Installation (Installation)

(Untitled) Nimoa and Me: Kiriwina Notations by Newell Harry brings together a litany of contemporary politics—mobilization around enduring racism, the legacies of Indigenous and independence struggle, and the prospects of global solidarity against neocolonialism and social injustice. Yet what makes his stance unique is his idiosyncratic ‘anarchival’ method, developed over twenty years of living, working, and gathering in and around the South Pacific. From the resulting miscellany, Harry elicits thought-provoking new connections between collected artefacts; photographs and impressions authored by himself; and items drawn from journalist, activist, and documentary archives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yu Honglei’s video and mixed media works riff on familiar motifs from the Western art historical canon and reimagine them through a playful but subversive culture jamming of their original meaning. Life (2013), for example, depicts a tiled backdrop of various images and stills associated with the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol. Digital reproductions of his silkscreens featuring public figures like Elizabeth Taylor, Chairman Mao, and Debbie Harry form an amalgamation of modern art iconography, while repeated images of Warhol himself serve as a constant reminder that even after his death, the artist is still decidedly present in our art historical consciousness.

Painting (Painting)

Karla Dickens’s collage Beneath the skim board addresses issues of discrimination and racism towards Indigenous communities in Australia through a constellation of historical and current events. Dickens spent over a year collecting and modifying ubiquitous objects into sculptural collages that commemorate former circus performers of Indigenous Australian descent. Assembled from various fabrics, knick-knacks and other materials, these frenetic compositions celebrate the campy glamour of circus performers, but also articulates the hidden mistreatment experienced by the performers, and more broadly, the lives of Indigenous communities in Australia.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter. As the artists dice, mix and plate meals, they begin throwing food at each other—the scene rapidly turning into a battlefield made of food projectiles, broken glasses, and dirty settings. Disruptive, playful, and aggressive, the protagonists’ actions fuse the spontaneity and innocence of children’s games with the force and reality of adults.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Limbé by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc takes its inspiration and its title from a poem by the Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, one of the co-creator of the negritude movement. This Creole expression, which activates the Limbo dance through language, evokes a great sadness, linked to the death of the artist’s sister. This silent film continues Abonnenc’s collaboration with dancer and choreographer Betty Tchomanga, who played the protagonist in his film Secteur IXB (2015).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance. Dilapidated and empty, the ghostly presence of the car park comes to life. Beer composed the piece to resonate with this architecture, finding the frequencies that would bring the building to life, acting as a sound box and in effect another voice.