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Luis Garciga
In Destinos Posibles Garciga performs a service in Havana, Cuba by offering strangers in the streets a “ride” to wherever they are going for free, in exchange he demands that the passengers address the question “what do they want from life?” A poignant video within the context of the limitations the Cubans have in terms of choices, desires, fantasies, and longing.
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Matti Braun
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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Goddy Leye
In Goddy Leye’s installation work The Beautiful Beast , a video is projected onto a gold-colored wooden box filled with sesame seeds. The sesame seeds look like pixels underneath the video, suggesting the texture of animation. The artist portrays a strange man who writhes on the ground like a beast against this ‘pixelated’ field.
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Fred Wilson
Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.
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Elisheva Biernoff
In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs. Although the imagery present in her work might seem nostalgic upon first encounter, Biernoff’s complex tableaux often reveal the artist’s skeptical look towards her subjects matters. They Were Here (2010), constitutes a clear example.
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Koki Tanaka
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site. Here, Tanaka has spread out various objects he collected throughout the city of Guangzhou. By fiddling with a window frame, water buckets, plastic bags, cardboard, soda bottles, and many other things, Tanaka creates fragile, temporary sculptures.
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Yoshua Okón
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city. Okón focuse d on Ciudad Juárez as a site for many ‘ maquiladoras ’ ( factories) and on its role within the global context. A mixed media and video installation , the work takes the form of a fictitious factory that produces canned laughter for sitcoms.
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Jordan Kantor
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Eclipse is a series of screenprints from Jordan Kantor’s larger vitrine installation that included reworkings of a single image of a small group viewing an eclipse through shielding cut-outs. Printed on a clear surface, the work plays with ideas of obstruction and viewing, connecting spectacular natural phenomena with contemporary art making.
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Taro Izumi
Steak House is a video representing two small puppets smearing the artist’s face with paint while he is sleeping. The work is based on modest means and reuses the classic theme of inanimate objects coming to life during the night while humans sleep. Is this the artist’s return to repressed feelings or fatigue provoked by the task?
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Jay Chung and Takeki Maeda
Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda remake a clip from the 1970s they found on the internet, and without really changing this archive material, displace it by imitating the staging and the acting with scrupulous precision. The slightest details are reproduced identically with great minutiae. The facial expressions are absurd, the prim attitude makes no sense.
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Jedediah Caesar
For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms. This technical rework allows for a clinical inspection of the material contents of the piece and the resulting slanted industrial monolith echoes minimalist sculpture, although with a different expressive texture. Indeed, Untitled can be seen as a contemporary pyramid with a painterly surface.
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Mohamed Bourouissa
The film called Temps Mort (Dead Time or Time Out) presents an exchange of short video footage assembled into one final edit. Remotely driven footage of daily life in prison, the banality of a sink, of a plant or a plate of pasta are offtset against scenes of life outside, in the streets of Paris, a night of love or seascapes. The dialogue between the inmate and the artist occurs by text messages and captures this exceptional situation of exchange, sharing et perhaps dependence.
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Kennedy Browne
Milton Friedman on the wonder of the free market pencil is an installation based on 42 blank pages. On the first page, one can read the original version in English of the liberal speech by Milton Friedman on “The Story of the pencil”. On the other pages, the same text has been translated into 41 different languages by using Google Translate, before coming back to English.
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Maaike Schoorel
This is one of the most important works Schoorel has made to date, a triptych that has as its subject matter a garden scene with what looks like a pond. One of her largest works, it seems highly suited to a Parisian collection where Monet’s Nympheas in the Orangerie represent the summit of treatments of such subjects. Typically for Schoorel, the painting is as much about absence as presence and examines the amount of information the viewer needs to construct meaning.
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Lieko Shiga
Lieko Shiga’s photographs appear like dreamscapes. They gain much of their visual power from the unusual interplay between light and color, and the way in which her motifs often seem to defy physical laws such as gravity. She often photographs nocturnal landscapes that are both enchanted and haunted, invoking an emotionally and psychologically complex, contemporary inner landscape, as well as the ancient relations between mysticism, spirituality, and folklore, specifically invoking Japanese traditions and beliefs, while at the same time transforming them.
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Matthew Darbyshire
Matthew Darbyshire has made several Furniture Islands, all of which employ different objects and different color values. Furniture Island No 3 looks like a shop display tastefully arranged in complementary colours. Darbyshire’s use of colour is like that of a designer or a painter.
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Pratchaya Phinthong
Phinthong made four photographs depicting fragments of meteorites of which the faces have been polished to reflect the sky. Lying on the ground, on what appears to be woodland ground, the form of the meteorite disappears and the reflections of the clouds seems like a piercing of the ground.
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Lieko Shiga
Lieko Shiga’s photographs appear like dreamscapes. They gain much of their visual power from the unusual interplay between light and color, and the way in which her motifs often seem to defy physical laws such as gravity. She often photographs nocturnal landscapes that are both enchanted and haunted, invoking an emotionally and psychologically complex, contemporary inner landscape, as well as the ancient relations between mysticism, spirituality, and folklore, specifically invoking Japanese traditions and beliefs, while at the same time transforming them.
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Mary Ann Aitken
Untitled (Diptych) by Mary Ann Aitken is a pair of paintings; one entirely abstract and the other a hybrid of representational and abstract elements. The left-side painting is a cacaphonous all over composition of brushstrokes layered in the artist’s signature primary colors. In the same color scheme, the right-side painting portrays a still life with an arrangement of flowers as its focal point, with marks and splatter spilling from the left-side composition into the right.
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Mahmoud Khaled
CAMARADERIE is a precursor to and a blueprint for Mahmoud Khaled’s later forays into queer aesthetics and modes of visual representation. This work is based on videos that the artist collected over the years through YouTube, of Egyptian professional bodybuilders exercising or rehearsing before posing in local and international competitions. The selection also includes videos of amateur young men from Cairo, who obsessively train and exhibit bodily transformations resulting from their admiration for those bodybuilders.
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Milena Bonilla
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions. Her drawings, sculptures, and photography are active investigations into our often-fallible notions of history. Stone Deaf (2009) is a direct intervention into Karl Marx’s gravesite, for which the artist literally traced the history of Marx’s grave.
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Miguel Calderon
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.
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Miljohn Ruperto
Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts. The video’s title figure, a Filipina actress, vaudeville dancer and singer who played racialized, peripheral roles in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, flits in and out of a montage of scenes. Ruperto digitally modified the 16mm film by blurring the background and all of the figures in each scene except for Cooper herself.
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Thomas Kilpper
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin. As a symbol of the past there could be none more powerful than this. By carving into its floor, Kilpper laid bare its history by making images of its occupants and political figures associated with that period of history.
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Michelle Handelman
In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present. Developed from a literary work, it deconstructs notions of narrative forms, styles and conventions. It is a hybrid piece, an example of the elasticity of the medium.
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Federico Herrero
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape. Rooted in Central American folklore, politics, and culture, his works often move beyond the canvas onto the wall or into the streets. In Á rbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican, 2009), a tree with cartoonlike creatures drawn in pen beside it emerges from a field of bright swaths of color.
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Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain
Letters of the Greek alphabet glisten on a black background. When a letter appears, there is a sound. Each letter corresponds to a star in the sky.
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Raimond Chaves and Mantilla Gilda
Many of Chaves and Gilda’s works use recycled cardboard. For Partituras, they arranged stacks of cardboard into long rectangles on the ground, which are visually analogous to fields of graphite in Chaves’s pencil drawings. While the blocks have a spare presence in space, they exist more full solidity within their borders, and the recycled nature of the cardboard adds some play into the clean minimalist rectangles and cubes.
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Vandy Rattana
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.
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Humberto Diaz
The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera. These are very successful in transcending the local into the global and/or universal. Memory, surveillance, and the routine and/or familiar, life in terms of both the political life and the social collective life shared by the constant reminder of the shut-off island psychological landscape.
Thomas Kilpper
- location: Stuttgart, Deutschland
- year born: 1956
- gender: male
- nationality: German
Miljohn Ruperto
- location: Los Angeles, California
- year born: 1973
- gender: male
- nationality: Filipino and Danish
- home town: Manila, Philippines
Lieko Shiga
Based on an instinctive feeling of unease with the convenience and automation of daily life, Lieko Shiga has developed an artistic approach that links questions about the nature of the photographic medium with fundamental questions about life and the means of expressing oneself...
Pratchaya Phinthong
Pratchaya Phintong’s works often arise from the confrontation between different social, economic, or geographical systems...
Audra Knutson
Based in San Francisco, Audra Knutson is known for her delicate and intricate works that depict elements from nature as well as scenes and objects from the everyday...
Jordan Kantor
Jordan Kantor’s artworks explore relationships between painting and photographic mediums...
Wong Hoy Cheong
- location: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- year born: 1960
- gender: male
- nationality: Malaysian
- home town: George Town, Malaysia
Milena Bonilla
Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, transit, and politics through everyday interventions...
Jao Chia-En
Chia-En Jao’s artwork approaches issues of identity, political regimes, coded sign systems, and his own experiences as a migrant...
Raimond Chaves and Mantilla Gilda
The collaborative works of Raimond Chaves and Mantilla Gilda often derive from a direct engagement with the world...
Goddy Leye
Born in 1965 in Mbouda (Cameroun), Goddy Leye was an artist, a teacher, a cultural activist and a curator based in Douala (Cameroun)...
Shilpa Gupta
- location: Mumbai, India
- year born: 1976
- gender: female
- nationality: Indian
- home town: Mumbai, India
Miguel Calderon
Miguel Calderón is a Mexican artist and writer...
Federico Herrero
- location: San Jose, Costa Rica
- year born: 1978
- gender: male
- nationality: Costa Rican
- home town: San Jose, Costa Rica
Eko Nugroho
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: Indonesian
- home town: Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Bjorn Copeland
- location: New York, New York
- gender: male
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain
Linguists, semiologists, and graphic designers by training, Angela Detanico and Raphaël Lain consider the use of graphic signs in society...
Jay Chung and Takeki Maeda
Jay Chung and Takeki Maeda’s practice is characterized by performance, which often involves weighty unsettling humour...
Moe Satt
Moe Satt is a Burmese visual and performance artist who uses his own body as a symbolic field for exploring self, identity, embodiment, and political resistance...
Harun Farocki
In the 1970s and 80s, the feature films Harun Farocki made contributed to theorizing essay-films, a cinema genre that juxtaposes archival images of different sources (news, film industry) with voiceover commentaries...
Mariana Castillo Deball
- location: Amsterdam & Berlin
- year born: 1975
- gender: female
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Mexico City, Mexico
Geoffrey Farmer
- location: Vancouver, British Columbia
- year born: 1967
- gender: male
- nationality: Canadian
- home town: Eagle Island, Canada
Heman Chong
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: Singaporean
- home town: Muar, Malaysia
Vandy Rattana
A self-taught photographer, Vandy Rattana has focused on challenging conditions in Cambodia, his home country, by documenting natural and manmade disasters...
Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa became known in the 2000s with a series of photographs on young people in the suburbs of Paris...
Matti Braun
Matti Braun’s work entails research and experienced wanderings during sojourns and journeys...
Humberto Diaz
Context is everything when it comes to the work of Humberto Diaz...