Installation (Installation)

Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr. Martin Hauser, Senior Insect Biosystematist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and longtime acquaintance of the artist. In Villa Dei Fiori, September to November, Zhao Renhui tracked and collected multiple insects within the everyday urban environment, either finding the insects dead or following them around for few days.

Photography (Photography)

Kastura (2012) is an installation consisting of 24 black-and-white photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto bequeathed by Kimura’s grandfather; free-standing structures on which they are hung; and ornamental plants. The photographs appear to have been taken in late 1950s soon after tours of the villa were first offered to the public. Then, as today, visitors were led by a guide and could only follow a designated route.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Many of Araujo’s works depict reproductions and Libro Ponti II is a recreation of a book on Italian architect Gio Ponti. Ponti designed the Villa Planchart a private, modernist house in Caracas, Venezuela, which at the time it was built in 1956, reflected the emergence of a class increasingly globalized, both culturally and economically. Araujo’s replica of the book thus refers to the role and visibility of Venezuela in circuits of global cultural production.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled consists of a small wooden sculpture that leans against a wall. Here, a rectangular piece of wood holds a folded article from a vintage design magazine whose Italian text states: “Villa per una persona sola. Arquitectura Pasadena California.” On the flipside of the paper is a feature with different images of paintings and architecture, including a painting by Piet Mondrian.

Painting (Painting)

Llorar mucho (To Cry A Lot) is representative of Fernanda Laguna’s practice of the past twenty years. It is an upshot of intense emotional stress and psychological regression for the artist, which resulted in her renewed and strengthened commitment to feminist causes, especially in Villa Fiorito, but also as part of the leading committee of Ni Una Menos in Argentina. It also picks up the thread of earlier works, accentuating the use of cotton, and embracing an almost cornily sentimental tone.

Painting (Painting)

¡Qué triste estoy! (I’m So Sad) is representative of Fernanda Laguna’s practice of the past twenty years. It is an upshot of intense emotional stress and psychological regression for the artist, which resulted in her renewed and strengthened commitment to feminist causes, especially in Villa Fiorito, but also as part of the leading committee of Ni Una Menos in Argentina.

Installation (Installation)

KLAU MICH is a TV and performance project by Dora García with Ellen Blumenstein, Samir Kandil, Jan Mech, TheaterChaosium, and Offener Kanal Kassel, during the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. In black and white, Yao depicts the historical site as an eerie abandoned compound. Reflecting on the centenary of the HsinHai Revolution and the end of the Cold War, Yao questions the existence of an ever lasting dynasty or “transcendental Rules of History.” The soundtrack features a sole voice reverberating through loud speakers.

Photography (Photography)

Charlotte Moth asked the art critic Francesco Pedraglio to write a text in response to the Man Ray film “Les Mystères du Château de Dé”, the decor of which was the Villa Noailles, built by Mallet-Stevens. Pedraglio’s text was then displaced since the artist attributed it to her own photographs taken on the rue Mallet-Stevens in Paris. A percussionist gave a audio response to the film during the opening at the Halle fu?r Kunst in Lüneburg, in 2010.

Installation (Installation)

Good life (2007) is an installation displaying letters, documents, photographs and objects from a man named Joseph Carrier, and appropriated by artist Danh Vo. The installation features a series of small square vitrines, inset, dark and precisely spot-lit. Inside these are framed photographs, mostly black and white, of young Asian men, taken, as the titles on the neat brass name plates tell us, in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Photography (Photography)

La Chambre Marocaine series is a means to reconnect personally to his connection to family history and objectively assess the process of reconnection. By creating this work in the Villa Medici in Rome, the neutral space—neither France nor Morocco—allowed the artist to distance himself with his history in the examination process. The series looks at Morocco through the eyes of his children and object belonging to his grandmother: a scarf, a cushion and a book in Arabic.

Photography (Photography)

This work is one of Koller’s many variations which he began to use from 1970 to describe the ‘cultural situations’ he created. His “Anti-Happenings” turned mundane events into ‘cultural’ and ‘subjective’ situations. He sought to create new cultural situations that weren’t new art, but rather new ways of living: a new creativity for a new humanistic culture.

Textile (Textile)

Cosmic Tautology I and II are two textile pieces representative of Santiago Borja’s practice and long-standing interest in disrupting universalist assumptions of minimalism by connecting them with other, non-Western or esoteric references. They were hand-woven in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, and are composed of nine squares, the middle one left unwoven. Their composition is based on Red Square, White Letters (1962) by Sol Lewit, but they also take cues from works like Black Series II by Frank Stella.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Last Postcards is a series of three small double-sided paintings on plywood in which Biernoff imagines the last communications from explorers lost in the wilderness. Biernoff’s choice of Everett Ruess, Percy Fawcett, and the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader is particularly telling. On one level, the Last Postcards analogize the nineteenth-century explorer with the contemporary artist who looks for purpose in their work.

Photography (Photography)

It is with the eye of a sculptor that Charlotte Moth records modernist architecture and its copies which she encounters during her trips and residences. Photographed in black and white, these architectures seem empty, out of time, and open to any interpretation. The artist creates a classification of her species of spaces, called the “Travelogue”, which is both artwork and tool since it allows her to ceaselessly generate new works.

Photography (Photography)

It is with the eye of a sculptor that Charlotte Moth records modernist architecture and its copies which she encounters during her trips and residences. Photographed in black and white, these architectures seem empty, out of time, and open to any interpretation. The artist creates a classification of her species of spaces, called the “Travelogue”, which is both artwork and tool since it allows her to ceaselessly generate new works.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jessie Stead’s Punched Interlude works are made out of found police barricade tape that she punches holes in and then runs through a music box, the music is composed by her as audible reflection on barricades and no go zones throughout the city of New York in area of Donald Trump. The music box is attached to a gum ball machine globe which acts as a resonator, amplifying the music that results from the punched holes.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall. More than a simple reference to the sport, the work has the disconcerting effect of creating a danger zone in the gallery space. The reference to direct aggression or violence is reinforced by the piece’s rapid pace.