11:00 minutes
Reborn, 2010 is a three-channel video by Desiree Holman that questions ideas of motherhood and the maternal instinct. The video features a group of women as they tenderly cradle lifelike baby dolls atop their rocking chairs. Although at first, the video might appear as a celebration of the maternal bond, the scene soon becomes eerie and unsettling as we see milk spilling out of the mothers’ mouths. Subsequently, the tone changes dramatically as a group of women in their underwear wearing colorful, bedazzled niqabs, perform an upbeat choreography with the dolls strapped around their bodies. The work is based on Holman’s research into the curious subculture of ‘reborners,’ a group of women known for hand-making, collecting and caring for hyper-realistic baby dolls called ‘reborns.’ Grounded in fantasy, the vernacular surrounding these dolls often addresses them as living. Fascinated by this, the dolls we see in Hollman’s video were created by the artist in a process that lasted over a year, which involved rooting each individual hair and painstakingly modeling their skin tones. Reborn is emblematic of Holman’s practice, which, through an anthropologic eye, aims at finding the fissures in established cultural tropes. As per other works by the artist , Reborn disrupts idyllic representations and conventions to bring to the fore the darker, strange and unsettling undertones of human nature.
Combining research, performance, video, digital manipulation, drawing, and installation, Desiree Holman’s multifaceted practice dissects the discourses that structure our shared experience of the social world: from ideas of gender and sexuality to notions of race and motherhood among many others. Originally trained as a sculptor, the Oakland-based artist places emphasis on objects due to their potential as repositories of meaning. With the help of performers, she then puts these objects to use as costumes or props in performances that the artist describes as “identity play-focused work.” Although Holman generally presents the performances as multi-channel videos, her oeuvre also incorporates traditional gallery works such as drawings and paintings, which a related to the videos on display. The source material informing her work is often based in her real-world research, pulling apart and interrogating social constructs she finds in popular culture and subcultures, in order to excavate social myths and illustrate the complexity of human psyche.
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)...
The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself...
In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person...
Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...
Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few)...
The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016...
Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Nugroho’s installations and performances have their roots in the shadow puppet rituals in Indonesia, particularly the Javanese Wayang tradition whose essence is in the representation of the shadows...