Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk. In this series, the artist attempts to organize meetings somewhere in the world. The audience is given the details of a meeting—the place, date and time—and nothing more.

Photography (Photography)

According to Viktor Kochetov, Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows is the first hand-colored print he ever made. Although this might well be a part of the artist’s mythology, this image perfectly demonstrates the methodology the Kochetovs used in their work. The snapshot itself was created during a journalistic assignment to document the meeting between a WWII veteran and school children in the Kharkiv region.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights. The protesters and their supporters carried signs and wore t-shirts whose messages are highlighted in the drawings. However, in them, Bowers isolates the images of the protesters from the multitude that surrounds them in the original photographs, and, therefore amplifies their messages.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A sly sense of humor is key in Pablo Helguera’s long-running Artoons series, one that includes ~1500 drawings made over ten years. It’s no secret that the artworld tends to take itself too seriously, so it’s no surprise that Helguera’s project has developed a large following over the past decade—providing much needed comic relief.. Helguera grew up making and exchanging drawings like these with his father and brother, but never made drawing a part of his public practice until in 2008, when he began periodically posting what came to be known as ‘Artoons’ on Facebook. The series caricatures and lampoons agents and events in the artworld, combining just enough visual reference along with a caption.

Photography (Photography)

Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram. Bold shapes, and the breaks between them, create a rhythm and compose an engaging abstract image. At the same time, the work deals with the conditions of the photograph’s manufacture.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Textile (Textile)

In 2011, Mounira Al Solh began a series of drawings that documented her meetings and conversations with displaced Syrian refugees in Lebanon and various European countries. The oral histories she collected are very different from those told in administrative interviews or police interviews. My specialty was to make a peasants’ haircut, but they obliged me work till midnight often (2017) is part of a series of embroideries that speaks to how personal stories in this political context create collective history.

Painting (Painting)

Shaun O’Dell’s paintings, installations, videos, sculptures, and music explore the overlapping realities of human and natural structures. Whether abstract or figurative, they often read like hieroglyphics, in that they piece together a philosophical portrait of reality. Purple Brush 8 is a painting that details a meeting of geometric forms, and the optical play that results.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Gozo Yoshimasu’s double-sided work on paper Fire Embroidery explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Gozo Yoshimasu’s visual-poetry series Dear Monster (Kaibutsu-kun) explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Gozo Yoshimasu’s visual-poetry series Dear Monster (Kaibutsu-kun) explores his response to the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. He embarked on the project out of a deep sense of sympathy and commitment, in pursuit of “poetry possible after March 2011”, without exactly knowing where he was heading. He started scribing lines and letters on exceptionally large manuscript paper that he handcrafted every day.

Painting (Painting)

Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang is a series of landscapes in the Xiaoxiang region in the modern day Hunan Province, China, and was a popular subject of poems, drawings and paintings during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Liang follows tradition by interpreting the historical subjects by classical Chinese artists including Dong Yuan (934–962 AD), Mu Xi (died in 1281 AD), Wen Weiming (1470–1559 AD). This reinterpretation represents the meeting point of the Xiang River and the Dongting Lake.

Painting (Painting)

The painting Index (Tokyo) includes an image of a protest march in Japan. There is some humor in this image and also cultural contextual confusion and displacement, embodied in the painting. The protest we can see on the clipping is against two things : 1)recently the Japanese government revised the constitution (some say illegally) so that the right to collective self-defense is possible; this basically re-militarizes Japan ending decades of pacifism and this sparked the largest public protests in recent years and 2) the protestors are also marching against re-starting nuclear power plants in Japan post-Fukushima.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marché Salomon by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz depicts two meat vendors, a young man and woman, chatting in Marché Salomon, a busy Port-au-Prince market. Amongst the surrounding bustle, the two have an unsentimental discussion about the mystical qualities of common products sold at the market, wondering whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats. Their musings weave together the cosmic and the mundane, with the work of butchering a goat and the characters of the market serving as existential metaphors for the universe, time travel, ghosts, and death.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s POWERPOINTS is an ongoing series of digital artworks that have been created with Microsoft PowerPoint. They are endless loops with sound. POWERPOINTS parallel Gothe-Snape’s broader conceptual practice stemming from improvisational performance.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I’ve heard stories (2008) is one of Marwa Arsanios early works. It is a short animated film staging a story that took place at the Carlton hotel in Beirut. This work is the first part of a longer project on this iconic building.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“A man wanders near the windows of a gallery, situated adjacent to the street. He occasionally gazes through windows into the gallery but never enters.” Passersby are numerous since these windows are by a tram stop on a busy street. It is surprising to note how few of them take any notice of this man peering repeatedly through the slightly tinted glass into an empty meeting room with no distinctive signs to be seen.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Polanszky’s sculpture is made from raw, found materials that have the patina of age. He brings together disparate material discarded by society to form aggregates. Although it is not his intention to make works of meaning the viewer endows them with poetic meanings and constructs.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Global? 1 & 2 documents an annual event during which people of a particular religious group gather around Jejuri in Maharashtra, India. The six-day festival, from the first to sixth lunar day of the bright fortnight of the Hindu month of Margashirsha is celebrated to allow the meeting of the principle God (Khandoba) with other gods carried from different homes of the patrons who take them back at the end of the ceremony.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film Sometimes It Was Beautiful by Christian Nyampeta poetically addresses the systemic conditions leading and emerging from the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which had lasting and profound effects on Rwanda and neighbouring countries like Congo. The divergent opinions of the characters, as well as suggestive gestures, settings, and marks inscribed in the landscape highlight the different approaches in addressing the slow violence linked to the enduring impact of colonialism and imperialism, the pursuit of knowledge, and the conservation of heritage, culture, and object repatriation. Structured into six chapters, the film imagines a meeting between improbable friends and interlaces dialogues, with choreography of dancers, places and objects.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Immolation I is taken from the four-part Immolation series which shows four Arab revolutionaries who publicly sacrificed themselves through self-immolation and in so doing heralded the beginning of the Arab Spring. The lugubrious drawings are made with cigarette burns, a direct reference to torture and burning stakes, even if what is depicted here can be considered the ultimate act of resistance in the form of self-destruction. The portraits were meticulously executed on large-scale fragile sheets of paper.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For the project Aguas calientes Gabriel Chaile exchanged silverware from three popular soup kitchens (mutual aid organizations to provide food for people in need) in Buenos Aires to brand new cooking utensils to shape his project. Chaile then reworks the used goods, welding and engraving the names of their sites of provenance and imagery from local indigenous community’s visual repertoire; faces from vessels and iconography present in Cultura Tafí, Condorhuasi, Alamito, Santa María, Candelaria, and Ciénaga. Through this operation, he translates the idea of the “communal pot” into a meeting point for mutual cooperation and political resistance.

Photography (Photography)

Mooi indie (which translates to “Beautiful Indies”) is a term used to depict the beauty of nature in the East Indies during the period of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. The term is usually used to describe a painting, romanticising the alluring tropics through the lens of European imperialism. Later in the 1950s, the prominent Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono, who is known as one of the founding fathers of Indonesian Modern Art, publicly rejected the Mooi Indie genre as Indonesian art.