Arpedia

Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities. The drawing on wood, the popcorn mixture, and the title all manifest a bumpy fullness, a “more-is-more” conflation between supposedly eternal spirituality and everyday stuff. The work’s title points to a serious timelessness completely belied by the materials.

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Untitled (Construction)

Larry Bell

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s. Resembling a black-mirrored box, this recent iridescent piece produces an uncanny effect in which the interior planes seem to enclose a mysterious light. Although austere in form, Bell’s works are far from simple: he uses technology like a vacuum-coating process, to accurately control the different levels of opacity and transparency on the surface of his immaculate glass works.

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VFGY9

Larry Bell

Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight. The blocks resemble a stone carving, or slabs of wood shaped into a simple organic composition whose overall sheen is varied through a thin layer of aluminum vapor. Yet, the real material of Bell’s piece is actually light, formed within the viewer’s eye into masses as present as stone.

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White Series

Ha Tae-Bum

Ha Tae-Bum’s “White” series, started in 2008, begins with photographic images from the mainstream media depicting sites of conflict or crisis. The artist eliminates human presence, miscellaneous details, and all color from the images, then “rebuilds” them into quiet, achromatic models with thin white paper. Once complete, the models are photographed in a nearly identical composition as the original image.

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Ohne Titel

Matti Braun

Painting (Painting)

During a residency in 2009 at L’appartement 22 in Rabat, the artist traveled in Morocco and Senegal on the traces of the German sculptor Arno Breker. On this occasion he learned about batik, a fabric printing technique which originates not only from Indonesia but also from Senegal. It is also widespread in Africa.

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The six grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the year 502 002

Matthew Buckingham

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*. He elaborates a historiographic narrative of this place and switches it into the domain of science fiction by proposing a photograph of the Memorial as it should appear in 500 000 years. The effigies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt become unrecognizable.

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Le Fou Postcolonial Insane

Guy Woueté

The video installation Le Fou Postcolonial Insane by Guy Woueté is a series of five videos that examine the concept of insanity in the post-colonial Democratic Republic of Congo. The first three videos in the series were shot in a market place in Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Congo, where several psychoanalysts explore mental health in the context of the Congolese public sphere. Throughout the video series, Woueté links this public health examination to memories of colonial history.

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Ponderosa Pine IV

Rodney Graham

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience.

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Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1)

Cerith Wyn Evans

Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other. Gonzales-Torres’ original work was a personal allusion to his own partner’s increasingly debilitating HIV-related illness, which grapples with the existential tension of coexistence in the face of death. Cerith Wyn Evans’s piece takes the same concept, and adds a third clock, moving from the intimacy of a monogamous relationship to suggest a more expansive, or possibly polyamorous alternative.

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Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura

Rodney Graham

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-size pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewer aware of his or her own retinal experience.

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The Carpenter

Jeffry Mitchell

Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench. It is difficult to tell whether the work represents just any carpenter or Christ, the most famous member of the profession and the subject of innumerable parables and artworks. His stilted pose is not too Messianic; drips of ochre glaze render his handiwork and hammer equally soft.

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Man and Pet

Jeffry Mitchell

In Man and Pet (2012), two benign ceramic figures smile sweetly upward. The man wraps his small companion in a hug, his arms extending in round arcs all the way to his feet. Though the expressions are strikingly similar—suggestive of Rockwellian Americana—the pet seems somewhat more genial and familiarly fuzzy than its owner, whose saurian pupils lend his face a reptilian air that belies his warm grin.

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The Swimmer

Jeffry Mitchell

Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly. The stocky figure lets his arm drop to his side, towel dripping on the ground. Mitchell’s umber-toned glaze makes everything look earthy and wet, primordial and warm.

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..this was the plane - the variously large and accentuated, but always exactly determined plane - from which everything would be made…

Charlotte Moth

It is with the eye of a sculptor that Charlotte Moth records modernist architecture and its copies which she encounters during her trips and residences. Photographed in black and white, these architectures seem empty, out of time, and open to any interpretation. The artist creates a classification of her species of spaces, called the “Travelogue”, which is both artwork and tool since it allows her to ceaselessly generate new works.

From Green to Orange is a series of silver films immersed in a bath of dye and rust. While the perception of the subject is made difficult by the chemical reaction, vegetation becomes discernible at a closer look. Thu Van Tran interferes in the depths of a mystery, in the density of a hallucinated dream.

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Poetry Light Stool

Aki Sasamoto

Poetry Light Stool evokes the spirit of Fluxus, the intermedia movement that encouraged artmaking to be simple, fun, and address everyday life. Aki Sasamoto does just that with this ironic work that revolves around found objects, namely a four-legged wooden stool to which she attached four wheels. Coiling above is a goose-neck cable that rises up and culminates in a globe lamp.

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Waltz of the Machine Equestrians

UuDam Tran Nguyen

Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development. The single-channel video Waltz of the Machine Equestrians is a response to the overwhelming number of motorbikes and scooters overtaking the streets of Vietnam as small agrarian communities have been displaced by the construction of skyscrapers. The video shows 28 “equestrians” on motorbikes and scooters arrayed into a rainbow cavalcade held together by strings clipped onto brightly colored ponchos.

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The Absent Forms

Charlotte Moth

Charlotte Moth asked the art critic Francesco Pedraglio to write a text in response to the Man Ray film “Les Mystères du Château de Dé”, the decor of which was the Villa Noailles, built by Mallet-Stevens. Pedraglio’s text was then displaced since the artist attributed it to her own photographs taken on the rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris. A percussionist gave a audio response to the film during the opening at the Halle fu?r Kunst in Lüneburg, in 2010.

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COMPOSITION (EEGYVUDLUK DRINKING TEA)

Annie Pootoogook

Painting (Painting)

Annie Pootoogook created COMPOSITION (EEGYVUDLUK DRINKING TEA) at a pivotal moment in her career. The drawing depicts her father Eegyvudluk Pootoogook, an Inuk printmaker and stone sculptor who died in 2000. Kin and kinship figure prominently in the artist’s work: Annie was the daughter of Napachie Pootoogook, a skilled draftswoman, and the granddaughter of renowned artist Pitseolak Ashoona.

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Die

Yang Song

Yang Song’s Die features a clay mask of the artist himself slowly dissolving into water. Clay returns to clay. Clay originates from and returns to earth, becoming a metaphor for life.

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Flight Rehearsals

Kiran Subbaiah

Flight Rehearsals focuses on Subbaiah’s desire to fly as a means to highlight the relationship between human ambition and limitations of the physical world. The video presents philosophical explorations of the human desire to defy gravity and time. The minimalist set of a table highlights the intention and persistence of the protagonist rather than technological innovation.

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Two Eyes Two Mouth

Erika Verzutti

Painting (Painting)

Made in cast bronze, Two Eyes Two Mouths provokes a strong sense of fleshiness as if manipulated by the hand of the artist pushing her fingers into wet clay or plaster to create gouges that represent eyes, mouths and the female reproductive organ. Equally, there is a semblance of fruits—their succulence and fragility. While the work is sensual, the matte bronze surface refuses any expectation of softness.

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DADYAA: The Woodpeckers of Rotha

Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet

DADYAA: The Woodpeckers of Rotha by Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet illuminates a unique and seldom seen international perspective on indigenous cultures and contemporary social issues in the Nepali context. A small masterpiece, the work engages with one of the most pressing social issues in Nepal, mass migration and the dissolving of social fabric in rural areas. The story begins with an old couple, Atimaley and Devi, who live in a village in Jumla, in the highlands of Western Nepal.

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Puits

Guillaume Leblon

Puits (“Wells”) is a circle made ? ?of raw earth elements, at the scale of Leblon’s hands. In this work, Guillaume Leblon reclaims the tactility of clay, as a classical material of sculpture, which we can also see in his other works like Raum (2006), National Monument (2006), and Notes (2007).

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Reborn

Desiree Holman

Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct. The video features a group of women as they tenderly cradle lifelike baby dolls atop their rocking chairs. Although at first, the video might appear as a celebration of the maternal bond, the scene soon becomes eerie and unsettling as we see milk spilling out of the mothers’ mouths.

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The Tower of Babel: Independence of the country

Du Zhenjun

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

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A.P. (no.1)

Erin Shirreff