Film & Video (Film & Video)

Heat Waves by Kent Chan examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of the different aesthetics of heat by drawing from the aesthetics of regions defined by hot and humid climates and associated with histories of coloniality such as ‘the global south’ and the ‘developing world’. The video takes the form of a curated broadcast or music video of historical and contemporary imagery and videos of both found and filmed footage, including media broadcasts; TikToks; DJ sets; an interview with Keanu Reeves; an excerpt of Ho Tzu Nyen’s 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art (2005); an interview with KADIST Collection artist Julian Abraham Togar; and DJ sets. The barrage of footage weaves together contrasting tropes about the tropics: depicting it as a diseased paradise; naturally abundant, yet economically poor; filled with people who are at once energetic and lazy; with dynamic aesthetics, but lacking order.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) by Leelee Chan is inspired by the camouflaging nature of the peppered-moth caterpillar. In 1800s Europe, during the industrial revolution, light-colored moths evolved into a darker color after trees in their habitat darkened by the polluting soot. Today, due to rapid human changes to the environment, caterpillars can adapt even before they metamorphose into moths, mimicking the colour of the branches they inhabit.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Park Chan-Kyong’s otherworldly film Belated Bosal primarily follows two women as they navigate their way up a spectral mountain and through what appears to be a history museum or nuclear disaster bunker. They converge to jointly perform a funeral rite in a shipping container, which a group of artisans temporarily convert into a makeshift Buddhist temple, replete with traditional paintings. Shot in crisp and densely detailed black-and-white negative, each frame is lit by the format’s spooky incandescence: shadows are white and the sun is black, as if the world were being viewed through X-ray, infrared camera or a plutonium-sensitive film.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Olive Oil (from the Propo Series)

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself. In homage to an influence in his early career, McCarthy attempted to reconstruct a pair of pants worn by Black Panther revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver in a picture that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. But in the process, McCarthy misremembered their original design of the pants, which had black outer panels and white inner panels in white, and left a black shape highlighted in the crotch area.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens exist in literature across many cultures including Ancient Greece and India, described as part bird and part woman, or like a mermaid. They were said to charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces.

Photography (Photography)

McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works. Here, McCarthy squirts liquid out of a bottle held near his crotch onto a stuffed animal in the shape of a lion. The costuming, materials, and simulated bodily functions frequently appear in McCarthy’s work, which often disturbingly juxtaposes visceral and startling manipulation of the body with the cheerful artifacts of popular consumer culture.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Oil Bell

Installation (Installation)

Sound of Ice Melting is based on the ancient Zen Buddhist koan about the sound of one hand clapping. Here, Kos has surrounded two twenty-five-pound blocks of ice with eight microphones that call to mind the political press conferences prevalent during the Vietnam War era when this piece was created. Zen practice values such absurdity as a way to transcend the limitations of ordinary discourse and rational thought—empirical processes at the root of all political conflicts.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey. On his shoulders he supports an enormous false head, Mickey’s familiar face grinning with glossy eyes. The artist has marked out in heavy black the background of Cinderella’s castle.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Parked on the shoulder of a single lane highway running through a desert landscape, Marlene looks over her shoulder from inside the car at a fierce storm looming over a distant horizon. Turning her head toward and away from the scene she says, “When I look for the lightning it never strikes, but when I look away it does.” And indeed, the lightning does seem to strike only when she turns away. Before filming Lightning , Paul Kos had done a fair amount of research on lightning, much of it conducted at the lightning research lab at the University of Colorado.

Painting (Painting)

In this painting made in 2014, which is part of a series started in 2013, the artist dismantles the traditional painting process. Putting aside any formal intervention, the artist lets the membrane slowly soak up white monochrome paint through a transferring technique before removing it. In some places the structure of the canvas can be seen, while other places of the canvas are purposely blurred to evoke the texture of the material used.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Board has a deadpan quality worthy of Buster Keaton. With this work, Wood and Harrison create an intimate, formally structured mise-en-scène in which they use their own bodies in interaction with a wooden board. The artists elaborate an orchestration of the comic consequences of inertia, gravity, and the law of falling bodies in this low-tech physics experiment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s earliest works, Device features Harrison performing a series of actions, assisted by the titular ‘devices’, that use physics to force his body into unusual and uncomfortable positions. Maintaining his signature deadpan expression throughout the video, in one scene Harrison is thrusted into the air by a slowly inflating balloon until only his feet are visible in the frame, while in another he levitates in diving position with the help of a pulley system. Wood uses his body and specially-designed props created by the artist duo to explore the space of the screen in hilarious, and sometimes clumsy or violent, ways.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

3-Legged is an early video work by John Wood and Paul Harrison in which they appear with their legs tied together (as one would do in a three-legged race). Wood and Harrison stand together in a narrow alcove built into their studio, dressed similarly in grey long sleeve shirts and jeans. Facing a tennis ball machine that is almost completely out of view, with only the barrel of the machine protruding from the bottom of the frame, they hobble back and forth across the alcove attempting to avoid the tennis balls launching toward them, with varying degrees of success.

Painting (Painting)

In Untitled (after Paul Schultze Nuremberg’s Kunst) (2006), from a larger series of diptychs, Gmelin addresses the notion of entartete kunst ( “Degenerate Art”) . Each diptych juxtaposes a portrait of a person considered to be mentally handicapped with a painting that was branded by the Nazi regime as degenerate. Gmelin’s source for these images is Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), a book by Paul Schultze Naumburg published in 1928.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Painting (Painting)

Taken from the title of the incredibly influential punk/hardcore record I AGAINST I by the Bad Brains, Untitled (blue) is an acrylic painting on reflective paper by Chris Duncan is part of a larger body of work titled EYE AGAINST I . This title references Duncan’s early artistic influences from the punk and hardcore music communities in tandem with his conceptual interest in perception and optics. This small painting features a glowing cluster of colorful dots on a bright blue background, also created from an accumulation of blue dots in varying tones.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Soufiane Ababri’s desire to construct a historical family and a genealogy of queer kinships in Bedwork / Yes I AM sees him conjuring up a pantheon of gay writers and artists whose intellect has changed the course of human history and development, despite their outsider status. Figures as disparate as Michel Foucault, Glenn Ligon, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and André Gide populate Ababri’s drawing series in the artist’s signature naïf style, their homosexuality the thread that connects them. The series of over forty drawings are part of Bedwork, a larger project that Ababri began in 2015.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U. S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Naama Tsabar’s sculptural works are developed serially. The series Work on Felt references the history of post-minimal sculpture: from Robert Morris to Joseph Beuys’s social sculptures. However one can equally relate her work to 1970s conceptual performers such as Terry Fox or Paul Kos.