Installation (Installation)

Defined as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is more easily dispersed than it is concentrated. One basic illustration of entropy is to imagine white and black sand: once mixed together, it is highly unlikely that the contrasting grains of sand can be separated and restored to their original distinct color groups. Arturo’s Trópico Entrópico ( Entropic Tropics , 2012) considers the colonization of the American continent as a similarly irreversible process of cultural entropy.

Installation (Installation)

Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement. Each waveform represents a syllable of the sentence “Primero estaba el mar.” This sentence is the first verse of the Kogui poem of creation. For the Koguis, an indigenous community from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta on the Colombian Caribbean coast, water was the absolute presence before the creation of the universe.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm. The movie was not well received by the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until its rediscovery thirty years later by American filmmakers. The movie’s acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise-en-scène prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s.

Photography (Photography)

Dialect by Felipe Romero Beltrán is a photographic series that follows a group of immigrants who have recently crossed the strait (the maritime border between Morocco and Spain) to avoid border controls. The young immigrants settle in Seville while their legal situation is either resolved or refused. Reflecting on his own status as a migrant, Beltra?n’s series of photographs documenting Morrocan immigrants is a tribute to their trajectories; a trace of their existences.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

From among a cloud of fake smoke we see a heavily pregnant Cohen wearing a bikini and golden stilettos with lace-up straps wrapped around her legs, grasping onto the frame of a modified car as its loud hydraulic system clumsily moves it up and down. Pregnant with her first child at the time of the shooting of this video, the car featured in Hydroforce is an aging East German Trabant that the artist transformed into an American El Camino lowrider over the course of a decade, and which features in several of her works. Challenging the politics of the idealized and sexualized female body and the stylized car, Hydroforce establishes a metaphorical connection with her own identity: as a woman, a mother, laborer, and a migrant.

Photography (Photography)

The photographic work Lowrider Builder and Child is a companion piece to the video Hydroforce , which features Cohen in the late stage of her pregnancy posing atop a German car that she transformed into a lowrider in a period of ten years. While in Hydroforce we see the artist pregnant, Lowrider Builder and Child features the artist’s newborn by her side. In the image, the positioning of Cohen’s body, together with the tranquil, idyllic nature of the site in which she reclines to breastfeed her baby — with the gentle light gleaming as it bounces off the hood of her car — is a nod to classical reclining nude paintings, which invariably portray female subjects.

Photography (Photography)

The series Funerals under Neon Lights by Tomoko Kikuchi focuses on how transgender people’s ritual became a vital part of funerals in rural China. Funerals in China have diversified to very unique forms, especially in rural areas. Shot in Sichuan province, Guizhou Province, and Chongqing between 2014 to 2017, the three photographs: Liangzi offering prayer, Chongqing , Liangzi at the funeral, Sichuan province , and Bereaved family at the funeral, Sichuan province feature funerals where eccentric performances by transgender performers, little people, young female performers and singers dressing bikini costume, magicians and acrobatics performers take place under gaudy neon light.