Installation (Installation)

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner. Its tiled effect can perhaps be seen as a vertical Carl Andre work and also bears some resemblance to another work in the Kadist Collection, Jedediah Caesar’s JCA-25-SC. McGee’s installation also echoes the votive altars in the chapels he visited during his residency in Brazil in 1993.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Through a semi-fictional approach, Extrastellar Evaluations envisions a version of history in which alien inhabitants, the Lemurians, lived among humans under the guise of various renowned conceptual and minimal artists in the 1960s (Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, and James Turrell to name a few). If humans interpreted and appropriated the geometric-shaped works they created as conceptual and minimalist artworks, the objects were in fact transmission devices the Lemurians used to report back on human actions to their mother planet. The video takes the form of a channeled message from Adama, High Priest and spiritual leader of the Lemurians.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Extrastellar Evaluations is a multimedia installation produced during Yin-Ju Chen’s residency at Kadist San Francisco in the spring of 2016. Chen’s project departs from a 19th century theory popular within Western biogeography that posited the existence of a “lost land” or ancient continent called Lemuria that had sunk beneath the Indian and Pacific Ocean due to cataclysmic geological change. As a result, its inhabitants, the Lemurians, found refuge in Mount Shasta, California.

Photography (Photography)

The Breaks reflects Capistran’s interests in sampling and fusing different cultural, social, and historical sources. Growing up in an African-American community in Los Angeles, Capistran has long been influenced by hip-hop culture. The photographs in this print document him surreptitiously breakdancing on Carl Andre’s iconic lead floor piece after the guards at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have left the gallery.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Killed is a video projection in which William E. Jones appropriated and edited, in a rapid sequence, a selection from the more than 68,000 censored or discarded films produced by the Farm Security Administration’s photographers between 1935 and 1943. Roy Emerson Stryker, the then director of the program, was in charge of what he called “killing” negatives by punching holes in them to render them unusable. Killed continues Jones’s use of discarded film footage seen in his video created from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn that was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant shows a looped scene where a robotic hand touches a “sensitive plant” — Mimosa Pudica, a species characteristic for closing on itself when touched. The name of the plant was derived from Carl Linnaeus sexual taxonomy of plants: pudica referring both to the external sexual organs, shyness and modesty. In a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) titled The Loves of the Plants (1789), this plant is associated, jokingly, with British Botanist Joseph Banks’s famous sexual adventures during his botanical expedition to the tropics.

Textile (Textile)

Cosmic Tautology I and II are two textile pieces representative of Santiago Borja’s practice and long-standing interest in disrupting universalist assumptions of minimalism by connecting them with other, non-Western or esoteric references. They were hand-woven in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, and are composed of nine squares, the middle one left unwoven. Their composition is based on Red Square, White Letters (1962) by Sol Lewit, but they also take cues from works like Black Series II by Frank Stella.

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).

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Soufiane Ababri’s desire to construct a historical family and a genealogy of queer kinships in Bedwork / Yes I AM sees him conjuring up a pantheon of gay writers and artists whose intellect has changed the course of human history and development, despite their outsider status. Figures as disparate as Michel Foucault, Glenn Ligon, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and André Gide populate Ababri’s drawing series in the artist’s signature naïf style, their homosexuality the thread that connects them. The series of over forty drawings are part of Bedwork, a larger project that Ababri began in 2015.

Painting (Painting)

In a style that is unique of Tokoudagba, he evokes the kings, gods and their symbols related to the earth, water, air and fire, usually on a white background. The representations of voodoo divinities imagined by the artist often return to the same pattern of red and black circles, participating in the mysterious character of the work. The title can enlighten the interpretation of these symbols: in voodoo, the guede are the spirits of death and fertility.

Photography (Photography)

The Caste Portraits Series by Leah Gordon investigates the practice of grading skin color from black to white, which marked the extent of racial mixing in 18th century Haiti. Médéric Moreau de St Mery (1750-1819), a French créole slave owner and freemason living in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), created a taxonomy of race classifying skin color from black to white using names derived from mythology, natural history, and bestial miscegenation. His Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789) hierarchizes 128 possible combinations of black-white miscegenation into nine categories (the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulâtre, the quarteron, the métis, the mamelouk, the quarteronné, and the sang-melé).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Sculpture by Musquiqui Chihying comprises a two-channel lecture performance and a photograph. The video begins with 2017 footage of French president Emmanuel Macron announcing his commitment to the restitution of French-held African objects looted during the colonial era. Moving through the video, the artist’s voice narrates over archival images and videos, explaining how so many African artifacts came into the possession of European museums.

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).

Installation (Installation)

Juan III (Pescadores En Una Isla) is a series of embroideries made with fake pre-Columbian fabrics produced by the Gonzales family, a three-generation family of pre-Columbian textile “forgers” based in Lima, Peru. The members of this family (grandfather, father, and son) all bear the name of Juan and make replicas by hand using traditional methods nearly indistinguishable from the pieces made thousands of years ago. A forgery pretends to be something it is not, but the Gonzalez family’s textiles openly intend to recreate those discovered in the 1920s at a necropolis in Peru.

Painting (Painting)

Ventana indiscreta (Rear Window) by Karen Lamassonne takes its title from Hitchcock’s renowned 1954 classic. The painting is part of Lamassinne’s Homenaje a Cali [Homage to Cali] series, developed by the artist in 1989 in a nostalgic attempt to immortalize Cali at a time in which violence from drug trafficking had rendered it unlivable, and the generation that Lamassone had lived it up with had all but dispersed. Lamassone had formally established in Cali around the middle of the decade at a time in which the hangover from the 1971 Pan-American Games and an artistic effervescence had transformed it from a provincial sleepy town into a newly discovered urban (and sexual) labyrinth, one that was fit for the artist’s own explorations around its representation.