Installation (Installation)

In this work, Omer Fast probes the feelings experienced by young people involved in an acts of war. Four monitors installed in the form a chariot of war relay the words and faces of four young Israeli soldiers. The installation shows a young generation confronted by the reality of danger, whether being attacked or facing death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work is based on a temporal loop in which the stories of several duets coexist and interfere with each other. The narrative articulates itself around four key moments or four neighboring apartments that the viewer discovers progressively: an air stewardess having an argument with her unemployed husband, and old lady telling old stories that no longer interest her caregiver, a black woman who is accused of stealing jewelry just when a newcomer, of Arab origin, moves into the apartment block. The narration itself is based on a void or non-event, however its dialogues refer to subjects such as terrorism or iimmigration.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Watching the films of Omer Fast confounds our expectations of the medium. 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, is presented like a conventional big-budget Hollywood movie and has similarly high production values. Yet Fast frustrates the narrative element that Hollywood teaches us to expect: While stories unfold, repetitions and obscurities challenge the idea of a central controlling account.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Godville Portraits Ten illustrated short stories

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eija Riitta was born in 1954 in Liden, Sweden, and is “objectum-sexual.” Since June 17, 1979, her name is Eija Riitta Berliner Mauer taking the name of her husband, the Berlin Wall. In animism all elements of nature are considered as alive and have souls. “Objectum-sexuality” is an extension of this belief.

Falling Wall is choreography consisting of a wall, three performers wearing uniforms, and a short ritual. The performers stand aligned in front of the wall, which suddenly falls, menacingly, in the direction of the viewers. The synchronicity of collapse echoes the possibility of transgressing borders such as state frontiers, or even the museum wall.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine.

Photography (Photography)

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi . These staged photographs were shot against the backdrop of the city’s empty streets at sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. During this time, Muslims fast and retreat indoors, leaving the city eerily empty.

Photography (Photography)

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi . These staged photographs were shot against the backdrop of the city’s empty streets at sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. During this time, Muslims fast and retreat indoors, leaving the city eerily empty.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Prisons is part of a series of videos, entitled Our Body is a Weapon , representing individuals who affirm the body as a place of political and social resistance. In this video, two young women used their bodies as a weapon of war, participating in a hunger strike in Turkish prisons in the year 2000. This hunger strike was violently repressed by the army.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing. As the shot widens it reveals the process we see unfold: a piano being vigorously tested by a factory machine designed to determine the endurance of the instruments. Contrary to what is often relayed, the work has nothing to do with Chinese factories or fast changing global economies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Daily Life of Human is comprised of a fast-paced series of still images selected by the artist from ImageNet, a massive dataset of images (about 14 million) produced by BigGAN. Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs for short, are AI (machine learning) programs capable of generating (synthesizing, not finding) high-quality images. BigGAN is trained on how to make a certain type of image and then starts producing new images like those it learned from.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dhuwã (term used by indentured people of Natal for ‘smoke’), is a single-channel film by Sancintya Mohini Simpson that traces back to the lived experiences of indentured labourers taken from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) to work on sugar plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family were contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal. Filmed originally in 16mm film, Dhuwã captures sugarcane plantations in North Queensland, initially in moments of stillness that are gradually disrupted by a crescendo of repetitive sounds and fast camera movements that culminate in the fields being engulfed by flames.

Painting (Painting)

What Color is Luke Murphy’s outstanding digital painting that elegantly loops in nonstop motion. The artist cleverly usurped the familiar signage of brightly scrolling words that we ordinarily see calling out to advertise a Bodega or sidewalk cart’s fast food. In a DIY manner, Murphy constructed the extra-luminous LED panel screen and also wrote the code that sets the pace and pattern of the flowing words.

Photography (Photography)

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water. Yet, ambiguous lights blink from buildings and yachts still sail on the water, and further observation reveals these structures to be miniatures manipulated by the artist through Photoshop and other postproduction image tools. The model city’s surroundings are themselves real abandoned spaces, perhaps an empty room, a wait-to-be demolished building, or a discarded bathtub.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Produced in an interview format and as an extended chapter of Cosmic Call (2019) in the KADIST Collection, Angela Su’s True Calling by Angela Su documents the artist’s answers to a series of questions on the conception of her 2019 film that proposes speculative cosmic synchronicities for an alternative understanding of epidemics that is not built on the foundation and authority of Western medical science. Set in Hong Kong, each of the locations draw connections to places commonly tied to dominant disease outbreak narratives, such as a bustling wet market with butchers handling and selling raw meat products and the Hong Kong West Kowloon Railway Station, a cross-boundary transport terminus that sees a high traffic footprint and directly linking Hong Kong’s city center to Mainland destinations without interchange. As the artist travels around the city, she observes systems of surveillance such as police officers patrolling, security cameras, and an encircling helicopter, all playing an important role in managing the population and instating health security.

Painting (Painting)

5901 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, FL 33127 (Botanica) is a series of paintings that artist Eddie Arroyo created over an extended period of time, depicting the same site as it appeared from 2016 to 2018. Like the series shown at the Whitney, their focus is a building complex that until recently housed a Voodoo Botanica and Variety Shop, another iconic set of businesses on NE 2nd Avenue in Little Haiti that housed practitioners of voodoo proffering candles, potions, and incense. It was one of many businesses in the area bearing paintings by Serge Toussaint, a local artist and professional sign painter known for his portrayals of Little Haiti.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai. Installed like monitors fed by surveillance cameras, the videos present a voyeuristic entry into a private space, where two teams of men are scurrying around a bed, a desk, and some shelves in to score a goal, represented by a kitchen at one end and bathroom at the other. The game is furnished with complete uniforms, a referee, and a midfield line.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM. Shy, proud and joyful, the two boys appear to be influenced by a third person – the artist and his camera. Their play of eyes creates an atmosphere reminding one of the close scrutiny and state control of the Kurdish population.

Photography (Photography)

N°001 Djoubi et sa meute is part of a series of photographs by Laura Henno titled Ge Ouryao! . This particular work depicts a young man named Djoubi posing proudly, surrounded by his pack of dogs, along the shoreline of Mayotte.

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.