Installation (Installation)

Aqua by Fernando Palma Rodríguez is an installation formed by four gourds and one movement detector that activates them. Once put in motion, the gourds open and close hinged hands that are cut from their bodies, catalyzing a sophisticated, choreographed conversation among them. Following Indigenous notions of personhood, Palma Rodríguez grants agency to ordinary objects and therefore the ability to relate to others—humans as well as non-humans.

Painting (Painting)

Abel Rodríguez’s precise, botanical illustrations are drawn from memory and knowledge acquired by oral traditions. They are the visions of someone who sees the potential of plants as food, material for dwellings and clothing, and for use in sacred rites. Terraza Alta V is part of a series of drawings that track the changing appearance and life of an area identified as Terraza Alta.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ecotone by Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a video work presented in six chapters, each beginning and ending with a one-sided telephone dialog with an informal, friendly and conversational tone, that leads quickly into complex philosophical subjects. The first chapter is an introduction, and the last is an epilogue, and both employ interfaces (a smartphone screen, and an optical illusion, respectively) to invite the viewer to make conceptual connections across the chapters. An “ecotone” is a region of transition between two biological communities.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Javier M. Rodriguez’s Going Round and Round in a Line ST (12m) is a sculptural composition made of the simplest materials—a single tape measure and metal rivets. The rivets lock the tape measure in its contorted shape, bending in angles to create a geometric abstraction. The piece hangs simply from the ceiling, at times rotating around, its shape changing with our point of view.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The drawing “Heidegger’s Cabin” (2005) is inspired by Martin Heidegger’s essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” During the artist’s stay in a high alpine area, near a lake reservoir, Bussmann related the landscape in her surroundings to her reading of Heidegger’s terms on the work of art and the meaning of a “thing.” In attempt to link spiritual heights to natural heights, Bussmann metaphorically relates the subjects of being and truth to a hiking path, and its different degrees of challenge and risk. In the drawings rather than finding the optimal path to reach ultimate meaning and materialization, Bussmann never arrives at “Heidegger’s Cabin,” and instead is led off the beaten track to areas she never discovered before. Upon her return from the mountains in 2004 and 2005, she continued to develop the series, leading up to 20 drawings on handmade paper that attempt to problematize Heidegger’s theory on artworks as “things” as bearers of traits, “things” confronting the world of perception, and “things” as formed matter.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney. This ubiquitous form of public transportation, originally built from U. S. military jeeps left on the islands after World War II, is normally exuberantly painted and personalized. They are known for their crowded seating and kitsch decorations, which have become an omnipresent symbol of Philippine culture.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Unraveling, or “unweaving” sections of fabric, Maria Fernanda Plata arrived at delicate and tenuous-looking forms, both ghostly and gentle. Her careful meditations in fabric reflect Plata’s ongoing interest in the relationship between people and their environments, in fragility, systems, and destruction.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the performance video Vitrina , María Teresa Hincapié stood inside a storefront window in downtown Bogota, unannounced, for eight hours a day, wearing a uniform and initially carrying out cleaning chores. As the day and passers went by, the routine became more playful: she would send kisses to bus drivers on the busy Avenida Jiménez who would return them, use the newspaper with which she was shining the glass to flirtatiously hide and engage with an improvised audience or draw the shape of her body with soap and a sponge. She would interrupt these chores to carry out other ‘feminine’ activities, like brushing her hair or applying make-up, only to return to frantically cleaning the transparent surface that separated her from the public.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.)

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Interested in role-play and videogames, Ana María Millán developed workshops with different communities in order to create characters and scenarios for her animations, often in collaboration with a choreographer. Elevación evokes various narratives inspired by the comicstrip Marquetalia, Raíces de la Resistencia (Marquetalia, Roots of the Resistance) (2011). This comic strip is a memoir of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas written by Jesús Santrich, one of its leaders who, after the 2016 Peace Agreement, rejoined dissident members of the organization in a clandestine guerrilla splinter group in 2019.

Photography (Photography)

Palo Enceba’o is a project by José Castrellón composed of three photographs, two drawings on metal, and a video work that creates a visual and cultural analogy between the events of January 9th, 1964 in Panama City and the game of palo encebado carried out in certain parts of Panama to celebrate the (US-backed) independence from Colombia. In the game, young men climb a wood post smeared with animal wax to collect a Panamanian flag in return for a bounty. During what is now remembered as Martyrs’ Day, Panamanian students trespassed the fence that separated the American-governed strip of land along the Panama Canal and Panama City to fly a flag and symbolically claim sovereignty over the area that had been turned over to the United States by the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty in 1903.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva traveled to Japan for a month to make a series of short 16mm films, often shot in slow-motion. This film, shown in continuous loop, has a run-time of just under 3 minutes, and is presented without sound. It captures a traditional Shisa (combination of a dog and lion from Okinawan mythology) animated by an invisible person.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La Ruta by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through untouched natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico. The Panoramic Route was designed for residents and tourists to connect with the traditional center of the island, as part of a political agenda to modernize the country through infrastructure and social programs. Today, the highway is notorious for dismal road conditions, resulting in isolation between more densely populated metropolitan areas and contributing to a loss of cultural sites and practices that once took place along the Route.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Audra Knutson’s work, The Death , is a hand-pulled linocut print inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Set in what appears to be a pathway inside a small town, the scene features two central figures: a man seated on a chair with a skull on his lap, and a girl writing the message ‘voilà votre mort, monsieur’ on a nearby wall. The girl’s message echoes the expression in the man’s face, who appears resigned or as described by Knutson “accepting death or a monotony in living, and not embracing beauty.” The large areas of solid ink in contrast with the delicate linework create a sense of theatricality and drama, and add to the mysterious and surreal nature of the scene.

Installation (Installation)

Carlton Hotel project is the second part of a research on the Carlton, an iconic building of modernist architecture from the 1960s in Beirut. Designed by Polish architect Karol Shayer, it was destroyed in 2008 (date of the project’s creation). This project is multifaceted, always transforming into different forms and involving a series of collaborations: the first step took place as part of the “traveling curtains project”, which consisted in recuperating the curtains from the Carlton hotel before its demolition and sending them to different cities throughout the world where they would be subject to new interventions and transformations by artists, among whom Marwa Arsanios.

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.

Installation (Installation)

The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions. This work by Native Art Department International signals a reminder that we–the audience and institution–are located on and occupy traditional territories. The work appropriates and twists white artist Sam Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) in response to his work Scaffold (2012) installed in 2016-7 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In “Untitled II (Mapping text)”, 2009, Langa abstracts language in an attempt to change the familiar into the absurd. With reference to comic speech bubbles, Langa combines in a sea of blue gouache a series of nuanced references to identity and politics with “Black Maria” alongside nostalgic and subtle phrases such as “mom be with me, I need u now” and “I didn’t listen.” Through this gathering of references “Untitled II (Mapping text)” forges a poetic and vulnerable site to engage with his personal experiences while simultaneously suggesting the senseless structure of language. This work resonates to larger world of art, politics and popular culture through layering assorted references, piling up meanings that are cryptic and ambivalent, yet resonant with multiple interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

dawn chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta is a work produced in Sofía Córdova native Puerto Rico and was largely shaped by the financial crisis, the islands’ histories under colonial rule and most recently, the climate-change related natural disasters which have affected the island. The latest of which, hurricane Maria, and the subsequent political mishandling of the situation, gave the project its ending. Prior to the hurricane, this work also engaged in conversation with blackness and anti-blackness in the Caribbean, syncretic religion and dance music as modes of survival and liberation, and fantasy and science-fictional strategies as means to break out of our current arc of history.