Photography (Photography)

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water. Yet, ambiguous lights blink from buildings and yachts still sail on the water, and further observation reveals these structures to be miniatures manipulated by the artist through Photoshop and other postproduction image tools. The model city’s surroundings are themselves real abandoned spaces, perhaps an empty room, a wait-to-be demolished building, or a discarded bathtub.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections. Each video depicts a portrait with features changing continuously and quickly into different persons, animals and symbols. Driven by the evolving contents of the screen itself, this piece showcases the form and material of Qiu Anxiong’s working method, which relies on precisely planned storyboard sketches drawn in pen on A4 paper.

Installation (Installation)

Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall. With its cushions removed to reveal its internal mechanisms, the chair’s programmed rubbing, kneading, patting, and vibrating motions create a strange sight and soundscape. The work explores the relationship between flesh and machine as they come together through technologically simulated social behaviors, challenging normative ideas about human interaction.

Photography (Photography)

At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops. A closer examination, however, reveals that a key element—the minaret—has been systematically removed, thereby changing profoundly the history and religious character of the city. The work is a response to a November 2009 referendum in Switzerland that approved a ban on the construction of new minarets in that country.

Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape. He travels armed with his camera and insightfully captures scenes of the everyday that other people might ignore. Perro en Tlalpan (Dog in Tlalpan, 1992) is a photograph of a dog regally perched under an industrial shelter in the borough of Tlalpan in Mexico City.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany. Here, Garaicoa’s interest in vernacular Cuban architecture shifts towards the European context: a series of twelve nineteenth-century French engravings have been reworked into delicate paper models. Here, the two-dimensional old-school architectural renderings have become the foundation for new hollow three-dimensional structures.

Photography (Photography)

Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground.

Photography (Photography)

Columpio

Photography (Photography)

Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July. I traveled to Mali for three weeks and took some photographs related to my work. They are very different, but there are links as the graveyard of Timbuktu, which I discovered during the trip.

Photography (Photography)

Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994). The artist arrived a week prior to the opening with no artwork to install, and created three spontaneous works from locally sourced materials. This one was made of white plastic record sleeves that Orozco arranged on the damp roof of the gallery.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The Great Adventure of the Material World Knight by Lu Yang is a video game world in which an androgynous protagonist goes on a hero’s journey to overcome their understanding of the material world as a coherent, objective truth. Looping arcade music builds suspense as the artist mobilizes varying aesthetics—Sinofuturist cityscapes, Kawaii, religious imagery, anime characters, and body scans of the artist—to propel the viewer through a series of levels, including heaven, hell, and various sites populated by deities and monsters. While traversing these worlds, the protagonist encounters a dizzying array of characters while posing a series of questions about the subjective nature of reality, desire, and suffering.

Photography (Photography)

Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture. The Freeway Series was developed in 1995, right after the artist’s inclusion in that year’s Whitney Biennial. As if suggesting that her work should not be restricted to being seen through overtly political or activist lenses, this series lends insight into the city of Los Angeles via its most characteristic urban feature: its highways.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After Reality is a video by Zhou Tao, which was born out of his residency with the Kadist Foundation in Paris in 2012-13. Prior to arriving to the residency, the artist had begun filming in in Guangzhou, China, capturing footage of the lush vegetation from the semi-wild and semi-urbanized zones of Guangzhou’s urban fringe and a group of Dragon Boat rowers training in the adjacent river. As he arrived in Paris, he was confronted with the radical difference with which Europeans arrange and organize environments: the highly manicured cityscapes of Paris in stark contrast with the overgrown abundance of Guangzhou.

Photography (Photography)

Photojournalist with Two Cameras restages a portrait of a photojournalist from the background of an old photograph of protest published in South China Morning Post on January 10, 2010 under the headline “Return of the Radicals: Recent angry protests are nothing new.” The photojournalist in the photograph, probably from a protest of earlier decades, was capturing the scene of a protester’s arrest while wearing two cameras. January of 2010 was a time of pro-Democracy demonstrators called for the release of activist Liu Xiaobo, drafter of the Charter 08 manifesto calling for the end of authoritarian rule, was sentenced to 11 years in prison one month earlier. Leung’s isolating and highlighting of the photographer by bringing him from the original photograph’s background to the foreground of his studio shot calls attention to the two older cameras and the journalist’s retro-style clothing.

Photography (Photography)

Office Lady with a Red Umbrella restages a figure from a 1980 postcard made from a photograph from 1950’s. The retro-glamor of the 1950s style is restyled devoid of the original context of a Hong Kong street scene, where the “office lady” is walking on Queens Road of the Central district. With the “office lady” facing away from the viewer with a bare background, an introspective tone is created in Leung’s restaging while highlighting the red umbrella resonating with a red pencil skirt emblematic of the identity of the professional urban woman when Hong Kong was under British rule.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Columbus of Horticulture stems from Vvzela Kook’s ongoing research into the central and often-ignored role that botany played in the history of European imperialism. The colonial project, with its maritime explorations and voyages, was for the most part centred around the profits made from the discovery and exploitation of valuable plants (or from the kidnapping of the people needed to work on them). Vegetal products thus constituted a great part of the volume of the colonial economy, from spices to drugs, from textile fibres and dyes to tea, coffee, or cocoa.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

Photography (Photography)

Priola pays particular attention to otherwise unnoticed details in the cityscape, a quality that not only recurs throughout his oeuvre, but which also places his work in line with a strong tradition of California documentary photography. Close-ups and attention to detail reveal something different: a portrait of what is usually discarded or missing, like unassuming weep holes in Alameda Street or minuscule weeds making their way up through the pavement in Chestnut Street . But these details are subtle to the point of being conceptual; from afar both images appear to be monochromes.

Installation (Installation)

Following a series of related works, Brutalismo Americano by Marlon de Azambuja is a site-specific sculptural installation produced during the artist’s residency at Kadist, San Francisco in 2017. Treating the city as an object of attention, de Azambuja collected building materials from the surrounding area over a period of ten days to conceive of an architecture in situ. The work is not meant to mimic any of San Francisco’s own architecture, or to be a maquette or portrait of the cityscape, but instead a singular, constructive gesture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fog and Smoke is the first video Jeamin Cha made after returning to Seoul from London where she studied and started as an investigation into the meaning of “otherness” in documentary filmmaking. The opening scene depicts an abandoned construction site that had once been part of the Songdo International Business District in Incheon, near Seoul. In the dark of the night, the sounds of a countdown and piano notes fill an empty apartment building and echoes far into the unknown corners and hollows of a newly built city.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

With the war-torn Beirut cityscape as its backdrop—urban alleys, glistening beaches, abandoned buildings—Eric Baudelaire’s complex film, The Ugly One , unfolds in a time and place that vacillates among revolutionary narratives of the past, the fragile and ever-changing political situation of the present, and attempts to piece together the memories of those that live, or once lived, in the city. Conceived as a sequel to his documentary The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), Baudelaire builds the structure of the film around a story told by Japanese New Wave film director Adachi, who also narrates the film. The plot line pivots around two lovers and former resistance fighters, Michel (played by Lebanese artist and actor Rabih Mroué) and Lili (Juliette Navis); their narratives fragment and reconfigure around the screenplay, which itself intertwines with Adachi’s own history, the act of making the film, and the self-conscious and sometimes improvisatory process of writing the script.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Unit/y we see Amapola Prada in the center of the screen wearing an oversized, worn out sweatshirt, socks and flip-flops—standing motionless on a dimly lit street in her native Lima, Peru. As the video progresses, people, stray dogs, and cars pass by unbeknown to her presence, inescapably fulfilling their roles in the everyday. The title of the work gives us a clue.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

An early work in Sung Hwang Kim’s career, the video Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 is a fictional documentary, the film is based on a non-fiction travelogue, In Korean Wilds and Villages , written by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman, who lived in Korea from 1935 to 1937. In Kim’s film, a Dutch female protagonist traces Bergman’s path in the present-day Seoul (Keijo was the Japanese name for Gyeongseong, currently Seoul). The protagonist navigates through spaces that have been rebuilt since the 1950s onwards, and the scenes are narrated by a voice-over based on Bergman’s written description of the modern city in 1937.

Photography (Photography)

Catherine Opie’s candid photograph Cathy (bed Self-portrait) (1987) shows the artist atop a bed wearing a negligee and a dildo; the latter is attached to a whip that she holds in her teeth. Opie is known for her honest portraits of diverse individuals, from LGBT people to football players, and the self-portrait has also been a long-standing and important part of her practice. Instead of hiding her sexuality and interest in sadomasochism, Opie wears it proudly.