Photography (Photography)

In Jackass (2008) by Ari Marcopoulos, his two sons, Cairo and Ethan, are pictured relaxing in a disheveled bedroom in their Sonoma home. One plays with some sort of board game while the other holds either a book or DVD of the movie Jackass Number Two, presumably the source of the photograph’s title. As Marcopoulos has continued to document his sons, and as they have become teenagers, the images of them begin to closely resemble the teenagers in much of his earlier work.

Photography (Photography)

A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California. In the past a photograph of marijuana would more likely be found in an evidence file than an art museum or gallery, but today continued debates about the legality of marijuana and the industry surrounding it has brought the substance into common public view. Green Box is a strong example of the current sociopolitical state of California and the grey areas that exist in legislature and at the same time illustrates the unavoidable commercialization of once underground cultures.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Shanghai Biennale, Awaiting Your Arrival is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the marketing posters of official biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.)

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Xu’s works provide a satiric and provocative alternative to the official system and make publicly visible images of many realities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Commissioned for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Hearsay of the Soul (2012) is Werner Herzog’s ode to the landscape paintings of the 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers. The work is a four-channel digital projection of Segers’s artworks accompanied by the emotive music of the Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger. Herzog sees Segers’s vast landscapes as powerful representations of our own interior worlds, resounding with feelings of anger, joy, fear, and loneliness.

Painting (Painting)

Wonocolo by Maryanto is part of a body of research and work that has been investigating the mining realities of Indonesia and Nigeria since 2015. This acrylic painting refers to ‘Texas’ Wonocolo in Bojonegoro, a traditional oil mine in East Java. Initially built by the Dutch and abandoned during Japanese occupation, it was revived under Indonesia’s independence (1949) and is now a controversial issue between local sovereign right and environmental concern.

Installation (Installation)

Stones and Elephants by Chia-Wei Hsu derives from the Malay literary classic The Hikayat Abdullah . The author Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who once served as the secretary of Major General William Farquhar, chronicled his life in Malaysia and published his writings in 1849. Hsu’s video installation excerpts two chap- ters from this classic.

Photography (Photography)

Mooi indie (which translates to “Beautiful Indies”) is a term used to depict the beauty of nature in the East Indies during the period of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. The term is usually used to describe a painting, romanticising the alluring tropics through the lens of European imperialism. Later in the 1950s, the prominent Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono, who is known as one of the founding fathers of Indonesian Modern Art, publicly rejected the Mooi Indie genre as Indonesian art.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Jonas Staal’s installation is based on the thesis written by Fleur Agema and titled “Closed Architecture”. The paper, written by the second most important person of Geert Wilderds’ Freedom Party, concerns an ambitious model for a new prison that focuses on the reconditioning of prisoners by means of four phases. Staal’s work is developed through a book, a plan and a 3d virtual tour in the social imagery of a current minister of the State of the Netherlands.

Photography (Photography)

This photograph is part of the series titled “Iris Tingitana project” (2007) focusing on the disappearance of the iris. If Yto Barrada was initially interested in the architectural heritage of the city, today the core of her research focuses on risks around landscape and its heritage. The iris, found bordering the city, carries the name of the city, and is an emblem of Tangier.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rond de Jambe by Aimée Zito Lema is a series formed by two works: a three-channel video installation and a live performance. Each component in this project approaches the same subject matter through a different medium in order to investigate politics as they are made manifest in and through the body. Using archival footage of protests of the Stopera building project in Amsterdam as a starting point, artist Aimée Zito Lema worked with dancers to translate the protest movements into a choreography.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As an artist Francisco Camacho Herrera seeks ways in which his work can exist within, and challenge, official social channels. His practice revolves around the possibility of art to bear practical effects on cultural assumptions and reflects on redefining common concepts that can lead art to change the ways in which we conceive society. Camacho Herrera speculated that Chinese sailors might have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century.

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)

The series The Memory of Trees is specifically about trees, and what trees have witnessed in South Africa: for example, trees that were used as locations for slave trading, or trees that was during the anti-Apartheid struggle as a kind of identifier for a safe house for activists who were fleeing from security forces. Trees and plants are connected and embedded in history; but not only as witnesses and onlookers; Orlow tries to think about plants as active agents in history. This perspective allows for an oblique view of history especially when it comes to specific loci of violence such as in South Africa.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Acting Exercise: Demon Possession is a video by Miljohn Ruperto that addresses notions of performativity, the self, and collective truth. Set in an empty, derelict room with nothing but an old mattress on the floor, the film features a series of actors independently performing a demonic possession, or at least their interpretation of what one would look like. Although each reenactment is slightly different, actor after actor, the viewer is confronted with a common thread: a near archetypal response that binds them all together.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives. These conceptual throughlines also underpin Ruperto and Minnesota-based director Rini Yun Keagy’s eerie experimental documentary Ordinal (SW/NE) , which collapses mythology, scientific research, Californian agricultural history, American literature, and speculative fiction into a poetic and timely examination of possession, infection, and individual agency in an age of wanton industrial agriculture and alienation. Ordinal (SW/NE) tells the tale of a young Black man named Josiah as he navigates the banalities of daily life while potentially being possessed by a malignant supernatural force or stricken by valley fever, a little-known yet gruesome and sometimes lethal real-life respiratory illness which disproportionately affects farm and field workers, particularly Filipinos and African-Americans.

Installation (Installation)

The work Tender is composed of several elements: a porcelain spoon, a florescent lamp box, a small portable night light, a shelf with nearly invisible embossments of flowers and a jar of jam resting on a black plastic tray. The cardboard painting is made of acrylic and inkjet ink on which we can read Tender . Tender is a brand of extra soft tissue paper, it refers to an intimate comfort but results in a sentiment of melancholy and absence.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways. He is usually depicted with two faces as he looks both forward and backward, to the future and the past. The video, which is deftly animated in collaboration with Aimée de Jongh, presents a close-up of a dying “duck-rabbit,” a vivified version of an ambiguous illustration made popular by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts. The video’s title figure, a Filipina actress, vaudeville dancer and singer who played racialized, peripheral roles in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, flits in and out of a montage of scenes. Ruperto digitally modified the 16mm film by blurring the background and all of the figures in each scene except for Cooper herself.