Film & Video (Film & Video)

Set in the infamous Tenderloin district of San Francisco, Factotum of the City is a documentary film by Javid Soriano that delves into the life of a former world-class opera singer turned self-styled street hustler. Factotum of the City centers around Tim, a Juilliard School graduate who fell from the world opera stage into the bowels of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, an destitute place located amidst the city’s vibrant downtown. The film follows the opera man as he navigates the Tenderloin and its surrounding locales, allowing a glimpse into some of the bizarre, tragic, and comical situations he endures while living as a self-fashioned ‘Figaro’ of the street.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

To produce the series of sculptures collectively titled Utarand , Prabhakar Kamble relocated his studio to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, near the village where he was born into a family of daily wage earners. Kamble cast the feet of agricultural workers in metal to prop up the eponymous terracotta pots traditionally used to store food and grains in every home. A commentary on the caste system’s four-tiered hierarchy, the pots become smaller as they go up the stand, mimicking the structure of society where most of the population is comprised of impoverished communities, which form the base of the caste system while a small minority makes up the wealthy upper castes.

Photography (Photography)

Mohamed Bourouissa’s “ Shoplifters” Series was created in 2014-2015, in a neighborhood supermarket in Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn. The store manager used to take and display Polaroids of thieves caught in the act. In the tradition of appropriation artists –from Marcel Duchamp to Richard Prince– Bourouissa simply reproduced these photographs and transposed them into the field of art to foster questioning.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2009, Laura Henno began research in the archipelago Comoros for her first film Koropa the first episode of a triptych— completed in 2016. Mayotte is the only remaining island belonging to France in the archipelago of the Comoros, which gained independence in 1975, creating an invisible border that divides the islands from Europe. Koropa is the portrait of a particular relationship: that of Ben, a former fisherman turned smuggler, and Patron, a child who makes his first smuggling voyage between the island of Anjouan and Mayotte.

Photography (Photography)

Bariga Nights is a photographic series set in the Bariga neighborhood in Lagos (Nigeria). This district has the reputation as home to some of the most disenfranchised of an estimated 21 million inhabitants of Lagos. After several years of being on the road across Africa, Europe and North America, Okereke decided to stay in Lagos in 2016.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his paper-based work, Medellin-New York , Rojas uses coca leaves and dollar bills to spell out the words of the two cities, tied together through the illicit exchange of materials used to make the word, gesturing towards the uncomfortable reality of the drug trafficking trade and the complicity of both America and Colombia within that economic system.

Photography (Photography)

After seeing Martha Camarillo’s photographs of horsemen in Strawberry Mansion -an impoverished Philadelphia neighbourhood- Mohamed Bourouissa travelled to see the urban stables run by African American men. For eight months, he observed, drew and photographed this community. As the community and Bourouissa became closer throughout his stay, the artist suggested that they organize a competition, called “Horse Day”, in which artists from other neighborhoods would be invited to create costumes for the horses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Ship of Fools” is a literary term derived from Sebastian Brant’s 1949 satirical allegory of the same name. The work tells the story of a wandering vessel with 111 fools aboard; each of whom represents a social issue. The Ship of Fools Mooring at the Train Station is a two-channel video work by artist Liu Yu, concerning the community of people residing on the fringes of society at Taipei Main Station.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Made between 1986 and 2015, Buchanan’s Shack Sculptures are a result of the artist’s close observation and extensive research of ‘shotgun’ houses, where one room is arranged in sequence one behind the other; the rural poor inhabited these houses. They were often constructed for rent near railways or manufacturing centers, but by the late twentieth century tended to be owner-occupied. By engaging with this architectural form, Buchanan considers the economic consequences of the abandonment of this form of housing as a result of the ubiquity of the motorcar that permitted people to move to the suburbs, where there was less pressure on space.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Improvisación escrita para lectura a primera vista

Photography (Photography)

At the halfway point along South Africa’s Highway N1, running from Cape Town to Johannesburg, sits the small town of Beaufort West. The 1,200-mile highway joins the northern provinces of the country to the south cuts through. Beaufort West becomes the main strip of the township, whereby the thousands of commuters passing through are thus forced to witness the town’s squalid social and economic condition.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Part of the series Still Life Analysis II: The Island , the two photographs The Objects under the Civic Boulevard and A Yellow Blanket on a Wooden Pallet feature household objects of vagrants living beneath the Taipei’s Civic Boulevard expressway. Such objects include trash, unidentified discarded objects, and plants. For the artist, the underside of Civic Boulevard resembles a subtropical island with its artificial stones and potted plants decor.

Photography (Photography)

Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No. 1, 1974-1976 presents an interrupted image. The images capture scenes from an urban development, La Vega, built to modernize and connect favelas in Venezuela.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Baudelaire’s latest film, Also known as Jihadi (2017) tells the story of a young French boy from Parisian suburbs and his assumed journey to the Al-Nusra front in Syria to join ISIS and fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Employing the cinematographic approach known as ‘landscape theory’ — or fûkeiron — developed out of Marxist film criticism in the 1970s where the landscape of a film is read as an expression of the political climate, thus becoming a significant character, motivation or reasoning for the films development. The 101-minute follows Abdel Aziz from the socially and politically rife milieu of the Parisian suburbs, weighted by division, segregation, development and poverty to, what the viewer assumes, Syria.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

As with so many other colonized geographies, the ways in which violence has become a natural and expected component of Santo Domingo reflects the forced friendship between the beneficiaries and residues of Modernism. What distinguishes these two communities? What separates them?

Painting (Painting)

Adjamé, Charbon reflects on both global environmental discourses and domestic impacts of the use and trade of coal. Adjamé is one of ten urban communes of the city of Abidjan, the economic capital and city with the largest French-speaking populous in the Côte d’Ivoire. Employing vibrant colors to contrast the plastic jerrycans, children toys and clothing strewn randomly throughout the shanty settlement with the darkness of coal is a challenging articulation of the image of progress and its environmental consequences today.

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.