AW documents reliefs and statues in Jogja, Indonesia that present an image of the ideological nuclear family. Following Indonesia’s communal and political conflicts, and its economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the second Indonesian President Suharto established the “New Order” regime. During this period, there were efforts to control the national birth rate through a programme called Keluarga Berencana (Family Planning).

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting. As with the acrylic painting Ticket (also 2015), Person in Red Sweater could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist films a horse dressage session at night, in a dimly lit manège. In this video the artist recalls the importance of traditional equestrian portraits in Spanish painting and relates to the repetitive passage between the rider and the mount. This effect of repetition is accentuated by the video played in a loop and the fixed framing of the image shot from the ground, with body posture and dressage themes as a method for training and obedience.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013. In the series, the artist persistently dissects, examines and describes his experiences and memories of his family and life in Tunis, Tunisia. As underlined by poet Arafat Sadallah, the artist draws eyes and gazes of unachieved portraits, hands and arms of a skeleton—figures disappear but they witness and testify.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013. In the series, the artist persistently dissects, examines and describes his experiences and memories of his family and life in Tunis, Tunisia. As underlined by poet Arafat Sadallah, the artist draws eyes and gazes of unachieved portraits, hands and arms of a skeleton—figures disappear but they witness and testify.

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting, and Ticket could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art.

Painting (Painting)

Parrot Drawings or Paintings look like children’s drawings and seem quite innocent. The parrot in both the Garden of Eden and the harems are associated with the symbol of purity and innocence. These symbols are found in Renaissance painting, especially in the Annunciations or the Virgins and child and later in Flemish portraits.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Prisons is part of a series of videos, entitled Our Body is a Weapon , representing individuals who affirm the body as a place of political and social resistance. In this video, two young women used their bodies as a weapon of war, participating in a hunger strike in Turkish prisons in the year 2000. This hunger strike was violently repressed by the army.

Photography (Photography)

In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions. An example of this is Floor, Legs (2013), a gelatin silver print in which a large black rectangle obscures the upper half of a candid photograph with two figures that are ultimately only identifiable by their legs and feet, which are even then indiscernibly crossed and posed beyond easy recognition. Even though its unclear if Lassry’s source image is a found photograph or an original composition, the underlying themes – of the photograph’s function as an object, and the impossibility of discerning “the real” through its representation – continue to resonate.

Installation (Installation)

Agony of the New Bed by Sheelasha Rajbhandari brings out the familiar yet often ignored reality of gender discrimination and taboos built within the construct of marriage. Part of the artist’s series Marriage Taboos , these portraits of women from different age groups in Nepal are staged on cotton mattresses placed on miniature golden matrimonial beds. The embroidered text on top of the portraits in golden threads are a representation of the range of vulnerable and resilient emotions experienced by women and the social beliefs towards them.

Photography (Photography)

In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region. As the Yanomami do not have first names, it was necessary to give them numbers to indicate that they had already been vaccinated and identify each one for their medical records. From this series of events, Claudia Andujar’s Marcados series was born: what was supposed to be a mere photographic record, for organizational purposes, ended up raising a big question about the “labels” given to people in the construction of societies.