Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.
Each day, Yuji Agematsu smokes a pack of cigarettes and wanders the streets of New York City looking for trash. Needless to say, he finds it everywhere: bottle caps, gummed hair, translucent miscellany, sick feathers, hot pink plastics, unknown, and more. The varied bits are then constellated by the artist in cellophane cigarette wrappers—modest vitrines for his steady collecting habit.
For the work Wigan Pit-Brow Women: Intersections with the Caribbean (mobile) , Candice Lin studied English Victorian Arthur Munby’s racialized and masculinized drawings of working-class white female miners. Specifically, Lin’s work critically addresses Munby’s observations about the laborers’ femininity that was more concerned with the modesty of the women, than that they toiled in life-threatening situations. “Pit brow women” or “pit brow lasses” were female surface laborers at British collieries.
In Summer Camp , Lola Gonzàlez filmed a group of friends at the home of her parents in the department of Charente (France) in the process of transforming the house into a training camp. They are doing exercises with the furniture as if they were training to fight against something yet to happen. Gonzàlez ’s films persistently evoke the same fear of an external threat, one which is never explained but which can be placed in relation with the current political situation and social tension.
There is no there by Gabriella and Silvana Mangano is a black and white looped video with sound, in conjunction with a live performance. The work is inspired by the Blue Blouse, a political propaganda theater movement which spread across the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. More specifically, the work takes the form of ‘Living Newspapers’, which were performances based on topical news events.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Sara Cwynar’s composite photographs of found objects and images court feelings of time passing. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she produces intricate tableaux that draw from magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogs. Cwynar is interested in how design and popular images work on our psyches, in how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness.
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves. Elements used in various stages of photographic processes (color filters, glassine, and prints themselves) are integrated back into the artwork either as part of the sculpture or as collage elements that are later added to the print. In some of the works, Maisel cuts into the prints themselves.
Her 2015 work Orión is a black flag-like cloth with glow-in-the-dark symbols embroidered in the shape of the constellation. In the place of stars, Martínez has substituted the logos of international corporations and entities that use stars as their symbol; celestial navigation commanded by the logic of international corporations. Easily spotted is the smiling face of the Carl’s Jr. / Hardee’s logo, the three-pronged Mercedes-Benz emblem, Walmart’s six-pointed asterisk, and the starry cluster of the Subaru shield.
The video animation Falling Head 2 , hand-painted by Diego Marcon in 2015, consists of a close-up of a head caught on the threshold between sleep and wakefulness or maybe from wakefulness to sleep. The film is projected as a ten-second loop where the first and last frames coincide. Working mainly in video and film, Marcon is familiar with the consequences of eyestrain.
Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015. The sculpture, employing the technique of traditional Atzompa pottery originating from Oaxaca, Mexico, is an examination of the way in which archaeological heritage is remembered in the earthenware made by Atzompa potters today. Accompanied by the publication ‘Ixiptla Vol.
Tsumeb Fragments was produced for the exhibition at Kadist, “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine” in 2015. In Spring 2015, Nkanga travelled to Namibia, making her way along an almost entirely defunct railway line from Swakopmund to Tsumeb. The artist was intent on reaching The Green Hill in Tsumeb, an area renowned for its minerals, crystals and copper deposits.
Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle. Her careful meditations in fabric reflect Plata’s ongoing interest in the relationship between people and their environments, in fragility, systems, and destruction.
Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang is a series of landscapes in the Xiaoxiang region in the modern day Hunan Province, China, and was a popular subject of poems, drawings and paintings during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Liang follows tradition by interpreting the historical subjects by classical Chinese artists including Dong Yuan (934–962 AD), Mu Xi (died in 1281 AD), Wen Weiming (1470–1559 AD). This reinterpretation represents the meeting point of the Xiang River and the Dongting Lake.
HFT The Gardner by Suzanne Treister is a large-scale project that comprises drawings and computer works by fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg. HFT is an algorithmic High-Frequency Trader based in London, who experiences a hallucinogenic episode that triggers a journey into the exploration of psychoactive plants. In a nerd-like discovery of Discovering Hebrew, numerology, botany, and shamanic divination and healing, HFT becomes an ‘outsider artist’ whose works are collected by oligarchs, bankers, and museums, much like in the mainstream art world.
Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting, and Ticket could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art.
Michelle Handelman’s video work Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes its inspiration from Musidora, a famous French silent film actress, and a character she played called Irma Vep, from the film Les Vampires (1915), directed by Louis Feuillade. The work uses these characters as metaphors to highlight the lives of those who live in the shadows—or feel like they do—and the anxiety they experience as marginalized figures. Musidora was a 20th-century feminist, who was known not only for acting in movies, but also for directing her own plays and films, and having secret affairs with Colette and other famous people of the time.
Particularly shaped by his own youth in the 1990s, his recent works have incorporated things like a marijuana leaf, a dragon-emblazoned chain wallet, metal grommets, and the ubiquitous (in the 90s) Stussy symbol. Reflecting and recouping elements from American youth culture, Reini’s works question how we package, mark, and express ourselves through manufactured symbols of identity. Reini has also used images of Mickey Mouse—Disney’s anthropomorphic icon—in numerous works, including in this pair of works, The More You Want…, …The Less You Get .
The depiction of the female figure in the sculptures remains an economic, canny composition of geometric abstractions in a Modernist spirit. Yet rather than provide us with the layers of information found in her wall reliefs, the sculptures exclusively frame space. In place of the tactile surfaces that can be carved into and drawn on, the sculptures’ outlines provide multiple perspectives on to their surroundings, and additionally unto themselves.
This still life falls apart, or rather floats apart as the composition is proved unstable and constantly morphing. An impossible attempt at achieving a fixed state, some objects remain buoyant and some objects sink, constantly tilting the overall scale and arrangement. Properties of weight, mass and shape have their own will but a hand appears in the scene, pushing back on these mysterious forces.
Bady Dalloul’s Scrapbook is a 48 minute video beginning from his birth, tracing major global events of the 20 th century, including the beginning and current Occupation and colonization of Palestine, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, assassination of family members and the Syrian diaspora. A voice over follows these moments as the camera traces over the collage that includes text; photos; postcards; origami birds; and inserted videos of world leaders. The film is a letter to the viewer, imploring the witnessing of what we assume, but cannot know, to be the artist speaking.
Rond de Jambe by Aimée Zito Lema is a series formed by two works: a three-channel video installation and a live performance. Each component in this project approaches the same subject matter through a different medium in order to investigate politics as they are made manifest in and through the body. Using archival footage of protests of the Stopera building project in Amsterdam as a starting point, artist Aimée Zito Lema worked with dancers to translate the protest movements into a choreography.
This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.
For 7 Materials , Tao Hui films seven scenes selected from the countless scenarios in his notebooks, including a group of ethnic minority girls in a spoil pit in the rain, a reporter interviewing a corpse, and a deity sailing on the river. Due to the lack of internal logical order, these one-minute video “materials” are not played in a fixed sequence but randomly. For Tao Hui, to film his diary is to adorn and embellish his memories before evoking and reviving their spirits.
In Over There, Bontaro Dokuyama conducted a series of workshops with various people who had been forced to relocate in temporary housing after the Fukushima accident. Participants in the workshop made masks from local newspaper cuttings, included in the installation as well as videos showing these different persons wearing their masks, pointing in the direction of their hometowns, where they can no longer return. Over There portrays those displaced from Fukushima due to the 2011 nuclear disaster, underlining the subjectivity of each person in opposition to the way they are usually considered within the Japanese society or by the media, calling them “victims from the disaster.”
Entre Chien et Loup is an installation incorporating a variety of media: rubber, discs, feathers and confetti that the artist weaves, sews and glues together. Influenced by Mike Kelley’s Memory Ware series, the artist creates an object-memory from found materials. The found objects used recall the artist’s mother – it is somehow her portrait, her cape-.
Marché Salomon by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz depicts two meat vendors, a young man and woman, chatting in Marché Salomon, a busy Port-au-Prince market. Amongst the surrounding bustle, the two have an unsentimental discussion about the mystical qualities of common products sold at the market, wondering whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats. Their musings weave together the cosmic and the mundane, with the work of butchering a goat and the characters of the market serving as existential metaphors for the universe, time travel, ghosts, and death.
The artist duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva traveled to Japan for a month to make a series of short 16mm films, often shot in slow-motion. This film, shown in continuous loop, has a run-time of just under 3 minutes, and is presented without sound. It captures a traditional Shisa (combination of a dog and lion from Okinawan mythology) animated by an invisible person.
Lifting Barbells is a video by Kim Heecheon that narrates his letters in Spanish to his girlfriend in Argentina, discussing his feelings after his father died in a bicycling accident. Using the data recorded on his father’s smartwatch, Kim’s video traces digital footage of his father’s route on Google Maps, the location of the accident, and his cardiographic data as he was dying. The video contrasts Kim’s emotional letters with the clinicality of the quantitative data recordings.
Mojtaba was painted in 2015 as a part of the Bedroom Posters series. Bedroom Posters feature the same beautiful boys who could well be out of a set of fashion editorials. Mojtaba, Manuel, Titus, and a boy found on Tumblr are on the verge of becoming men, yet are narcissistic adolescents prone to fall into the trap of ideological extremes.
Photographer and filmmaker Joanna Piotrowska explores issues such as the female condition, family dynamics, and post-Soviet Poland, through black and white images that depict the quotidian...
Kaoru Arima experiments with painting in order to discover new expressive forms...
With a practice deeply engaged with feminism and LGBT rights issues, siren eun young jung reveals the subversive power of traditional culture, one unknown in the Korean modernization period, and provides unique perspectives and documentation of important communities...
Colombian artist Maria Fernanda Plata found herself drawn to fabric as a material with conceptual implications while on a residency in Vietnam...
Throughout her paintings, sculptures, and videos, Maria Taniguchi unpacks knowledge and experience—connecting material culture, technology, and natural evolution—and investigates space and time, along with social and historical contexts...
Kim Heecheon’s complex video installations are deeply rooted in his experiences, opening possibilities for a dual visual discourse that combines personal feelings, informed by his immediate surroundings, in a digitized global environment...
Margo Wolowiec uses her multidisciplinary practice to examine space, material versus conceptual practices, and affective responses...
The artist, writer, and researcher Ho Rui An probes histories of globalization and governance, performing a detournement of dominant semiotic systems across text, film, installation, and lecture...
Meiro Koizumi is a Japanese video and performing artist, born in 1976...
Aki Kondo utilizes animation, video, and mixed media to explore such varied topics as intimacy, loss, and the human body...
Yuji Agematsu is an artist who works across various media, including sound, photography, and the arrangements of objects—not exactly sculpture...
The work of Hao Liang reimagines and explores the sublime of contemporary ecological landscapes...
biarritzzz is a Brazilian artist who inserts epistemological conversations through mass communication, specifically on and from the internet...
Birender Kumar Yadav is a multi-disciplinary artist who experiments with various media including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, etching, found and man-made objects, as well as live documentary...
Visual artist and performer, Otobong Nkanga’s (b...
Sarah Lai Cheuk Wah is best known for her paintings of common objects and urban landscapes, which she renders realistically in great detail...
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s practice engages with the cultural hegemonies that form the basis for the evolution of contemporary society...
Though born in Nigeria, artist Toyin Ojih Odutola was raised largely in the United States, living in Alabama, California, and now New York...
Edie Fake’s paintings start as self-portraits, referencing elements of the trans and non-binary body through pattern, color and architectural metaphor...
Cwyner is both related to a photo conceptual tradition of photography from Vancouver as well as to a new school of photography working with digital manipulation, scanners, stock photography and the notion of photography after image making, both of which are represented in the Kadist collection via artists such as Arabella Campbell, Ron Terada, Tim Lee, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace from Vancouver and artists such as Chris Wiley, Lucas Blalock, Erin Shirreff or John Houck, who recently have explored the idea of photography beyond image making....
Since the beginning of his career, Minamikawa Shimon has made work that deviates from conventional painting and other formats...
In the work of American artist Zach Reini, elements of recent pop culture mix with art historical references to create works tinged with playfulness and darkness...
Bontaro Dokuyama became an artist after the triple disaster of March 2011 that irrevocably damaged his hometown of Fukushima, “sensing that everything that had been taught to him was a lie.” Previously working as an architect, he then started his artistic practice under a new name in order to underline the beginning of this new life...
Ibro Hasanovic is a film, video, photographic and installation artist currently based in Brussels, Belgium, concerned largely with the powers of individual and collective memory...
Born in Milan, Italian-Libyan Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and researcher...
Bady Dalloul cunningly employs collage across various media: texts, drawings, video, and objects to produce powerful works commenting on the past and the present...