Installation (Installation)

The installation Breathspace by Eduardo Navarro encompasses all the content presented at the artist’s first solo exhibition, of the same name, at Gasworks, UK. In lockdown, Navarro started drawing every day and this practice “relocated the studio to inside his head”. This meditative activity was inspired by quantum physics, according to which information in the universe cannot be created nor ever destroyed.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Living Distance by Xin Liu is a VR work and two-channel video based on a real mission in which the artist’s wisdom tooth was sent to outer space and back down to Earth again. In the VR work, users play the role of the tooth, journeying from the mouth to outer space, with a poetic narration by Liu. The piece is exquisitely rendered, with deep blacks that make the experience especially powerful on a Vive Pro.

Painting (Painting)

Readymade Flea Market is part of a series of works developed by Hun Kyu Kim. While the artist’s previous work drew a parallel between capitalism’s inherent social violence and the evolution of weaponry, Hun Kyu Kim now focuses on political nihilism and how to overcome it. In this new work he uses the metaphor of 3D Graphic Space to represent our current reality.

Photography (Photography)

Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision. This photograph was taken at Half Dome, a frequently visited granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park, California. For this work, Paglen created a digital file of the 8 x 10 inch photographic negative so that the artificial intelligence program can apply computer vision to evaluate the content of the image.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

David Gustav Cramer’s are composed of simple, descriptive texts accompanied by found photographs, letters or other materials. The elements juxtaposed in each work operate like the lines of a Haiku. It is the tension between them that opens space for thought.

Painting (Painting)

Calling attention to campaigns for land rights, survival, and sovereignty, Prabhakar Pachpute’s recent works consider how farmers in India use their bodies in performative ways during acts of protest. The oil painting Inclined uncertainties depicts a grotto-like city atop a boat carried by headless human bodies. The waterless boat navigates through a desolate landscape, propelled forward by the faceless humans, who appear to be holding the cumbersome structure together.

Painting (Painting)

Got Your Back by Gisela McDaniel depicts two women of color from different ethnic backgrounds who share similar violent experiences. However, the sitters never met and were depicted separately by artist Gisela McDaniel. The painting is thus an artificial construct, whose warm, gentle and seemingly benign look Is undermined by the accompanying soundtrack detailing their horrific experiences.

Painting (Painting)

Jarrett Key’s practice combines several modes of production into a single frame, incorporating sculpture, painting, and performance. Dancing Free I , painted in wet cement, like a fresco, is part of a current series of paintings titled Leaving the City , which depicts Black people they know in lush, pastoral landscapes. Raised in rural Alabama, Key’s series grew out of a few experiments conducted with visitors to their studio.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Raybrook by Jesse Krimes takes its name from The Federal Correctional Institution, Ray Brook (FCI Ray Brook), a medium-security United States federal prison for male inmates located in Essex County, NY. In addition to its indexical title, this quilt-work tapestry is made from personal clothing and other like articles the artist was given by currently, and formerly incarcerated persons. It is part of a larger series of works called the Elegy Quilts , which illustrate domestic scenes inspired by conversations the artist has had with the individuals these fabrics were acquired from.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Squid Currency is a series of 13 non-calibrated double-sided tin coins made using a casting technique dating back to Neolithic times where cuttlebones (squid bones) were carved by hand and then used as a mold. Natsuko Uchino draws on research into tin mining across the world, which takes place largely in China and Bangladesh as well as in Potosi, Bolivia where silver has been depleted due to the production of coins and other ornate riches during the 16th century Spanish Empire. Tin has a low melting point and is easily up-cycled from vessels such as measuring cups and kitchen utensils found at yard sales.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Yo Daham has been knitting, which he initially took up as a daily pastime, to produce objects that function as an incense burner by releasing smoke. His questioning of the nature of matter led to this unusual combination of knitting (typically considered a form of two-dimensional weaving) and an incense burner (an object traditionally used in rituals). Knitting is an act that requires unwinding a spool infinitely wrapped with thread and determining the form by applying force and pressure.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Paloma Contreras Lomas sometimes incorporates large scale drawing into her practice. For Contreras, drawing is a deeply personal and corporeal exercise that she relates to writing and narration. Her charcoal drawing Bugs Bunny Behind a Mesophile Bush features a gigantic hat providing shelter to the simultaneously identifiable and unidentifiable cartoon character hiding behind a wild bus.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Sculpture (Sculpture)

silentstar, delicacy by Duane Linklater is a replica of a baby pink hoodie that the artist wore as a teenager, embellished with hand-painted elements and band patches. From associations with punk and hip-hop to skater culture, the hoodie has a history of being adopted by youth-driven communities once relegated to the fringes, and being embraced by mainstream fashion as a practical article of clothing, which Linklater’s work complicates even further. The reproduction is made with dye extracted from cochineal insects.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Oren Pinhassi’s work examines the relationship between the human figure and the built environment. His hybrid sculptures, often somewhat emaciated, hover between the figurative and the architectural. In the case of The Crowd , a series of sculptures which evince architectures of control – where humans act and exert power – we find voting booths, segregation cells, institutional desks, places where bureaucratic exchange become spaces of bodily desire, complete with sexual appendages.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“There is a tapestry of sounds around us.” – Tania Candiani Tania Candiani has long been interested in Acoustic Ecology: the study of relationships between humans and our environment mediated through sound. A poetic text by Candiani narrated by writer and MacArthur fellow Josh Kun is featured in this three-channel video, For the Animals. The artist carried out visual research for the project: scanning, sampling and borrowing from books, vintage videos and images of material that informed her process.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The year 2016 is organized like a telephone book; the data corresponding to the contributions are classified in alphabetical order by the name of the donor. With this database as well as other types of information, the 900-page book presents a material representation of the scale of the cross over between cultural philanthropy and the financing of political campaigns in America. It also provides an unprecedented resource for discovering the political leaning of the museum sector.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Composed of five episodes, Brine Lake (A New Body) by Shen Xin is set in a fictional factory where iodine is produced as a byproduct of natural gas sourced from deep sea brine lakes. Korean, Japanese, and Russian are spoken in multiple episodes. The protagonists have multiple encounters and conversations with two unseen employees of the factory whose visions are overtaken by the camera.

Painting (Painting)

thanks for staying alive Fern.1994 by rafa esparza is from a body of work that pays homage to youth culture in the 90s. The work is based on the popularity of mid-90s era Star Shots photographs, which usually featured graphic backgrounds and highly glamorized subjects wearing heavy makeup, matching outfits, perfectly coiffed hair, and dramatic expressions. In Los Angeles, esparza remembers many Black and Brown youths going to the mall (where many Star Shots photo studios were located) to circulate the photos with personal messages written on the back.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jeamin Cha’s essay-film Ellie’s Eye is an extensive examination of the human mind and the effects of new technology, such as chatbots and virtual avatar therapists on the mental health industry. One such avatar, named Ellie, was developed by the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Ellie has the ability to interpret the user’s emotions through data collected from their speech and physical gestures to indicate psychological distress on a micro-level, which would be imperceptible by a human therapist.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The point of departure for Xar – Sueño de obsidiana by Edgar Calel is a poem that the artist wrote in Maya Kaqchikel. Made in collaboration with Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Pereira dos Santos, the film was shot while in lockdown in Brazil, where Calel found himself during the first outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The film shows Calel ambling around the empty Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer to host the São Paulo Biennial in 1954.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Musa is a visual and textual work by Minia Biabiany and the starting point of a broader research around the sexuality of Caribbean women, the historical legacy of slavery, and the artist’s own female lineage. Sometimes shown within an installation, sometimes on its own, the video combines images of flowers, landscapes, and bodies, with text in Creole and English. The video is conceived as a weaving, its technique creating stitchings and surfaces, upon which the artist inscribes stories.

Painting (Painting)

Since Manuel Solano became blind, they developed a technique that relies on audio descriptions that allow for an assistant to place pins and threads on a grid that guides the artist’s hands through the surface. In Los Abuelos , the artist works with a canvas the size of their body, allowing intense interaction with the wet paint. This kind of tactility creates a complex entanglement of color masses alternating sharp and blurred details, giving the image an erratic and affective atmosphere just as our fond memories often appear to us.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Paloma Contreras Lomas has frequently used animals as metaphors in her work. This work’s title, Cimarrón , is the Spanish word for an untamed animal, the wild vegetation that grows in the open, or a runaway slave. Cimarrón is part of a larger series in which the artist turned scaled-up Mexican hats into meticulously hallucinatory landscapes.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“ I think we are oversaturated, filled to the brim with images in our inner subconscious eye. Towards the end of 2020, I was feeling very much that I couldn’t take in any more information visually. That was when I made Instruments of Air.

Photography (Photography)

Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways. “Tiko drink-Kumba drunk” is an adage that is commonly used in the Southwest province of Cameroon to speak of how one’s actions affect others. Civil liberties are next to non-existent in Cameroon, the law is lawless, and structured in a way that is intended to attack its citizens’ human rights.