Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision. Often the artist works with the motifs of the counterculture and contemporary non-religious spiritualism. The figure hangs suspended—seemingly ascending—animation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body. The Buddhist master Padmasambhava achieved this state from his union with Mandarava, a female spirit (dakini) and princess in Tantric Buddhism. Through study and physical connection, each played a key role in the other’s enlightenment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables. Referencing iconic folklore such as Alice in Wonderland, the Odyssey, and the Mahabharata, Ganesh’s video illustrates the story of a hero’s journey and transformation that is not driven by the glory of violent conquest or saving a damsel in distress. Ganesh’s short video features a colorful style of illustration specific to the artist’s comic works.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream . This series by artist Chitra Ganesh comprises a large-scale narrative suite inspired by a 1905 feminist utopian (eponymous) text written by a Bengali writer and social reformer, Rokeya Sakhhawat Hossain. Educated thanks to the support of her elite family, Hossain was one of the few Bengali women of her generation writing in English.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silhouette in the Graveyard is part of a suite of animated videos by Chitra Ganesh titled The Scorpion Gesture . All five videos incorporate figures and themes from Buddhist mythology and dialogue directly with artworks from the Rubin Museum, for which the videos were originally produced.? The central figure of Silhouette in the Graveyard is Maitreya, the Future Buddha, whose arrival on Earth was prophesied to usher in a new age.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Youthfulness and gestures of play are central to Aziz Hazara’s practice. The artist uses these mechanisms as a lens to give pause to the behaviours of children as foreboding reflections of the enduring and all-pervasive effects of conflict and war. In the short video Rehearsal the artist documents two young Afghan boys imitating the guttural rattling of an automatic rifle, play-shooting in the field in front of them, and swivelling as if to suggest the gun is mounted.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire.

Installation (Installation)

Lyrics: Edition

Installation (Installation)

Blue time is a song co-written by artists Saâdane Afif and Lili Reynaud Dewar. Collaborations are frequent in the work of the Afif, as is the case of the exhibition “Lyrics” which opened at the Palais de Tokyo in 2005, in which Saâdane Afif asked artists and musicians to translate his artworks into song lyrics and interpret them. The lyrics written on the wall produced a silent story, in a musical way that remains implicit (unlike certain installations by the artist where lyrics can be heard on headphones).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To make the video installation Soft Staycation (Gaze Track Edit) , the artist, playing the role of ‘job creator’, hired a group of unemployed and expat freelancers through Craigslist to watch a 30 minute compilation of national tourism ads. These ads, which are generally sponsored by various publicly funded tourism boards and screened in airports for example, were found on the Internet by Keller. He used a gaze-tracking camera to measure the eye movements of the people participating in the experiment.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. These drawings were created during the trial of political activists pursued by the government that the artist would regularly attend. During the tribunal, the artist would let his pen slide freely across his notebook, replicating the automatic drawing techniques of the surrealists.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In this work, Saâdane Afif quotes André Cadere’s round wooden batons using the copy share and remix principles. Cadere’s sculptures, batons constituted with a mathematical chain of painted wood segments containing one error in the succession of colors, can be presented according to any possible configuration (on the wall, floor, hung or not). In the catalogue documenting the project, Power chords, there is a facsimile (another type of quotation) of one of Cadere’s conferences: “Présentation d’un travail, utilisation d’un travail” (presentation of a work, use of a work).