Photography (Photography)

Having a press card allowed Viktor Kochetov to photograph freely in public places, access to which was strictly regulated for amateurs. Seeking a way to transgress the reportage canon, the Kochetovs employed a method of taking images of large gatherings that emphasize the structure and “patterns” of the imaginary collective body. His 1978 photo of women sorting corn, titled Working women, builders of communism, are sorting corn… , is organized on this principle: the scarfs on the workers’ heads are perceived as an element of uniform, which creates a visual rhythm.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Now; 1992 is Ali Yass’s attempt to remake his childhood drawings, which were lost after he was forced to leave Iraq following the 2003 US occupation. The drawings are chimeric compositions of animated limbs, animal, human, and machine, that seem to hurl in all directions and mediums, unified as colorful figurations posed against blank backgrounds, rendering the curious characters suspended in time. This suspension materializes the artist’s view on violence and temporality, on which he has claimed: “I will not talk about war because it is from the past.

Photography (Photography)

Ukraine-Russia / Volleyball by Viktor and Sergiy Kochetov features a concrete monument of women volleyball players before the railway station in the village of Vodyanoye, Kharkiv region. It’s a typical Soviet sculptural composition, thousands of which were casted in the USSR during this period. Many can still be found all over post-Soviet territories, leading to regular debates on the destiny of this visual heritage in Ukraine.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Modelled and rendered in 3D, Moving Target Shadow Detection by Sung Tieu reconstructs the entire interior of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the site of the first-known instance of a supposed sonic attack, which collectively became known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. First reported by CIA staff in the Cuban capital in 2016, the syndrome includes a range of unexplained disorders ranging from nausea, fatigue and memory loss to brain injuries resembling concussions. In Tieu’s film, CCTV camera footage and images taken by a nano drone lead from the hotel’s lobby to an occupied hotel room, where the viewer is confronted with classified documents and news reportages of the recent Havana Syndrome attacks around the world.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Bath Time by Sharif Waked is a short video based on the tragi-comic outcome of the Israeli Blockade and the wars in Gaza. The story tells about how, after a war and the ongoing economic pressure, the Gaza Zoo lost several of their animals, and decided that they could paint a donkey so that it could pose as a zebra. The video imagines the donkey in the shower after a shift impersonating a zebra at the Gaza Zoo, as the hot water slowly washes its faux stripes away.

Installation (Installation)

Victory Through Air Power III (1943) by Wendy Cabrera Rubio is part of a series of quilted maps that reproduce different scenes from the eponymous film. Victory Through Air Power the film is an animated history of aviation produced by Walt Disney, and likely one of the first educational and documentary films using animation. Disney’s political agenda, specifically towards Latin America, has played an important role in Cabrera’s practice.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Pyre , an installation by Mexico City-based artist Joaquín Segura, addresses corruption, impunity, and the role that failed governments play in the normalization of violence. The work references mass disappearances at the hands of corrupt armed forces and paramilitary groups that have taken place in Mexico since the 1960s and significantly escalated over the last decade due to the War on Drugs. While the piece may be installed any number of ways, it is marked by the precision of its material content: 71 liters of gasoline, 23 used car tires, and 760 kilograms of wood.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.

Photography (Photography)

According to Viktor Kochetov, Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows is the first hand-colored print he ever made. Although this might well be a part of the artist’s mythology, this image perfectly demonstrates the methodology the Kochetovs used in their work. The snapshot itself was created during a journalistic assignment to document the meeting between a WWII veteran and school children in the Kharkiv region.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U. S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U. S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Youthfulness and gestures of play are central to Aziz Hazara’s practice. The artist uses these mechanisms as a lens to give pause to the behaviours of children as foreboding reflections of the enduring and all-pervasive effects of conflict and war. In the short video Rehearsal the artist documents two young Afghan boys imitating the guttural rattling of an automatic rifle, play-shooting in the field in front of them, and swivelling as if to suggest the gun is mounted.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

East of Ukraine became a place of armed conflict with Russia-backed separatists, who proclaimed parts of (the) Donetsk and Lughansk oblast (administrative region in Ukrainian) to be ‘People’s republics’. This region, in conflict since spring 2014, is where most of the charcoal is extracted. It is with this same coal that artist Nikita Kadan realizes this drawing in 2018, representing a field on which is juxtaposed a small photograph.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Game (Six Pieces) by Erbossyn Meldibekov is inspired by the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle and is composed of three colors (red, green and white) instead of six, referencing the colors of the Afghan flag. The work provides a revisionist interpretation of the legacy of The Great Game (the original 19th-century standoff between Russian and British empires over Afghanistan), and Afghanistan’s position as a centerpiece of the longstanding War on Terror, (the military campaign led by the United States and their allies against organizations and regimes they identified as terrorists after 9/11). Game (Six Pieces) mobilizes dark humor and irony to illustrate the complex and unstable relationships between communism, Islam, and American and British imperialism.

Photography (Photography)

Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam. After World War II, many Japanese soldiers who fought in Vietnam stayed in the country. They married Vietnamese women, had children, and lived in the country until Japan recalled them home.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. In black and white, Yao depicts the historical site as an eerie abandoned compound. Reflecting on the centenary of the HsinHai Revolution and the end of the Cold War, Yao questions the existence of an ever lasting dynasty or “transcendental Rules of History.” The soundtrack features a sole voice reverberating through loud speakers.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Masterpiece in the Water by Lu Pingyuan tells the story of an impatient collector who is killed by an artist. This murder becomes an artwork in of itself as the story within the story sheds light on the psychological anxieties faced by soldiers during war time, the family bond, and the paranormal. This playful, yet violent, story explores the amusing similarity between supernatural events and the creation of artistic ideas, while reflecting on the complex relationships that exist within the art world.

Installation (Installation)

The installation Hey Daddy, Hey Brother comprises a series of “Sukajan” jackets, which Tamura collected over a period of several years. They were a popular souvenir among the US military stations in postwar Japan during the Korean War (1950-1953). With origins rooted in military occupation of in the East Asia region, the jackets fuse the American “bomber,” or baseball jacket, with traditional hand-stitched designs of Japanese iconography, including dragons, tigers, Mt.

Photography (Photography)

Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945. Yoneda focuses both on the original Japanese features of the houses and on details that have been altered since the end of the occupation. The yet-to-be acknowledged history of the occupation of Taiwan and other East Asian countries by Japan during World War II is subtly disclosed in these pictures.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010. Numerous passive demonstrations against the government have led to numerous police repression of the protestors. The demonstration ‘Euromaïdan’ in 2013 is a perfect example.

Painting (Painting)

In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.

Textile (Textile)

In 2011, Mounira Al Solh began a series of drawings that documented her meetings and conversations with displaced Syrian refugees in Lebanon and various European countries. The oral histories she collected are very different from those told in administrative interviews or police interviews. My specialty was to make a peasants’ haircut, but they obliged me work till midnight often (2017) is part of a series of embroideries that speaks to how personal stories in this political context create collective history.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Clemens von Wedemeyer has imagined a trip back in time at Breitenau. Starting with events that happened there from 1933 to 1945, the German artist has composed three stories that reach the years of the women’s reformatory, in the 1970s, with a different protagonist for each era. A work that attempts to bring out the “pathology” of the site, as the artist tells Bert Rebhandl, and at the same time its “unforgettable” status as a black hole in the history of Germany, that sucked up innocent lives for almost a century.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier. Inspired by the artist’s father,a soldier in Algeria who then suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,the video depicts the delusions flowing from a mind ravaged by violence: a vision grown from the inside out. Like a mirage amidst a blank, desert expanse, specters are conjured as the inanimate comes to life.

Painting (Painting)

Madani works on a small scale and a large scale. This work is from a series of small paintings called Dazzle Men that take as their starting point the Dazzle patterns used by artists to camouflage ships during the First World War. Dazzle camouflage was designed to confuse the aim of U boat commanders.

Photography (Photography)

Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds series was made following a transformative encounter with the craters left over from 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped by U. S. forces during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1973. Dissatisfied with the level of documentation on the bombing and its repercussions, the artist began to study the historiography of his country. He travelled to the ten most severely bombed provinces, engaging villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters, and how they are lived with today.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s performance Illusion of Matter establishes a dream state through a composition of motifs that were drawn from the artist’s childhood memories. Ramírez-Figueroa recreated the components of the dream as giant props made out of polystyrene, and set in a colorful yellow and orange mise-en-scene. Throughout the performance, the props and set are activated and demolished by children under the artist’s direction.

Photography (Photography)

The Last Riot was originally created for Venice Biennale in 2007. In reference to Baroque Painting tradition and Chiaroscuro, this video installation imagines a dystopian virtual world where bodies removed from conscience and emotion exist weightlessly in a cyber paradigm. Light, shadow and digital manipulation slate a post-apocalyptic world where young teens enact conflict as ritual.