Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke was shot in the American Southwest at Mid-century modern architectural structures that were built to house regional independent banks and have since been bought up by Chase, Bank of America, and TD Bank. The video utilizes transparency and opacity effects in multimedia software to question the perceptibility of finance. It offers a complex metaphor (toxic assets, emergency flares, house/mortgage on fire) about the financial sector and the effects of the ‘crisis’ that led to the disappearance (and the ghostly memory) of many local and regional banks.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments. The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away.

Painting (Painting)

Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Butter Mountain is part of an ongoing series of works that combines a sense of painterly mass and substance with sculptural language to examine the synergy between a topographical landscape and a landscape of the human condition. The work intentionally alludes to the materiality of the human body and of the land. A stool has been consciously repurposed as a “support”, that by its nature and identity provides evidence of human presence.

Photography (Photography)

This year: missing witness by Brook Andrew consists of a multi-layered collage of photographs. The work features newspaper cut-outs of the phrases: “This year: be prepared…” and “missing witness” overlaid onto a disaster scene, upon a worn-up manuscript. Pulled from The New York Times , the image is of a destroyed temple on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, that has increasingly experienced natural disasters due to climate change.

Painting (Painting)

In 2008, Grassie was invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to document the transformation of some of its spaces. The artist chose to depict the space before and after, thus creating the series titled “After the Archive Collections Room.” This group of paintings displays a space locked into time with its scaffolding and broom exposed, depicted just before an exhibition on a collection of archives.

This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Highly autobiographical, exquisitely made and compiling different aspects of the artist’s practice, Kiss of the Rabbit God is one of Andrew Thomas Huang’s most precise, relevant, and successful videos. This video work exemplifies a new, global wave of queering tradition, indigenous references and international pop/post-internet esthetics. In this short video, a Chinese-American restaurant worker falls in love with an 18th century Qing dynasty god of gay lovers who visits him at night and leads him on a journey of sexual awakening and self discovery.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.)

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524. Each choir was filmed separately, and the artists weave together the audio while the video features each choir individually. The juxtaposition of different contexts in which singing occurs functions as an embedded sociological study of various communities throughout the region.

Painting (Painting)

Mojtaba was painted in 2015 as a part of the Bedroom Posters series. Bedroom Posters feature the same beautiful boys who could well be out of a set of fashion editorials. Mojtaba, Manuel, Titus, and a boy found on Tumblr are on the verge of becoming men, yet are narcissistic adolescents prone to fall into the trap of ideological extremes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Battle of Karbala was a military engagement that took place on 10 Muharram, 61 AH (October 10 th , 680) in Karbala, situated in present day Iraq, when Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, was killed. This battle is central to Shia Muslim belief in which Hussein’s martyrdom is commemorated each year, in a celebration called Ashura which symbolises the birth of Muslim division still at issue today between the Shia and Sunni. During Ashura , the artist worked in close collaboration with the people of Zeynebiye (referring to Hussein’s courageous sister, Zeyneb), documenting their preparations for the ceremonies, which involve a mass theatre performance and the isolated, weeping ritual at the end of the Ashura day.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Made between 1986 and 2015, Buchanan’s Shack Sculptures are a result of the artist’s close observation and extensive research of ‘shotgun’ houses, where one room is arranged in sequence one behind the other; the rural poor inhabited these houses. They were often constructed for rent near railways or manufacturing centers, but by the late twentieth century tended to be owner-occupied. By engaging with this architectural form, Buchanan considers the economic consequences of the abandonment of this form of housing as a result of the ubiquity of the motorcar that permitted people to move to the suburbs, where there was less pressure on space.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Limbé by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes its inspiration and its title from a poem by the Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the co-creator of the negritude movement. This Creole expression, which activates the Limbo dance through language, evokes a great sadness, linked to the death of the artist’s sister. This silent film continues Abonnenc’s collaboration with dancer and choreographer Betty Tchomanga, who played the protagonist in his film Secteur IXB (2015).

Painting (Painting)

Simon & Gus by Bobo is a binaural and fantastical artwork that tells the story of a sea steading maker-hobbyist as told from the perspective of an arduino board, and a mars dwelling stop motion animator as told from the perspective of a stop motion armature. The stop motion animator attends an artist residency on the red planet, and eventually sets out to start his own artist colony (a martian animation studio) with stupefying hubris. The result has disastrous consequences, with the martian ghosts eventually swallowing his soul, and his armature gaining full access to the animator’s motor skills and control of his ability to move.

Installation (Installation)

Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family.

Installation (Installation)

In Felicitas, we follow the converging routes of three characters: Felicitas, Michael and Andrew (the artist’s father-in-law who also features elsewhere). Felicitas is thedaughter of a German industrialist who immigrated to Rio after the Second World War. She is the one visible with a toucan in several images.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria. Idir continues the artist’s previous work on ‘hittistes’, which translates as someone who spends their day with their back to the wall, the city’s unemployed and the gestures proper to them. In collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Carole Douillard’s performance takes place across three emblematic sites within the city: Bab El Oued, Les Sablettes and Diar Es Saâda.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fade In (the whole title of the film is actually the entire five page script) is a collaboration with the Danish artist collective Superflex (group of freelance artist–designer–activists committed to social and economic change, founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen). There are several time layers to understand the story behind this film. In 1601, the San Jago set sail from Goa for Lisbon; the cargo included the first consignment of South East Asian porcelain destined for the European market.