Photography (Photography)

Washington D. C. Constitution Ave. is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image, a woman and a child walk along Constitutional Avenue as a surveillance camera on the street post directs its gaze towards them. The otherwise quiet image then becomes an exercise of resistance: together with the other images from the series, Gordon’s photograph documents the changes that have taken place in architecture, civic life, especially in a post 9/11 experience of public space.

Photography (Photography)

San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.

Photography (Photography)

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.

Photography (Photography)

The Caste Portraits Series by Leah Gordon investigates the practice of grading skin color from black to white, which marked the extent of racial mixing in 18th century Haiti. Médéric Moreau de St Mery (1750-1819), a French créole slave owner and freemason living in Saint Domingue (now Haiti), created a taxonomy of race classifying skin color from black to white using names derived from mythology, natural history, and bestial miscegenation. His Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789) hierarchizes 128 possible combinations of black-white miscegenation into nine categories (the sacatra, the griffe, the marabout, the mulâtre, the quarteron, the métis, the mamelouk, the quarteronné, and the sang-melé).

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2019, Ayoung Kim traveled to Mongolia to research its widespread animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones, and sacred caves that purify human guilt. The Mongolian people’s belief that rocks and minerals are alive, like other natural elements, consider the particular origin myth that human beings were born from stones. For the video work Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix Kim creates her own hyperbolic mythology connected to the origin of the fictional mineral genderless Petra Genetrix, a figure who also appears in other recent works by the artist.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010. tranzit.cz is part of a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Romania since 2002. Such doodle-like drawings are often crucial components of Kim’s performances. The imagery of faces, heads, snakes, and serpentine paths are recurring motifs in the artist’s drawing practice.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Pianoiss . . . issmo (Worse Finish)

Painting (Painting)

Readymade Flea Market is part of a series of works developed by Hun Kyu Kim. While the artist’s previous work drew a parallel between capitalism’s inherent social violence and the evolution of weaponry, Hun Kyu Kim now focuses on political nihilism and how to overcome it. In this new work he uses the metaphor of 3D Graphic Space to represent our current reality.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sung Hwan Kim created the drawing push against the air 01 during a rehearsal for his eponymous 2007 performance at De Apple (as part of Prix de Rome), Amsterdam, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. For the performance, Kim interviews his frequent collaborator David Michael DiGregorio and a fellow musician, Byungjun Kwon, about love songs they have composed. The performance appears spontaneous and creates a space of vulnerability and intimacy, however in reality, the three rehearsed the performance numerous times and performed it in numerous cities.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010. tranzit.cz is part of a network working independently in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, and Romania since 2002. Such doodle-like drawings are often crucial components of Kim’s performances. The imagery of faces, heads, snakes, and serpentine paths are recurring motifs in the artist’s drawing practice.

NFT (NFT)

Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022). Sun produced this NFT from a still image of the animation that features a drawn notation of the sign “echo” in American Sign Language. Visually the black and white image depicts two side by side mounds, one labelled ‘Hand’ and the other labelled ‘Palm’.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eschewing their current musicological function, 4 mourners on a mantel presents photo-realistic depictions of said figures on top of a hypothetical collector’s fireplace. Herein, these funerary objects are displaced as curios which stare back at the viewer in signs of grief and confusion.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Indexes that either allow or inhibit the establishment of communication exist in both signed as well as spoken languages. Some differ radically depending on a variety of social, economic and geographical factors, while others are universally understood. Seemingly small and fleeting gestures can determine a sense of affiliation or a feeling of rejection.

Installation (Installation)

Sylbee Kim’s Unindebted Life is a single-channel video, commissioned and premiered at the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021). This work is a major production by the artist, addressing her attempts to attractively integrate and intersect elements such as bodies and minds, ancient spirituality, heterogeneity, class and capital, digital temporality, and particular aesthetics of the post-internet generation. In the work, the vitality and the movement in calligraphy motifs, revealed through the flashing light presented in the screen panels and video sequences, are related to the moment of change inherent in the body’s cell energy and living things.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Turtle Walk is a video installation that documents two performers carrying large white disks on their backs as they walk through the urban environment of Seoul. The simple disks disrupt normal social behaviors in urban space, acting like parabolic antennae that cause the performers to interact and communicate unusually with their surroundings. The performance causes viewers to reflect on their expectations for normal behaviors within the social space of the city.

Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development).

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s work brings together spoken and written language, photography, vintage television and computer animation to pay homage to African-American popular culture. Figuration (B) is a mediatic dumpster dive through the not-yet-historical past, its fantasia of purloined images flowing to an interruptive, channel-surfing logic. A stream of TV clips, commercials, news segments, video memes, and movie scenes—at times run backwards, doubled, or layered over other clips—incorporate archival and pop cultural sources layered with a soundtrack constructed of found and made sources to make something akin to a video mixtape.

Photography (Photography)

For the last few years, Che Onejoon has been focusing on the relationships between African countries and North Korea. He has attempted to interpret the ongoing Cold War in the Korean peninsula from a new geopolitical perspective. His resulting body of work focuses on the memorial monuments, statues and architectures that were built in 13 different African countries by North Korean government.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Park Chan-Kyong’s film Citizen’s Forest draws on two works for which the artist has a particular fondness: The Lemures , an incomplete painting by Korean artist Oh Yoon, and Colossal Roots , a poem by Korean poet Kim Soo-Young. The Lemures (1984) is a panoramic sketch depicting a procession of victims from major events in modern Korean history, including the Donghak Peasant Revolution, the Korean War, and the Gwangju Uprising. Colossal Roots (1974) is an intellectual text taking into account the multiple layers of unconditional acceptance of traditions while subverting the Orientalist perspective.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Possibility of the Half by Minouk Lim is a two-channel video projection that begins with a mirror image of a weeping woman kneeling on the ground. As both frames progresses, a montage of large crowds of mourners are depicted in slow motion interwoven with a variety of images including bomb explosions, fireworks, vacant stores, sunsets and sunrises, beachside landscapes, and infrared shots. At midpoint, life in the year 4012 is foreshadowed down to living insects and the video concludes back in the year 2012 as a burning inferno.

Photography (Photography)

A young settler girl, dressed in a bridal outfit for Purim, stands in a street in Hebron waiting, perhaps for her parents or other children to join her. In the background three soldiers scan the buildings and the rooftops for threatening presences. Turning her back to the soldiers, the little girl pays no attention to what surrounds her.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Che Onejoon’s unsettling video My Utopia opens with a round table of women asking and answering the questions “Who am I? Where did I come from? Where should I go?” One of the women featured is Monique Macías, the daughter of Francisco Macías Nguema, the first Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin. As a symbol of the past there could be none more powerful than this. By carving into its floor, Kilpper laid bare its history by making images of its occupants and political figures associated with that period of history.