Photography (Photography)

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars creates a division of space implying a separation the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation.

Installation (Installation)

A woman pronounces parts of sentences. Via rigorous editing, the artist creates anticipation with the silences, rhythm by the repetitions, temporal ellipses with music. The recording is diffused by a loud speaker placed on a plinth which gives the whole an anthropomorphic status which reminds one of Box with the sound of its own making by Robert Morris.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

On a piece of paper, the artist has traced two loops in black crayon and placed two eyes where the lines intersect. Cut out of the same photograph, the eyes belong to the same gaze. The first asset of a slip knot is its simplicity, it basically requires a small length of rope.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The piece consists of sculpture of 10 elements, among them: a globe, a picture of a gorilla, a chair, scrabble letters, 3 glasses of black ink, a book whose title is illuminated by the beam of a 8mm projector, a pair of boots, etc. The display is a collection of selected objects chosen in response to the reading of a text by Alain Badiou (the first chapter of the seminar “Le réel est l’impasse de la formalisation; la formalisation est le lieu de passe en force du réel” from February 4, 1975). The elements are a visual way to question the transposition of an idea into reality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

My Shape (2018) is the final work of the exhibition “Sorry”, taking the form of a Levi’s denim jacket pattern, expanded three or four times larger than its original shape. Adorned with different pockets, visible through the transparency of the paper and different light bulbs illuminating the form, white cables link the piece to hidden plug sockets, recalling a similar piece made by the artist for the 2015 Ricard Foundation prize. The work is representative of a series of recurrent concepts in the artist’s work manipulation of scale, abstraction through monumentalization, highlighting of tangential objects integrated like sculptural elements by the artist, in a way in which others might try and hide them, as well as the melding of the intimate alongside objects of mass production and the globalization of tastes.

Photography (Photography)

Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition. The title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior.

There was a tragedy in Sialkot, Punjab, in August 2010, when two adolescents were murdered by vigilantes who were apparently in connivance with the police. Struck by this blunder revealing police corruption, the started a series of paintings on paper, You who are my love and my life’s enemy too, in which he expressed his reaction to this murder. At first glance the work appears to be a splash of blood like the one in this killing, but, close up, the composition reveals itself as meticulous floral motifs typical of the art of miniature painting which the artist teaches.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video installation Le Fou Postcolonial Insane by Guy Woueté is a series of five videos that examine the concept of insanity in the post-colonial Democratic Republic of Congo. The first three videos in the series were shot in a market place in Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Congo, where several psychoanalysts explore mental health in the context of the Congolese public sphere. Throughout the video series, Woueté links this public health examination to memories of colonial history.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked . Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot a few months before the USA and Cuba restored diplomatic relations in 2015, The New Man and My Father looks into the quiet aftermath of one family’s individual experience of the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). The film brings to the fore a socio-political system made for a country whose successes and failures fell upon the individual men and women who experienced it. In the film, Melis interviews his father about the Cuban Revolution, as well as the more recent re-introduction of capitalism to the island after 60 years of the US-imposed embargo.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Ranging from Baudelaire to the Koran, each of Hassan Massoudy’s drawings are titled with a quotation from a text. In the case of La beauté sauvera le monde, the text originated from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot , alluding to aspirations, models of behavior and words of wisdom. The image itself, though generated in a hybrid manner relating to Arabic and Japanese calligraphy, suggests both fluttering flags and buildings rising high out of the desert as one would see in many developing Middle Eastern countries.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory. Gupta created each map by superimposing 100 separate drawings of each country. The project investigates modern notions of the nation-state, national identity, and borders by looking at countries in which boundaries are contested and the history of the land far precedes such ideas.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world. Patches of canvas cover parts of this otherwise representational photograph and ask the viewer to consider the role that editing and play in our perception of the urban landscape and modernity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground. Comprised of curt lines such as “forever” “failure” “to live,” the Korean forms non-sequiturs and double entendres to the English script following a line of questioning between a detective and a victim telling a meandering story surrounding a bullet being in a wrist, going to hospital, traveling to Japan, and the discovery of a love triangle. This narrative of a potentially grave situation is told in a nonchalant manner.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The work “Les Fleurs d’intérieur” (which gives its name to the exhibiton presented at Kadist Art Foundation from May 30 to July 13, 2009) is a brass plate engraved with the inventory list of the works included in the show. From this moment, Dahn Vo will use this brass plates as a systematic element for all his exhibitions.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Photography (Photography)

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. The long-exposure capture depicts García Torres at multiple stages of brainstorming, devising, and introspection, his ethereal figure connected with artistic giants of the past. Yet, there is also an insipid tone beyond mere insomnia or frustration at the lack of being able to garner inspiration.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The artist asked his parents to perform a flags-raising-lowering ceremony on their home’s cloths drying rack, with the HKSAR regional flag, and the flags of PRC and The UK. Artist Lee Kit hand-painted the HKSAR regional flag following the detail instructions in “The State’s Standards of The People’s Republic of China, GB16689-1996”, issued by The State Authority of Technical Monitoring.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory. Gupta created each map by superimposing 100 separate drawings of each country. The project investigates modern notions of the nation-state, national identity, and borders by looking at countries in which boundaries are contested and the history of the land far precedes such ideas.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For the two-channel work Asking the Repentistas – Peneira & Sonhador – to remix my octopus works Shimabuku asked two Brazilian street singers to compose a ballad about his previous works with octopi (in which he created traditional Japanese ceramic vessels to catch octopi, with a fisherman who took him on his boat to test them out as we can see on one of the channel). In the Brazilian singers’ ballad, Shimabuku is transformed into a fisherman, the greatest fisherman in Japan, but a kindly fisherman who returns his catch to the sea. The artwork thus becomes facilitator for an interaction between different cultures and interpretations.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Photography (Photography)

This photograph seems to be awaiting meaning, it more or less evokes known elements without really identifying with them completely: a motorway interchange, a bridge, an electric pylon… In fact this is the end of the tracks of the Aérotrain, a wheelless monorail invented by Jean Bertin in the 1970s, which acts like ‘a fossil of movement on landscape scale’, as explained by the artist. This fragmentary place is meant to activate physical movement. It also activates the spectator’s imagination.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A child and dreamer my whole life long (broken tree) (2004) is a sculpture made of filler, wire, copper, oil paint, and wood depicting a tree just at it’s moment of breaking into half – one part alive with foliage and blooming branches and the other the crisp of the break exposed, with the trunk adhered solidly to a plinth. The sculpture appears to speak quite bluntly about Isaac’s own sense of bleak pessimism when exposing a severed tree, the universe’s sacred sign of life and birth. Through the perfect rendering of this encapsulated moment, Isaacs demonstrates the strength of the sculptural artifact and his interest in failure and fragility.

Photography (Photography)

Like many contemporary photographers who play with the codes of realism, Valérie Jouve composes her images, having already a more or less predetermined result in mind, in order to deliver a complex representation of the world instead of a bold presentation of facts. A part of the series “Les Figures”, this “portrait’ of P. Faure carries a strong ambiguity, typical of the photographer’s images, between realism and mise-en-scene . This photograph is exemplary of Valérie Jouve’s work: inscription of an inidual within an urban landscape, relation to architecture, simplicity of composition and strong, yet imprecise narrativity – related in part to seemingly familiar characters or places.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jaali – Horizontal references religious practices in Hungary that were considered as a civil disobedience throughout the 1950s. In their text associated to the work the artists state: “My ancestors on my father’s side were rather elegant Hungarian noblemen—lots of churches, lots of religious education. My parents went to church as a form of civil resistance.