Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot on 35mm in two simply framed shots, Jazmín López’s Juego Vivo captures children at play, mixing imagination, reality, innocence, and violence. Set within a lush, green forest, we see first several children come into the frame, walking towards us, as a disembodied voice counts off “Tres…cuatro…cinco…” A game of hide and seek is at hand, and sounds of the girl counting are met with scattering children. In the first shot, while everyone else disperses, one boy advances steadily toward the camera, holding a scavenged stick in his hands, wielding it like a gun.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Corey McCorkle’s 2016 installation Pendulum is developed around the Cavendish family and their role in importing bananas to Europe. Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. In 1834, Cavendish received a shipment of bananas from Mauritius, and developed these bananas in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House with his gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, and were later given to missionary John Williams to take to Samoa.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Uncomformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Board has a deadpan quality worthy of Buster Keaton. With this work, Wood and Harrison create an intimate, formally structured mise-en-scène in which they use their own bodies in interaction with a wooden board. The artists elaborate an orchestration of the comic consequences of inertia, gravity, and the law of falling bodies in this low-tech physics experiment.

Painting (Painting)

Strongly influenced by history and memory, Goddy Leye’s paintings are based primarily on stories and mythologies. Containing ideas, emotions, and sensibilities, signs and symbols occupy an important place in Leye’s work, though he has to retrieve them from an interrupted history. The painting Animal was made in reference to an important precolonial kingdom, Bamun.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Piedras Blancas , arguably his most ambitious and visually arresting video to date, Miguel Angel Ríos made 3,000 “piedras” out of a concrete/stone composite. The video is shot in arid, mountainous locations in Mexico (his adopted country) and Argentina (his home country). Over several months, Ríos scouted locations for natural-worn tributaries where he eventually allowed these balls to then thunder down the mountain.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings. At the time of recording, like all of this films, there was no particular intent. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, this film becomes prescient and ominously prophetic.

Painting (Painting)

The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection. Various vanishing points and interior perspectives, like in another painting dated the same year called Continental Breakfast , create a complex matrix in which motifs, shadowy or geometric forms coexist to further confuse the map of this space. A disturbing yet alluring virtual reality composed of a medley of seemingly abstract designs is depicted through digital and painterly means.

Installation (Installation)

Milton Friedman on the wonder of the free market pencil is an installation based on 42 blank pages. On the first page, one can read the original version in English of the liberal speech by Milton Friedman on “The Story of the pencil”. On the other pages, the same text has been translated into 41 different languages by using Google Translate, before coming back to English.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Immersion , Harun Farocki went to visit a research centre near Seattle specialized in the development of virtual realities and computer simulations. One of their projects consists in using virtual reality (environments created to simulate this world) for therapeutic reasons for soldiers suffering traumas after the Iraq war. The double projection creates a parallel between animations and testimonies by soldiers reliving their mission, the explosions, gunshots and ambushes, their fears and their guilt.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

Photography (Photography)

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.