Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

David Gustav Cramer’s are composed of simple, descriptive texts accompanied by found photographs, letters or other materials. The elements juxtaposed in each work operate like the lines of a Haiku. It is the tension between them that opens space for thought.

H.2. N. Y Skeleton of the Dump revolves entirely around the performance “Homage to New York” (1960), of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), during which the machine built by the artist in the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) had to self-destruct itself in 27 minutes, but, in the end, it had to be finished off by firemenbeing called in after it erupted in flames. Since the discovery of Jean tinguely’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, in 1982, Michael Landy spent two years researching and sketching (charcoal, oil, glue, ink) from his previous research carried out at Museum Tinguely in Basel, and at the MOMA in New York.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G. I. character, personified through an action figure that comes to life. The protagonist breaks into Chicago’s Oriental Institute to “liberate” Mesopotamian votive statues, who are likewise animated through voice-over narration, from their imprisonment in the museum’s vitrines. This set-up allows for meditations on various war and colonial histories; as a barbed twist on the Bush-era rhetoric of promoting “democracy” in the Middle East through regime change, the G. I. cannot understand why the statues wish to remain in the museum and not return to their (currently war torn) “homelands”.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After two years of research in close conversation with anthropologists and archaeologists, Linares eventually enrolled in classes to study archeology—specifically the history of material artifacts. He became obsessed with the origin of metaphor, and the stick as the Ur (earliest) object used by humans that led to the formation of meaning itself. This video, which accompanies the “Museum of the Stick,” is part of major work surveying material culture collected and presented by the artist through a complex narrative of associations and anthropological research.

Painting (Painting)

In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message. The viewer is faced with the familiar image of political power seen in our homes on the television, yet this time located in a whimsical abstract landscape. The speaker appears as a shadow in front of a crowd that is responding to him by holding bubbles containing images of animals and plants.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The sculpture shores shored (Working Title) makes reference to the human form. The two sides of the sculpture are distinctively different, with the rear showing an anamorphic-corrugated structure, the front suggesting the human form, making perhaps an unconscious reference to Giacometti or Barnett Newman. But whereas their work suggests immanence, Michael Dean refuses any notion of transcendence, remaining rooted in presentness .

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (violet)

Installation (Installation)

Martin Kippenberger’s late collages are known for incorporating a wide range of materials, from polaroids and magazine clips to hotel stationery, decals, and graphite drawings. Untitled is a collage on paper work by Kippenberger that typifies his everything-goes approach: a barely discernible, sliced image of Michael Jackson’s face is overlaid and woven with strips and triangular shapes from a different source into a single composition. Blue tones come from torn out pages of a book where fragments of illustrations can be seen.

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.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For many years, Nina Könnemann has placed a camera before a billboard situated in the suburb Neukoln in Berlin. The silent film that exposes the both banal and paradoxical passages of time and space of the passers by highlights the transformation of public space. The surface of exhibition—the billboard—becomes a wall behind which the fascination of the artwork concentrates.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Installation (Installation)

In Felicitas, we follow the converging routes of three characters: Felicitas, Michael and Andrew (the artist’s father-in-law who also features elsewhere). Felicitas is thedaughter of a German industrialist who immigrated to Rio after the Second World War. She is the one visible with a toucan in several images.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Erratum: Brief Interruptions in the Waste Stream exists as performance, sculpture, drawing, video and the printed word. In a short video the two artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine transform a porcelain toilet into bricks in four movements. In quite brutal actions, they use sledgehammers to smash the toilet into small shards that are then reshaped to form a stack of bricks.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dreaming of the dream of the dream is a 16mm projection consisting of images of waves that come and go continuously. The artist has assembled extracts of cartoons in which water is visible (the sea, bubbles, a stream, waves, etc.). Somewhat nostalgic, these extracts can recall either childhood cartoons or paintings by Hokusai.

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)

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.