NFT (NFT)

This short looped-video NFT Invertebrate Interactions by Sofia Crespo aims to capture generated impressions of diatoms. Diatoms are the microscopic algae that inhabit a large portion of our seas, whose anatomies are characteristically enclosed in a shell of silica, their shapes formed as various symmetries. The rapid, shifting quality of Crespo’s work reflects the pace of microscopic life, which often appears sped up to our eyes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s earliest works, Device features Harrison performing a series of actions, assisted by the titular ‘devices’, that use physics to force his body into unusual and uncomfortable positions. Maintaining his signature deadpan expression throughout the video, in one scene Harrison is thrusted into the air by a slowly inflating balloon until only his feet are visible in the frame, while in another he levitates in diving position with the help of a pulley system. Wood uses his body and specially-designed props created by the artist duo to explore the space of the screen in hilarious, and sometimes clumsy or violent, ways.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In the first part of Cosmic Call by Angela Su the voiceover proposes in a neutral, documentary-like tone, a series of stories to rethink the way we usually understand, justify, or place blame for epidemiological events. Comets carrying an infective bacterium are linked with the invasion of viruses—our current nemeses—coming from outer space. Second-century BCE medicinal writings correlated the appearance of 29 comets over 300 years with events including plague and drought.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les nucléaires et les choses by Hikaru Fujii is the first video produced in the artist’s long-term project focusing on the Futaba Town Museum of History and Folklore, located in the “difficult-to-return zone” since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in 2011. Over four years, Fujii filmed the rescue and displacement of this museum’s collection of archeological, historical, or cultural artifacts outside the zone, in order to avoid radioactive contamination and biological damage. He followed the actions, gestures, and reflections of the Futaba Museum curator Takamitsu Yoshino and his collaborators, charged with the preservation of these objects and the knowledge they contain about the territory they come from and the life of its community, struck by the disaster.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

3-Legged is an early video work by John Wood and Paul Harrison in which they appear with their legs tied together (as one would do in a three-legged race). Wood and Harrison stand together in a narrow alcove built into their studio, dressed similarly in grey long sleeve shirts and jeans. Facing a tennis ball machine that is almost completely out of view, with only the barrel of the machine protruding from the bottom of the frame, they hobble back and forth across the alcove attempting to avoid the tennis balls launching toward them, with varying degrees of success.

Installation (Installation)

The acronym “CFL” stands for an existing light standard (Compact Fluorescent Light) as well as a standard nutrient (Cognitive Fooding Laboratory). “CFL” is a mobile laboratory for growth of watercress shoots which contain high levels of anthocyanin – a natural pigment used by fighter pilots to increase their visual acuity at night in order to achieve better responses to light stimuli. In the work Celador, a taste of illusion (2007), the viewer is invited to consume the plants – a candy with the flavor of illusion.

Installation (Installation)

Descent into the Fungal is a two-channel video and a sculptural installation. The mushroom / sculptural element is site-specific and is grown from readymade mushroom blocks sold by mushroom farmers. They are given two weeks to mature and follow their natural cycle, bringing the natural element directly into the white cube.

Installation (Installation)

Executed in 2012, A World Undone revolves around a single, metaphorically rich substance, drawing on geological research into an ancient mineral, Zircon, unearthed in remote Western Australia. These rocks are now studied, like a time capsule, revealing intriguing clues about the state of the planet more than 4 billion years ago. Mangan procured a sample of the material and reduced it to a fine dust that he then filmed, in flux, with a high-speed video camera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In which he changes the rules of the game and all imitations are suddenly interrupted – Third episode of The Unmanned series and replicating the editing structure of “1834 – La Mémoire de Masse”, “The Outlawed” takes place in August 1953 on the island of Corfu, in Greece, at the Club Méditerranée resort where Alan Turing spent his last summer. On a sunny afternoon, the mathematician and inventor of the modern computer, subjected to hormonal treatment after being convicted for his homosexuality, embarks on a makeshift raft to study the morphogenesis of marine organisms. As he explores the coast, the raft progressively drifts away.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

From afar, Chimeric Antibodies by Angela Su may look like scientific drawings or botanical illustrations. Yet, upon closer look, sexual organs and imagined human and plant elements start becoming recognizable, and realistic. Each intricate, large-scale drawing indeed mixes human body parts, machines and other organic constructions as they become intertwined and inseparable.

Photography (Photography)

To the Cardinal Gods: Central Axial Consecration (Site 6) is from a 2017 series made by Ren Zi during a residency in the Arctic Circle. The work reflects upon the serious ecological issues we face today. During the residency Ren Zi was joined by other artists, scientists, architects and educators exploring the high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago in an interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavour to create work addressing such issues.

Installation (Installation)

Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr. Martin Hauser, Senior Insect Biosystematist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and longtime acquaintance of the artist. In Villa Dei Fiori, September to November, Zhao Renhui tracked and collected multiple insects within the everyday urban environment, either finding the insects dead or following them around for few days.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

False or True No. 3 by Li Gang consists of two components. The first is a machine designed by Li that uses a pump to collect moisture from the air.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon. Turning her head toward and away from the scene she says, “When I look for the lightning it never strikes, but when I look away it does.” And indeed, the lightning does seem to strike only when she turns away. Before filming Lightning , Paul Kos had done a fair amount of research on lightning, much of it conducted at the lightning research lab at the University of Colorado.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Columbus of Horticulture stems from Vvzela Kook’s ongoing research into the central and often-ignored role that botany played in the history of European imperialism. The colonial project, with its maritime explorations and voyages, was for the most part centred around the profits made from the discovery and exploitation of valuable plants (or from the kidnapping of the people needed to work on them). Vegetal products thus constituted a great part of the volume of the colonial economy, from spices to drugs, from textile fibres and dyes to tea, coffee, or cocoa.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Ningwasum , Subash Thebe Limbu explores Adivasi Futurism, a concept he has developed over a number of years, inspired by the writings of Octavia Butler, Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurism, and various Adivasi, Janajati, feminist, queer, and Dalit movements. The video features an Indigenous, astronaut time traveller from the future, whose Indigenous nation not only co-exists with other nations and allies but also contains advanced technology that would appear magical to those from the present. Filmed mostly in the Himalayas, including the Wasanglung region in Eastern Nepal believed to be the shamanic home of the Yakthung, Ningwasum weaves oral narratives, animations, language, storytelling, soundscapes, and electronic music.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness. Combining fictional and non-fictional content, the film slips an interpretative script based on the writings of the painter Vassily Chekrygin, and the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, within the context of an ancient pagan fertility ritual still practiced in the region. The film’s impressionistic plot revolves around the ecological dimensions of Russian Cosmism.

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.