Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled was part of the 2002 exhibition “Drawings for the Austrian School” held at the D’Amelio Terras gallery in New York. For this occasion, Morris created a language of his own by using acrylic, ink, graphite and ballpoint pen on paper. The exhibition title comes from Morris’ interest in the early 20th century Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a one time Austrian Minister of Finance, bank director, and economics professor who taught in Europe and at Harvard University.

Painting (Painting)

In No Title (Blue Chapel) Therrien has reduced the image of a chapel to a polygon. The object and its ground both glow, but the chapel-shape is crisp and simple, reminiscent of a piece of cut paper. Like many of Therrien’s early pieces, this abstraction slips into representation and the visual and spiritual power of the image is emphasized by the strong central placement of the chapel.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Forking Sprawl

Photography (Photography)

Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s is from the series “As We Walked on Water” (2010-2012), which looks into Singapore’s history around the phenomenon of land reclamation. After exhausting the country’s own soil from its tiny hills and ridges, the government had to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue its reclamation efforts. At the early stages of a land reclamation project, the imported sand would sit idle for some time, forming an artificial desert-like landscape.

Photography (Photography)

Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, the photographic grid features a selection of some 6,000 members from single family of flies –hoverfly– identified over the last 25 years by Sacramento-based Dr. Martin Hauser, Senior Insect Biosystematist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture and longtime acquaintance of the artist. Worldwide specialist of hoverflies, Dr. Hauser collected the insect and meticulously sorted them out. The label below each fly indicates the country where it is from, its species, its size, etc.

Photography (Photography)

The photograph Proxy II (Beetles) by Robert Zhao Renhui belongs to a series, titled Christmas Island, Naturally, that focuses on the ecology of Christmas Island; a remote volcanic land formation in the Indian Ocean. Since the first settlements in the late 19th century, the ecosystems of Christmas Island have undergone devastating alterations. After nearly 150 years of human settlement, a number of invasive species have been unwittingly introduced to the island.

Photography (Photography)

Expedition #46 is a work from the series “The Glacier Study Group,” which consists of artists, scientists, activists, and enthusiasts of glacial and polar activity in the Artic Circle to conduct scientific investigation, data collection, and glacier sampling. Recent media attention on global warming and climate change has driven interest in increased glacial activity. The group spends long period of each year in the harsh Arctic environment to acquire in-depth knowledge of these changes while experiencing the landscape firsthand.

Installation (Installation)

Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr. Martin Hauser, Senior Insect Biosystematist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and longtime acquaintance of the artist. In Villa Dei Fiori, September to November, Zhao Renhui tracked and collected multiple insects within the everyday urban environment, either finding the insects dead or following them around for few days.

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Darbyshire has made several Furniture Islands, all of which employ different objects and different color values. Furniture Island No 3 looks like a shop display tastefully arranged in complementary colours. Darbyshire’s use of colour is like that of a designer or a painter.

Installation (Installation)

A woman pronounces parts of sentences. Via rigorous editing, the artist creates anticipation with the silences, rhythm by the repetitions, temporal ellipses with music. The recording is diffused by a loud speaker placed on a plinth which gives the whole an anthropomorphic status which reminds one of Box with the sound of its own making by Robert Morris.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (violet)

Film & Video (Film & Video)

16 films is a selection of David Haxton’s single-screen videos, which he began producing in the 1970s as a continuation of some of the conceptual underpinnings of his earlier film installations. As the described by Haxton, “[he] became interested in in examining the nature of the medium [of film] including light, movement, and the formation of a three-dimensional illusion of space in a flat surface.” This selection of films were produced in 16mm film between 1970 and 1982 and have been digitally mastered in high definition from the original 16mm films, which are preserved by the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles. Reminiscent of the paired back, low-fi quality of other conceptual video work from that period, Haxton abides to a certain criteria to restrict aspects of the medium: he does not do any editing, always fixes the camera onto a single position for the whole duration of the films, and he limits the actions of the performers.

Photography (Photography)

In this anti-collage, which comes from a series of 4, Macuga takes a photo she found in the archives of Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw. The series was made on the occasion of her exhibition there in 2011. In 2000, Harald Szeemann curated an exhibition at Zacheta called ‘Beware of Exiting your Dreams: You May Find Yourself in Somebody Else’s.’ The exhibition provoked a violent response as a result of his inclusion of Maurizio Cattelan’s La nona ora , where the figure of the Pope is struck down by a meteor.

Photography (Photography)

In the mid to late 70s David Haxton turned to photography, and similarly to his output in film, his photographs show reverberations of his perspective as a painter. As inferred from the title—and the titles of most of his work—Haxton has a methodical, near-scientific approach to studying and documenting the effects of light. In Holes in White and Holes in Cream with?

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Minutos de odio contra sí mismo (Minutes of hate against itself) is a simple and powerful work about the political situation in Venezuela, replacing the stars on the flag with bullet holes. A meditation on the disillusionment of the people towards the government and nationalism. The precision of the marksman is impressive, as if “drawing” or re-making the representation of the symbol within a contemporary reality and climate.

Photography (Photography)

In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person. Since a photograph is fixed, it cannot encapsulate the spirit of someone who is gone. Muñoz etched onto the surface of a mirror an appropriated historical image, a daguerreotype from 1839.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).

Installation (Installation)

Adição por subtração 4 (Addition by Subtraction, 2010) is an intervention into the white cube with both beautiful and intimidating results. The installation is a large rectangular frame created out of shards of clear and colored glass that protrude from the wall. The use of glass fragments is reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s sculpture Map of Glass (Atlantis) (1969), yet the concerns here are very different.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (Construction) recalls the series of glass cubes that gained Bell international recognition in the 1960s. Resembling a black-mirrored box, this recent iridescent piece produces an uncanny effect in which the interior planes seem to enclose a mysterious light. Although austere in form, Bell’s works are far from simple: he uses technology like a vacuum-coating process, to accurately control the different levels of opacity and transparency on the surface of his immaculate glass works.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Like many of Larry Bell’s works, VFGY9 deals primarily with the viewer’s experience of sight. The blocks resemble a stone carving, or slabs of wood shaped into a simple organic composition whose overall sheen is varied through a thin layer of aluminum vapor. Yet, the real material of Bell’s piece is actually light, formed within the viewer’s eye into masses as present as stone.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Battle of Karbala was a military engagement that took place on 10 Muharram, 61 AH (October 10 th , 680) in Karbala, situated in present day Iraq, when Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, was killed. This battle is central to Shia Muslim belief in which Hussein’s martyrdom is commemorated each year, in a celebration called Ashura which symbolises the birth of Muslim division still at issue today between the Shia and Sunni. During Ashura , the artist worked in close collaboration with the people of Zeynebiye (referring to Hussein’s courageous sister, Zeyneb), documenting their preparations for the ceremonies, which involve a mass theatre performance and the isolated, weeping ritual at the end of the Ashura day.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

AIDS Ring by General Idea is a cast metal ring, which takes as its basis Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” design, appropriating its pop aesthetic, and totalizing, simplistic universal messaging to instead emphasize the severity of the AIDS epidemic that occurred in the 1970s. This visual detournement of Indiana’s sculpture into the form of a ring is an indictment of pop art’s apolitical nature, as well as of its increasingly commodified status. General Idea instead proposes that art’s expansive platform for messaging be used to spread awareness and create accountability for political negligence of the AIDS epidemic.

Photography (Photography)

The title of this series – Two videos, three photographs, several related masterpieces and American art – is paradoxical, suggesting the work is conceived in relation to its medium and a situation in art history and the region of the world in which it was made. Paradoxical but in the end, often true of the way in which art history is written. The presence of black men and the term “American Art” brings us back to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Soft Materials is a curious, touching but also disturbing sequence of confrontations between two people: a man and a woman, and machines. Shot in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Zurich, the humans and the machines mirror each other’s actions. It is unclear which party takes the lead.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Postcards from the Desert Island is a remake of a 50s educational film Holiday from the rules in which four children interact with an omniscient narrator who teleports them to a tropical island where there are no rules. As in Lord of the Flies , the little children’s anarchistic society quickly breaks down. Finally, when the narrator asks the children if they want to leave the island they answer unhesitatingly: “instead of making up a lot of rules, why don’t we go home where we already have them?”.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“School of the seven Bells (SOTSB)” is based on a series of hands games in which an object is passed from hand to hand. The performance is a reference to the film by Robert Bresson, “Pickpocket”, where a group of pickpocketers play with their victims. The artwork, through the actions of the hands, is an interrogation into space and time, questioning the relationship between public and private space, the establishment of communication through the body and visual exchange and gestures between aggression and sensuality.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Cumulocumulonimbus capillatus incus functions on the mode of a mise en abîme: it is a cube composed with 8000 dice. The work plays with chance, each installation produces a renewed visual combination. Robert Filliou said that Eins.

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.