Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

As she traces the same shape again and again, Ojih Odutola’s lines become darker and deeper, sometimes pushed to the point where their blackness becomes luminous. Set against a blank white background, as in Untitled (2015), Ojih Odutola’s figures are stark, resolute in their darkness. The surface of her subject’s skin becomes ribbon-like, lines weaving across the contours of their head and neck.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial. Tierra depicts the artist standing naked in a lush field that a bulldozer has broken up. The video references an incident in which innocent Guatemalans were brutally murdered and buried in a mass grave.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his paper-based work, Medellin-New York , Rojas uses coca leaves and dollar bills to spell out the words of the two cities, tied together through the illicit exchange of materials used to make the word, gesturing towards the uncomfortable reality of the drug trafficking trade and the complicity of both America and Colombia within that economic system.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago. They were Christians and pagans that were often oppressed by the majority Muslims in the Riau community and were eventually forced to convert to Islam. Zai conveyed this history in Converting through the stark contrasts of red, white, black.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lifting Barbells is a video by Kim Heecheon that narrates his letters in Spanish to his girlfriend in Argentina, discussing his feelings after his father died in a bicycling accident. Using the data recorded on his father’s smartwatch, Kim’s video traces digital footage of his father’s route on Google Maps, the location of the accident, and his cardiographic data as he was dying. The video contrasts Kim’s emotional letters with the clinicality of the quantitative data recordings.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Audra Knutson’s work The Oblivion was carved and printed in conjunction with the print The Death . Also a hand-printed linocut, many of the details in this work are based on photocopies of images sourced by the artist from her local library. At the time she was making these works, she recalls looking at ‘beautiful, sad, timeless and stark photographs taken in old-work segments of Europe and being influenced by their aesthetic and emotional gravitas.

Photography (Photography)

In Stilleben mid Zierlauch ( Still Life with Aluminum) Annette Kelm utilizes visual juxtaposition to bring together a gridded aluminum backdrop, a pot with a vaguely indigenous pattern on it, and two purple dandelions. The aesthetic dissonance between the mechanical, gridded aluminum and the grainy clay pot signify an interaction between systems of visual production, furthered by the aluminum grid’s inward tilt, visually apparent due to the grid pattern’s convergence at the top of the photograph. Contrasting the stark slant of the grid, the pot sits on a level surface, while the two tall stems protruding from it run at a non-parallel angle to the grid.

Painting (Painting)

Maria Taniguchi works across several media but is principally known for her long-running series of quasi-abstract paintings featuring a stylized brick wall device. Full of subtle gradations and low-key modulations, these are her trademark: a sustained, reiterative practice, steeped in repetition but carefully attuned to the economies and the sculptural presence of painting. Her approach to painting is conceptual.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole. Despite its dismantled form, the screen still functions, a simple, mountain-range desktop background clearly visible with no distortion. As with much of Beshty’s work, Office Work thematizes its own construction, in this case, through a clearly deconstructive action that preserves the technological ontology present through the monitor.

Photography (Photography)

Comprised of fifty-one photographic postcards, Antin’s 100 Boots is an epic visual narrative in which 100 black rubber boots stand in for a fictional “hero” making a “trip” from California to New York City. Over two-and-a-half years, Antin photographed the boots against different backdrops across the U. S., and then turned the pictures into postcards, which she then mailed to approximately 1,000 people around the world. In conjunction with the boots’ “arrival” in New York City, the postcards were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art.

Painting (Painting)

Adnan’s paintings are simple images with bold contrasting colors and rich textures. This particular work has an iconic feel and a strong physical presence in spite of its diminutive size. All of her paintings are small but, like Howard Hodgkin’s work, their intensity gains from their diminutive size.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture. The subject in Dulu atas pedestal, sekarang dalampedestal / Before on pedestal, now inside (2005), a ball point pen and charcoal rendering of a bald figure with a wide-eyed stare, appears caught in a distressingly static state, at once both uncomfortable and yet incapable of ameliorating his condition. Sulaiman’s subject here becomes an almost frightening sight, the emotive brush strokes replaced by the ball point pen’s erratic black lines, the eyes and mouth scribbled over in a deliberately defacing gesture.

Photography (Photography)

Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph. Contrarily to the actions, he took the photographs himself. One of the rules he stuck to in his artistic practice was to always use material at his disposal, a real economy of means.

Painting (Painting)

Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture. The green acrylic paint used for the subject’s skin in Maka Panau / Tinea Vesicolor (2005), for example, evokes cultural associations between phenotype and diseases such as hypochromic anemia, a blood-related illness historically diagnosed by the green-hued tone it produced in a patient’s pallor. Staring at the viewer a forlorn gaze, Sulaiman’s subject appears caught in a distressingly static state, at once both uncomfortable and yet incapable of ameliorating his condition.

Photography (Photography)

Ha Tae-Bum’s “White” series, started in 2008, begins with photographic images from the mainstream media depicting sites of conflict or crisis. The artist eliminates human presence, miscellaneous details, and all color from the images, then “rebuilds” them into quiet, achromatic models with thin white paper. Once complete, the models are photographed in a nearly identical composition as the original image.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Wind by Antonio Pichillá is a textile piece depicting the glyph that represents the element wind in the Mayan tradition. It is woven in the four colors of each of the cardinal points which, together, symbolize the entire universe. It is woven mostly with knots that the artist refers to as a “bond between two or more systems that also represents a closure […] the knot in the throat that submerges the voice.” This piece, like other works in Pichillá’s practice, is an attempt to reconcile the Maya Tz’utujil symbolic tradition with Western art historical categories and practices.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled exemplifies the format that Anna Bella-Papp most commonly works in, using her hands to create delicate tablet-like reliefs within a rectangular form made out of clay. The lack of any glazes and other finishes used in traditionally in ceramics is a deliberate decision with an aim to preserve the pale hues and natural qualities of the clay. Papp’s decision to display the pieces resting flat on table tops, invites us to imagine them as landscapes or architectural structures seen from a bird’s-eye view.

Installation (Installation)

Ground Plan by Louisa Bufardeci is a large-scale, digitally-printed, architecturally rendered, wall drawing that pictures the permitted global flow of the world’s population. Utilizing data from UNESCO, the national census, opinion polls, and the CIA World Factbook, Bufardeci presents each country as a room in a labyrinthine building. Each room is composed of sometimes incomplete walls, with open or closed doorways, in reflection of their border immigration policies; each room is scaled according to its population density.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province. It begins with sound – perhaps a hammer, or a gong – the lack of image making its identification difficult. A landscape emerges of an open field where a farmer tends his grazing cow herd.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Will Rogan’s video Eraser (2014) shows a hearse parked in a clearing amidst leaf barren trees. The steely grey sky stands in stark contrast to the vehicle’s luminously pristine white finish and makes this already deathly object seem even more ghostly. The grass underneath is half-turned brown and further marks this as a lifeless landscape.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red. Two muscular men with sledgehammers simultaneously pummel the blocks where Gilmore attempts to stand. Although we can only see the artist from the waist down, her body language reveals apprehension: her hands, tense, press against the wall in an attempt to maintain balance while the men come dangerously close to smashing her bare legs.

Painting (Painting)

The Rebellion of Roots by Daniela Ortiz depicts a series of situations in which tropical plants, held hostage in the botanical gardens and greenhouses of Europe, are protected and nurtured by the spirits of racialized people who died as a result of European racism. The work is divided into four short stories: About Afghanistan and heroin , About Exposition Colonial and cow , About Jardin d’acclimatation and potato , and About Vietnam . The series of 14 painted panels draw upon the aesthetic of ex-votos, a genre of traditional religious folk painting that acts as a tribute for divine intervention in response to personal tragedy.

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)

In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made the TV series: “France / tour / detour / two / children”, in which they aimed to identify the lifestyle of French people in 12 episodes of 26 minutes each. On each episode a little boy and girl are firstly asked about their daily lives. By broadening the scope of the interview, the questions of Godard and Mieville gradually bring the protagonists to think of themselves as subjects in the history of the world, to “live and see themselves on television” with a critical point of view.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again.

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.