Photography (Photography)

Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Adrian Balseca’s Suspensión I inverts the logic of the old colonial game, the greasy pole. Digitally filmed in the Province of Morona Santiago among the last existing community at the entrance of the Sangay National Park, a native girl climbs a balsa tree trunk from which plastic containers filled with “local” fossil fuels hang (super, extra, eco-país, gasoline, diesel, etc.). The trunk – which is lightweight quality wood, typical of the subtropical jungle of Ecuador -– has been cut down and suspended vertically and the trophies of modern progress hang from it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pasajes I is the first in a series of Sebastián Díaz Morales’s four videos Pasajes , which focuses on a solitary man walking through Buenos Aires. He walks through churches, shops, and libraries—accessing completely different interior spaces simply by going through doors. The seamless editing allows the man to transcend locations: after he enters a house from a busy intersection he emerges in the halls of a school.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo. The materiality and form of this traditional headpiece represents the strength and fierceness of forest warriors. Their ‘chimneys’ on top are intended to resemble trees in the jungle onto which hornbill feathers would once have been stuffed.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Immolation I is taken from the four-part Immolation series which shows four Arab revolutionaries who publicly sacrificed themselves through self-immolation and in so doing heralded the beginning of the Arab Spring. The lugubrious drawings are made with cigarette burns, a direct reference to torture and burning stakes, even if what is depicted here can be considered the ultimate act of resistance in the form of self-destruction. The portraits were meticulously executed on large-scale fragile sheets of paper.

Textile (Textile)

The title of this work by Egle Jauncems, The Paler King I , is taken from an unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace called The Pale King, published posthumously in 2015. Jauncems notes that the book is fragmented, following unrelated characters struggling with ennui and depression, navigating the pressures of modern reality. In her art practice, Jauncems has been interested in the lives of powerful and influential men for many years.

Painting (Painting)

Kamau Amu Patton’s painting Static Field I originates from a system of electronic and digital media. The image we see on the canvas was created by pointing a camera into its output—a gallery wall—and subsequently generating a feedback loop. Patton then records the distorted image, digitizes it and prints the file onto unprimed canvas with the help of a machine.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I’ve heard stories (2008) is one of Marwa Arsanios early works. It is a short animated film staging a story that took place at the Carlton hotel in Beirut. This work is the first part of a longer project on this iconic building.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Soufiane Ababri’s desire to construct a historical family and a genealogy of queer kinships in Bedwork / Yes I AM sees him conjuring up a pantheon of gay writers and artists whose intellect has changed the course of human history and development, despite their outsider status. Figures as disparate as Michel Foucault, Glenn Ligon, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and André Gide populate Ababri’s drawing series in the artist’s signature naïf style, their homosexuality the thread that connects them. The series of over forty drawings are part of Bedwork, a larger project that Ababri began in 2015.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From suicides, to gang violence, to the epidemic abuse of force by police departments (predominantly against Black men), to school and mass shootings, there is perhaps no more urgent issue in the United States than gun control. The color blue is a proxy for both sadness, and a color that is emblematic of American law enforcement services. I Am Blue, 1 by American Artist is a sculpture that fuses a school desk with a ballistic shield.

Painting (Painting)

The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism. Historically, in countries such as the US and South Africa, the term “boy” was used as a pejorative and racist insult towards men of color, slaves in particular, signifying their alleged subservient status as being less than men. In response, Am I Not A Man And A Brother?

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

Painting (Painting)

Zbigniew Rogalski territory extends from painting to photography. Here , the artist turned his attention towards the photographic qualities in painting and towards the pictorialism found in photography . As the artist mentions on his website,” this work is about flying and the experiences connected with it – the person floats under the ceiling like a balloon, being hunched in a position recommended during an emergency landing”.

Painting (Painting)

Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s. I am the Greatest presents the famous quote by Mohammad Ali to think about his important presence in the African American community. In dialogue with the painting I am a Man, also in the Kadist collection, this assertion that begins the same way takes the line from the protest poster several steps further.

Installation (Installation)

Phinthong provided 5,000 Euros to exchange for Zimbabwean dollars, the most devalued and worthless currency in the world. The ZWD has no legal status outside Zimbabwe. The exchange took place through a network of contacts rather than direct with Zimbabweans.

Painting (Painting)

His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

Painting (Painting)

Jarrett Key’s practice combines several modes of production into a single frame, incorporating sculpture, painting, and performance. Dancing Free I , painted in wet cement, like a fresco, is part of a current series of paintings titled Leaving the City , which depicts Black people they know in lush, pastoral landscapes. Raised in rural Alabama, Key’s series grew out of a few experiments conducted with visitors to their studio.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory. Using long shots and atypical settings, Lu Chunsheng enigmatically refers to a distant history while conveying the sense of dislocation wrought by successive stages of modernization. The combination of elaborate landscape shots from the suburbs of Shanghai and Lu’s signature style of spare and minimally crafted acting offers a surreal view of human behavior in spaces marked by the hulking remnants of China’s extraordinary development.

Photography (Photography)

On New Year’s Eve in 1965, Lisette Carmi met and photographed a group of transgender people living and working on the Via del Campo in Genoa–the main street for prostitution in the city, located in the former Jewish ghetto. This encounter was the beginning of a seven year relationship with the group, and led to the publication of I Travestiti (1972), a controversial book that comprised all of the images Carmi took of the group between 1965-1971. Forming close friendships with the people she portrayed, the artist rented an attic near Via del Campo in Genoa to live with them, she captured the everyday lives of the group, depicting sex work from a new perspective.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Baumgartner’s own excursion into war imagery is the diptych Formation . She was watching a television documentary on the Second World War, was struck by the extraordinary nature of the colour film and decided to video it. The two frames she isolated depict the shadows the planes cast on the ground and the sun glinting off their steel fuselages.

Photography (Photography)

For this image, Olaf Breuning invented a revised stone age corrected for the cinema in which dolmens and leather were replaced by surf boards and neoprene clothing. With the beach as a backdrop, the hyper-aestheticized vikings seem to pose for a surf ad. The collage on the horizon line, the heterogenous nature of the lighting and the costume-like clothing all point to the mise en scène.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm. The movie was not well received by the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until its rediscovery thirty years later by American filmmakers. The movie’s acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise-en-scène prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Following her family’s political exile to Australia in 1990, Havini began to document her journey’s home to the north of Buka Island, in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. Reflecting on the still visible aftermath of conflict and changing economic factors, Havini creates traditional beroana or shell money from extracted earth materials only found on Solomon islands like Bougainville. Havini’s whirling assemblage of ceramic discs emulate the strings of shell money (still valid around the Pacific as system of payments) to examine the economic changes that occurred in her homeland.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering. Amy Balkin’s neon sculpture I (heart) Data Mining , takes on this issue by revealing the acronyms or abbreviations of both technology companies and government bodies that have either profited from data mining, or have used it to political ends. The culprits include Facebook, Investigative Data Warehouse, Apple Computer, The Department of Homeland Security, Narus, Target, and Twitter.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions. Given one minute to seize the voice of authority, contestants were asked to be the finger-pointing Uncle Sam, and their performances—as on the TV program American Idol —were voted on by a live audience. Five winners were chosen and their image and slogans appeared on posters throughout San Francisco to coincide with the presidential elections.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Photography (Photography)

Lu has developed an oeuvre that consists of characters in bizarre situations. The large-scale photograph I Want to Be a Gentleman depicts nine men standing like statues on display in a museum on tall plinths in front of a run-down industrial building. Lu’s brooding films and photographs are preoccupied with China’s industrial era and communist history.