2:50 minutes (looped)
The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history. In 1995, OJ Simpson—a well-known American football player—was accused of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Based on the courtroom footage, Ezawa uses his signature style to create an abstract and graphically simplified echo of what happened in the room. This re-enactment reflects the uncanny feeling of the trial footage, which was depicted solely through fixed close-up recordings (there was only one camera allowed in the courtroom). Zeroing in on the facial expressions of Simpson and his lawyers, Ezawa makes use of simple facial gestures, such as the movement of eyes and eyebrows, to highlight the emotional intensity of the moment. These expressions are minimal, due in part to the limitations of the artist’s animation technique. As the artist subtracts other visual cues, the most obvious way to distinguish people becomes their skin color, leaving the viewer with a comment on the racial implications of the trial and the unreliable nature of the verdict.
Kota Ezawa borrows images from the news, art history, and pop culture and turns them into cartoon-like stories. He produces flat and two-dimensional imagery via his light-boxes, works on paper, and animations. These works are often inspired by important moments in history, such as the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, the O.J. Simpson trial, and media coverage of former National Football League (NFL) player Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem as a symbol of protest. Ezawa’s animations, which he describes as “moving paintings,” make use of a labor-intensive technique that requires the artist to recreate each frame with close attention, producing hundreds of illustrations via digital drawing and animation software. He is best known for a signature style that embraces vibrant colors and simple forms, stripping detail from images to leave only essential attributes and environments. This reductive technique does not diminish the power of the image, as it turns to the familiar historical or cultural context to fill any gaps left by the artist’s erasures. However, the gesture also invites viewers to think about how these erasures might destabilize the reliability of public memories, highlighting the faulty process of collective remembering and what it tends to overlook.
The Crime of Art is an animation by Kota Ezawa that appropriates scenes from various popular Hollywood films featuring the theft of artworks: a Monet painting in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), a Rembrandt in Entrapment (1999), a Cellini in How to Steal a Million (1966), and an emerald encrusted dagger in Topkapi (1964)...
While Untitled (Shuffle) presents the same formal characteristics as the rest of Berman’s verifax collages, this constellation of specific images inside the radio’s frames—the Star of David, Hebrew characters, biblical animals—have Jewish symbolism and attest to the artist’s lasting obsession with the kabala...
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...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...
These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin...
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...