Arpedia

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building. Viewers unwittingly become voyeurs, peering through the rectangles that stand for windows and observing the residents therein, who ponder questions both mundane and existential: “Where is Ron now?” and “What have I become?” The queries and characters are treated democratically—not judged, praised, or subjected to hierarchy. While their thoughts are specific, the painting captures a universal urban activity: looking across to the building next door and wondering about its residents, all the while knowing that they have probably looked over and wondered about us, as well.

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30 Proposals of Flag

Jao Chia-En

Installation (Installation)

30 Proposals of Flag explores the relationships between signs, meanings, aesthetics, and nations. The artwork consists of 30 flags layered together and hanging from the ceiling. Each flag is illustrated with Jao’s rendition of a possible coat of arms derived from Taiwan’s economic and political history.

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Creole Portraits III

Joscelyn Gardner

Creole Portraits III alludes to the 18th century practice by slave women on Caribbean plantations of using tropical plants as natural abortifacients. As an act of political resistance against their exploitation as “breeders” of new slaves and to protest the inhumanity of slavery, some slave women chose to either abort or kill their offspring. Armed with practical knowledge passed on orally from their African ancestors and/or Amerindian counterparts, enslaved Creole women collected the seeds, bark, flowers, sap, and roots from various plants which allowed them to secretly put an end to their pregnancies.

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Returning a sound

Allora & Calzadilla

Vieques is an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used by the U. S Navy and NATO forces as military testing ground as from the 1940s. Civil disobedience and active protest movements initiated by local inhabitants and an international support network led to the end of the bombings and progressive demilitarization in 2002.

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New Kurdish Flag

Peter Friedl

Installation (Installation)

Peter Friedl’s projects place aesthetic questions within an expanded field that takes into account the social, political and philosophical context. This textile piece quotes and diverts a flag with a red background and the central star of the Kurdistan National Liberation Front (ERNK, a military organization linked to PKK, founded in 1985 and disbanded in 2000), and not the national flag of Kurdistan. The artist became interested as from 1994, when the town of Lice was destroyed by the Turkish army and the PKK was expelled from Germany.

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Land Mark (Foot Prints) #12

Allora & Calzadilla

This series of photographs is part of the body of work Allora & Calzadilla made regarding the situation in Vieques, an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used for the 60 years by the U. S Military and NATO forces to practice military bombing exercises. In 2000, they began a collaboration with the local activists to make the campaign more visible.

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COMPOSITION (EEGYVUDLUK DRINKING TEA)

Annie Pootoogook

Annie Pootoogook created COMPOSITION (EEGYVUDLUK DRINKING TEA) at a pivotal moment in her career. The drawing depicts her father Eegyvudluk Pootoogook, an Inuk printmaker and stone sculptor who died in 2000. Kin and kinship figure prominently in the artist’s work: Annie was the daughter of Napachie Pootoogook, a skilled draftswoman, and the granddaughter of renowned artist Pitseolak Ashoona.

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Re: definition of architectural project 2

Marcelo Cidade

Marcelo Cidade interrogates the city, architecture and urban planning. This architectonic drawing proposes modular possibilities, adaptable variations based on the form of the concrete block (a material which is often actually integrated in his practice). The “re-definition” announced in the title is in construction, in process, under development, in flux.

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Untitled

Trisha Donnelly

Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook. Donnelly’s interest in the waveform–visually, aurally, and perceptually–is made manifest in works across multiple media, including photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and performance.

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Eu preciso estar seguro de você 1 (I need to be sure of you 1)

Marcelo Cidade

This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.

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Slowed-down Journey

Roman Ondak

As the caption purposely admits, these drawings were made by friends of Ondák’s at home in Slovakia asked to interpret places he has journeyed to. The description of the blond artist wearing the same outfit and bag in places of transit like airports, stations or streets are faithful in straightforward (verging on naïve) styles. His own skill as artist is displaced and delegated to others with no particular gift in draftsmanship.

Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall. More than a simple reference to the sport, the work has the disconcerting effect of creating a danger zone in the gallery space. The reference to direct aggression or violence is reinforced by the piece’s rapid pace.

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Impossible Accomplishment or the power as addition of seductions 2

Marcelo Cidade

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Diane Arbus: A printed retrospective, 1960-1971

Pierre Leguillon

Installation (Installation)

End of 2008, Pierre Leguillon presented at KADIST, Paris the first retrospective of the works of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) organized in France since 1980, bringing together all the images commissioned to the New York photographer by the Anglo-American press in the 1960s. This exhibition, destined to tour in various locations, presents the original pages of the magazines, including “Harper’s Bazaar”, “Esquire”, “Nova” and “The Sunday Times Magazine”. As Pierre Leguillon states: “The mythology surrounding Diane Arbus’ character is willingly set aside to offer a more neutral point of view on a more unfamiliar part of her work, although it was mass-distributed.” Many of the characters portrayed in these commissioned works seem less sensational at first glance than the “freaks” that made Diane Arbus’ work so famous, since the retrospective MOMA organized in 1973 in New York, two years after her suicide.

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Los amantes (The lovers)

Diana Fonseca Quiñones

In Los amantes (The lovers) Diana Fonseca Quiñones uses simple, commonplace objects and experiences that she derives from daily life to develop narratives that mix reality and fiction. Drawing on seemingly everyday moments, such as lighting a match, Quiñones creates poetic metaphors that cleverly comment on broader social issues, as well as politics, and universal human desires. In her profound work Los amantes, the humblest of materials, a pair of burning matches, becomes a parable for the sharing, longing, restraint, and death that everyone faces in life.

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Mr Joe Shrigley Jr, président de la nation Navajo

Bruno Serralongue

The half-length portrait of Joe Shirley presents a man with a great presence, wearing several items that point to ancestral Native American culture. In this photograph, which is relatively poor in information, the projection screen in the background acts as a clue about the event: Bruno Serralongue went to the second phase of the ‘Sommet Mondial sur la Société de l’Information’ (or SMSI, World Summit on Information Society, in Tunis in November 2005). This portrait echoes another picture in the same series (Native Peoples Claim Their Right to Participate in the Information Society) in which Joe Shirley is just a silhouette amongst the speakers, whereas here he occupies the entire frame.

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Wild Boy

Guy Ben-Ner

Wild Boy is the story of the education of Amir, the artist’s son. Ben-Ner plays the educator’s part, trying to domesticate the child. Using the metaphor of the wild child is Ben-Ner’s homage to this recurring theme in literature and cinema: from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ « Tarzan » to Truffaut’s « L’enfant sauvage », and Rudyard Kipling’s « Jungle book ».

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Typical Weapons

Alejandro Marré

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Typical Weapons is a series of sculptural interventions where Alejandro Marre transforms traditional Guatemalan craft objects usually sold as souvenirs into weapons. Wooden flutes, hacky sacks, and musical instruments are woven with rope to appear as nunchucks, slingshots, and other forms of armament. Designed to be exhibited as objects from an archaeological museum, the previously innocuous representations of Guatemalan popular culture acquire darker meanings as they come to symbolize the brutality and extreme violence that now mark the country.

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Untitled (violet)

Michael Craig-Martin

Untitled (violet)

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BRB ("be right back")

Miri Segal

The work BRB is a 30 min. journey in the new game world of Second Life (“SL”). Consistent with Segal’s work with the projected image, this video was shot using a virtual in-world camera, with the footage later being transformed by a software custom designed by the artist.

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John Heartfield and Silvio Berlusconi

Thomas Kilpper

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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Willi Brandt, Günther Guillaume and Dietrich Sperling

Thomas Kilpper

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Walking Through

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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Temps mort

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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Sans titre n°10 (Temps mort)

Mohamed Bourouissa

Temps Mort is the result of one year of mobile phone exchanges of still images and videos between the artist and a person incarcerated in prison. Mohamed Bourouissa directs the scenes to be reconstructed inside the prison from a distance. With sketches and instructions, he indicates in detail the sort of shots he would like to receive.

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Chalis Katesi Ramaula

Nagendra Gurung

Chalis Katesi Ramaula is a series of 240 prints capturing Nagendra Gurung’s life, work, and colleagues from the construction sites where he has worked in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. When seen together, the sequence appears to have a cinematic temporality, as one feels the passing of the years he has endured as a migrant worker. Gurung’s subjectivity is highly present, even when looking at the most banal scenes of cranes, concrete, and other machinery, which are rapidly transforming the landscape and society of the Gulf into its own version of capitalist futurism built through the exploitation of others.

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The Beautiful Beast

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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Animal

Goddy Leye