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.
Home (good infinity, bad infinity) by Lêna Bùi sheds light on the experiences of those who live along, and on, the waterways of Saigon, Vietnam and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Vietnam is a tropical country of major sand extraction; the UAE a desert country of major land reclamation. Scenes of the Saigon river being heavily eroded due to industrial machines mining sand for construction of skyscrapers are interspersed with images of concrete jungles, and aerial views of Saigon and Sharjah varying in scale and style.
The film Sometimes It Was Beautiful by Christian Nyampeta poetically addresses the systemic conditions leading and emerging from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which had lasting and profound effects on Rwanda and neighbouring countries like Congo. The divergent opinions of the characters, as well as suggestive gestures, settings, and marks inscribed in the landscape highlight the different approaches in addressing the slow violence linked to the enduring impact of colonialism and imperialism, the pursuit of knowledge, and the conservation of heritage, culture, and object repatriation. Structured into six chapters, the film imagines a meeting between improbable friends and interlaces dialogues, with choreography of dancers, places and objects.
Butter Mountain is part of an ongoing series of works that combines a sense of painterly mass and substance with sculptural language to examine the synergy between a topographical landscape and a landscape of the human condition. The work intentionally alludes to the materiality of the human body and of the land. A stool has been consciously repurposed as a “support”, that by its nature and identity provides evidence of human presence.
Silhouette in the Graveyard is part of a suite of animated videos by Chitra Ganesh titled The Scorpion Gesture . All five videos incorporate figures and themes from Buddhist mythology and dialogue directly with artworks from the Rubin Museum, for which the videos were originally produced.? The central figure of Silhouette in the Graveyard is Maitreya, the Future Buddha, whose arrival on Earth was prophesied to usher in a new age.
Abel Rodríguez’s precise, botanical illustrations are drawn from memory and knowledge acquired by oral traditions. They are the visions of someone who sees the potential of plants as food, material for dwellings and clothing, and for use in sacred rites. Terraza Alta V is part of a series of drawings that track the changing appearance and life of an area identified as Terraza Alta.
Gated Commune , a video by Camel Collective, is a critique of the complex, and often obtuse, language used to describe sustainable development projects. To construct a future scenario in the imagination of the viewers, a voiceover narrates two perspectives of futuristic practices in architecture and social behaviors: neo-primitives on one hand, who value organic materials and design based on geometric forms, and futurists on the other hand, who value organic forms and computer design. In this constructed universe, both perspectives lead to societal structures that malfunction due to issues with their design, which are not in line with their users’ needs.
Megan and Hazel Sue at Creekmore House by Carolyn Drake is from a series of works titled Knit Club . For this project, Drake collaborated with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi who loosely call themselves “Knit Club”. The subject matter of this photograph centers on the relationship between the girl and doll in the painting, and the woman and girl in the photograph.
Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family.
The archival images used by Frida Orupabo in her collages trace stereotyped representations of race, gender, sexuality and violence. Her works are developed through a process of decontextualization of such imagery, layering and recomposing, playing with new narratives. In this work she focuses on memory and what might be triggered in the viewer.
Monteverdi Ici – Deeply, Feeling Filling the World by Laure Prouvost is a tapestry that references a video by the artist entitled Monteverdi Ici (2018). Both artworks feature a woman’s naked body as a central visual element. In the video, the woman’s body is outdoors, with her back to the camera, moving her arms gently through the surrounding flowers.
Something Other Than What You Are by Camel Collective is formed by two works: a multi-channel video installation with controlled lighting, and a single-channel version with stereo sound. In both works, the 36 minute video depicts a narrative taking place outside of a live theater performance in the form of monologues that moves between the production and technical crew. There is a set of three different characters—a lighting technician, a lighting designer, and a professor all played by the same actress who share in their personal experiences and attitudes the precariousness of their work, the problems and myths of collaboration, and the obsolescence of theatrical technology.
Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion. The plane appears as an anthropomorphized figure: lying on the sands of the beach without its wings, it resembles a sculptural torso that has lost all its limbs, with cables coming out of its body appearing as internal organs. These injuries remind the viewer of the danger inherent in these artifacts, and the potential for both heroism and death implicit in flying them to far-away territories.
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.
The video Tell me everything you saw, and what you think it means by Sin Wai Kin is from a performance series titled A View from Elsewhere. Wearing exquisite hair and makeup and a pair of silicone breasts under shimmering diamanté lingerie, Sin Wai Kin’s former persona, Victoria Sin, assumes an alluring, inviting, and intimidating pose. Through subtle and slow movements, this atemporal courtesan appears as a living deity, whose presence embodies codes of representation found in brothels from the turn of the century, burlesque, and Beaux Arts female nude painting.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Mullican’s Stick Figure Drawings depict characters reduced to their most basic graphic representation. Glen is a simple silhouette, genderless and inspired by a found photo of a crime scene, in whom we recognize the generic sign of the universal symbol of a self-portrait. Mullican continually projects himself, sometimes physically, into the silhouette that he has created, allowing the artist to pass from one reality to another.
Untitled (Ring) consists of two prominent elements contained in water filled glass sphere. The first, Phinthong’s wife’s ring, cast in recycled gold, collected from damaged electronic devices during Thailand’s great flood in late 2011. It is intended to be a reminder of when the couple consoled one another amid the flooding disaster.
Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
View of Harbor by Jon Rafman mines the latent cultural imaginary surrounding climate change and society’s collective death drive. In contrast with other recent works that aim to use VR or AR to visualize the impact of climate change, Rafman’s work instead presents the rising sea as an almost anthropomorphized foe, within which strange human-like bodies lurk as the viewer is swept into a kind of watery hellscape. This strong element of fantasy leads the viewer to wonder what type of wish fulfillment is at play—what desire for the museum to be inundated, for the existing social order to be washed away by the deluge?
The Korean title for U: Repair the cowshed after losing the cow = Too late is —a famous Korean proverb meaning “you are doing something when you are already late to do it”. This work by Seulgi Lee is a nubi (traditional Korean quilt) blanket project that shows Korean proverbs expressed as geometric shapes. Nubi blankets were used as single sheet summer blankets in Korean households until the 1980s.
Hopf’s works reference the effects that developments in economics and technology have had on our bodily and mental composition. With her series Laptop Men she presents a humorous reading of the way we interact with computers, and the growing tendency to perceive them as part of our bodies. This takes place against a backdrop of an increasing dependence on implants and prostheses among the human species.
Formed from pillowcases, each of which contains an embroidered calligraphic text as well as drawings depicting dreams, Ali Eyal’s Painting Size 80 x 60 cm is part of a long-term project which records and indexes such dreams. “I rode on my cousin’s back, laughing until the heaviness of my body weighed his to the floor. At the time I was with him on their large farm that he always dreamed of visiting.
Bariga Nights is a photographic series set in the Bariga neighborhood in Lagos (Nigeria). This district has the reputation as home to some of the most disenfranchised of an estimated 21 million inhabitants of Lagos. After several years of being on the road across Africa, Europe and North America, Okereke decided to stay in Lagos in 2016.
Jackie and Chloe by Carolyn Drake is from a series of works titled Knit Club . For this project, Drake collaborated with an enigmatic group of women in Mississippi who loosely call themselves “Knit Club”. There is a strangeness to this photograph; details of facial identity are withheld.
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.
Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
The virtual reality work Aquaphobia by Jakob Kudsk Steensen examines it’s title subject matter – the fear of water. Inspired by psychology studies used to treat aquaphobia, the work employs VR technology to merge imagery of past and future geological landscapes, as well as external ecosystems with internal psychoscapes. Steensen mobilizes the visual exploration of the fear of water to transform viewer’s perceptions on water-related climate change, such as rising water levels.
The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.
De sino à sina (From Bell to Fate) is a six-channel sound installation by Carla Zaccagnini exploring the relationship between modern Brazil and its colonial past. The sound installation is made from a recording of the bell at Capela de Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Homens Brancos, a Baroque-style chapel that is one of the first chapels in Ouro Preto (previously Vila Rica) in the region of Minas Gerais. The work references the execution of José da Silva Xavier (1746-1792), also known as “Tiradentes”.
The photographic series Wrapped Future II by Lim Sokchanlina brings fences used on construction sites to enclose the surrounding areas, to different locations, lakes, valleys and forests; and places them at the center of works to obscure the beautiful Cambodian landscape. The inharmonious landscape is gradually captivated by the exquisite balance between inorganic material and mystical background. The photos were taken in places that in recent years have become targets of large-scale exploitation under a massive globalization of capital and other political interests.
El mar y sus múltiples afluentes (The Sea and its Multiple Tributaries) builds on the concept of trafficking that Adriana Bustos has been exploring over the last decade. The piece represents an apocryphal river and illustrates the routes of the slave trade between the coasts of Africa, Europe, and South America, departing from the Congo River (once called Zaira), and arriving at Río de la Plata, the main river in Buenos Aires that divides Argentina from Uruguay. The work collapses time and space, placing the coasts of colonial empires across the colonies where slaves were taken.
On January 7th, 2020, artist D’Angelo Lovell Williams was diagnosed with HIV. Only a handful of chosen family members knew up until the public announcement that coincided with the release of this body of work. According to the artist, “discovery” is key to this group of large photographs.
Lim Sokchanlina, nicknamed ‘Lina’, works across documentary and conceptual practices with photography, video, installation, and performance; particularly drawn to the use and function of space where urban communities meet rural attitudes...
Abraham Onoriode Oghobase’s artistic practice explores identity in relation to socio-economic and historic geographies...
Spanning printmaking, sculpture, and video, Chitra Ganesh’s work draws from broad-ranging material and historic reference points, including surrealism, expressionism, Hindu, Greek and Buddhist iconographies, South Asian pictorial traditions, 19th-century European portraiture and fairy tales, comic books, song lyrics, science fiction, Bollywood posters, news and media images...
Nontawat Numbenchapol is primarily known as a film director and television screenwriter, widely recognized for his documentary work...
Part of the Indigenous Tamsaling community in Nepal, Subas Tamang comes from a family of traditional stone carvers...
Camel Collective comprises the artists Carla Herrera-Prats (Mexican, photographer and conceptual artist) and Anthony Graves (American, painter), who began working together in 2005 during a fellowship at the Whitney Independent Program...
Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects that involve travel and collaboration...
Jakob Kudsk Steensen employs a formally rigorous approach to creating multi-layered VR environments that engage with the contemporary issue of extinction...
Laure Prouvost is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for her films and immersive large-scale multi-media installations, in which she plays with words and their meanings in non-linear ways...
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...
Jeamin Cha’s questions exist in the gyre between individual and social environment, stepping over conspicuous strands of relation between the two in favor of cultivating characters that dwell in the night, under-noticed or otherwise surplus figures outside of mainstream societal representation...
Wingyee Wu is an NYU and Central Saint Martins educated filmmaker, as well as a businesswoman with roots in the Hong Kong diaspora, currently living and working in Stockholm...
Alex Lukas’s practice is much akin to that of the researcher, historian or collector of folklore, exploring exceptional sites in the American landscape...
Indira Allegra uses text and textile production—a combined material they designate as a “text/ile”—to embody unseen forces like memory, haunting, grief, and emotions born from trauma...
Mohamed Bourouissa became known in the 2000s with a series of photographs on young people in the suburbs of Paris...
A central element of Frida Orupabo’s practice is her digital archive, storing images from both the media and from her personal life on her Instagram account, later transforming them into analogue collages...
Trained in large-scale painting, Nikita Kadan’s artistic practice encompasses installation, graphics, painting, wall drawing, and urban postering, sometimes in collaboration with architects, human rights activists, and sociologists...
Adriana Bustos creates a narrative discourse through installation, video, photography and drawing, in which her reflections on prevailing social, political or religious oppression appear in non-linear interpretations of history...
Cauleen Smith is an artist and filmmaker whose approach has been shaped by the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film — including structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction...
Emeka Okereke is a Nigerian visual artist and writer who lives and works between Lagos and Berlin, moving from one to the other on a frequent basis...
Vuth Lyno’s artistic practice operates at a crucial intersection of contemporary Khmer culture...
Artist Ali Eyal’s practice aims to explore the complex relationship between community and politics using different media such as video, installation, photography, and painting...
Through performance, moving image, writing, and print, artist Sin Wai Kin (formerly known as Victoria Sin) uses speculative fiction to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification...
Seulgi Lee’s artistic references range from anthropological materials, archetypical linguistic elements, vernacular culture, handcrafts tradition, to the graphic culture of animistic belief found in diverse locals around the world...
Zhang Zhenyu’s practice is at once conceptual and material, best-known for his dust paintings series, repurposing found matter, transforming waste dust into a highly polished image, his work is a reflection upon the trace elements of urbanization and development...
Liu Yu has developed a multifaceted artistic practice that takes field documentation as its point of departure...
Christian Nyampeta’s works investigate how individuals and communities negotiate forms of socially-organized violence...