Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ghost Games , follows the enigmatic dance of crabs “steered” by a flashlight in the night of darkness of a South American beach. The video produces a surreal impression, typical of Sala’s work, with no plot in the classical sense, no story being told. Like in Blindfold (2002), in which a sunrise is reflected in urban billboards, and Time After Time (2001), in which the figure of a horse emerges from darkness lit by the headlights of an automobile, Sala likes to explore the phenomenon of light and its effects; In Ghost Games , he uses the threatening reflection of the flash light through the darkness of the beach.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Perpetual Motion (2005) the seemingly erratic flight of the bright orange Monarch butterfly—filmed in its winter habitat of Michoacán, Mexico—is intensified by the artist’s editing in which frames are randomly dropped and the film is sped up. As a result, the butterflies become hyper-real and animated in appearance. The manipulated footage is presented in a video wall of nine monitors, where the butterflies flit from screen to screen, in a room bathed in vivid orange light.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Suspension a young man is hanging in the air, falling, or perhaps drifting through time and space. There is no special or definite way to understand it. And it is in this construction where Morales envisions the world as an endless void, or timeless gravity, that we fall deeper and deeper into our own humanity.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

American Artist is engaged in a multiyear research project that traces and teases various interconnections between the life and work of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (b. 1947, Pasadena, CA); the evolution of rocketry and sci-fi in Los Angeles; and the post-war movement of African-diasporic families from the Southern to the Western United States, a phenomenon known as the Second Great Migration. Using a historical materialist frame of study, American Artist’s undertaking asks of the region and the frequency of Black people practicing art and science in Altadena, an enclave northeast of Los Angeles.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A short video about Tate Modern by Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa depicts just two shots, both featuring the artist. The first scene portrays Wolukau-Wanambwa in a close-up frontal view, dressed in black, standing silently against a worn white wall. Through subtitles, the artist recounts her experience of participating in a workshop on the top floor of the museum.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Stone Deaf (Video)

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)

Wang Xu’s video Summer Wind Before Rain was made during his residency last summer at Storm King, where he lived in a hut made of wood and gathered clay from the nearby forest. During his residency, he interacted only with the sculpture park’s gardener. In the eleven-minute video, we see the gardener ride a lawn mower the size of a golf cart, and we observe the artist slowly make a large, realistic bust of the gardener, bit by bit and layer of clay by layer.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. Conversations with a Tropical Vulture is an experimental narrative video, co-directed by both artists, and blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all-too-real life approach, which creates and inspires a counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality. The video, shot on location in Acapulco, utilizes a “lo-fi” aesthetic and playful use of non-professional actors.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As the video Datamosh begins to play, Yung Jake emerges out of a colorful, smoke-like background and breaks into rap. Malfunctioning green screens and pixelated digital mash-ups bleed into each other in a parody of the music video trope and specifically of the trend of ‘datamoshing’—a digital technique commonly used across this genre. The song’s lyrics distinctly borrow from the lexicon of rap, combining mentions of clubs, money and fame, with self-referential and humorous lines that literally describe the way in which the artist subverts the medium.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Rubber Man continues exploring issues related to land use, also noticeable in his Untitled series (2011). More specifically, Rubber Man addresses the French colonial legacy of land use for the exploitation of rubber –today exploited by multiple forces such as individuals, governments, multinationals and international banks– and its effects on Cambodia’s indigenous forests and culture today. The video takes place in Ratanakiri, an area in northeastern Cambodia increasingly known in local and international news for land grabs and protests, and where the artist frequently traveled to over two years.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial. Tierra depicts the artist standing naked in a lush field that a bulldozer has broken up. The video references an incident in which innocent Guatemalans were brutally murdered and buried in a mass grave.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

During Summer 2011, few months after the nuclear accident, performance artist Kota Takeuchi got a job at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and kept a blog about the labour conditions of clean-up workers. In 2012, he exhibited an ‘anonymous’ video taken from the 24-hour live feed on TEPCO’s website that monitored the clean-up activities. The video, which then went viral in Japan and became known as the “Finger Pointing Worker”, captured someone in a protective suit, entering the frame and pointing his finger at the video surveillance installed by TEPCO on the nuclear plant site.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement. ” Filmed at display homes in the suburbs of Manchester in the United Kingdom, the video features real-estate agents clad in bright-red blazers enthusiastically describing features of the ‘dream home’ as they walk through different rooms. A couple of additional elements, a couch and neutral soft carpet, recreate the domestic setting and immerse the viewer in the unfolding scenes.

Photography (Photography)

Diversionist is part of the Cosplayers Series from 2004. In Cosplayers Cao Fei depicts the popularity among Asian youths of “cosplay” in which daily life is merged with images of video games and popular films. For many, this virtual reality is an outlet to “transcend” the paradox of a developing society in which the pleasures of consumption and depression of alienation go hand-in-hand.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eamon Ore-Giron’s new commissioned video project Bite Work, is an experimental genre breaking video that is part-performance, part-conceptual and part-comical addressing issues of mediation, surveillance and trust. The main characters in the video wear traditional dance masks of “La Chonguinada” rituals from Peru and attempt to dance while being bitten by trained attacked dogs. Through this act, the dogs simultaneously become sculptural obstacles and dancers.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Time is a 24-hour video in which the artist rests, hangs and clings onto the minute hand of a large clock, 4 x 4 meters in diameter, arduously counting out a full 24-hour cycle so that the video becomes a functional time-keeping device. In standing in for and becoming time, Mitchell ultimately examines its essence as it passes before her. Dressed in blue work overalls, Mitchell appears like a maintenance or quality control worker, making sure every moment is up to muster.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique. His ultimate goal is to reveal the ways in which social image is constructed and to cast doubt on the ephemeral vision of a middle-class utopia offered by mass media.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Letter I Never Wrote is one of the most powerful series of Jinoos Taghizadeh. This is a series of stamps reflecting on variety of issues that the artist finds them important and critical to be discussed and seen by the public, which is also hidden and not talked enough by the Iranian government. From extremely political issues such as the chain murderers of intellectuals and politicians in Iran to environmental changes and archeological decadence of historical heritage, Taghizadeh is using one of the most popular form of circulation for information and communication to put these issues on top of them.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Letter I Never Wrote is one of the most powerful series of Jinoos Taghizadeh. This is a series of stamps reflecting on variety of issues that the artist finds them important and critical to be discussed and seen by the public, which is also hidden and not talked enough by the Iranian government. From extremely political issues such as the chain murderers of intellectuals and politicians in Iran to environmental changes and archeological decadence of historical heritage, Taghizadeh is using one of the most popular form of circulation for information and communication to put these issues on top of them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization. The images show the diversity of forms of life on earth. These forms are associated with texts that relay a form of propaganda.

Photography (Photography)

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .