Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet. There is a drawing for each letter, in which the letter is repeated over and again in various directions and scales, thereby demonstrating how a symbol can be reoriented without changing its linguistic meaning. Here, the letter K is outlined and surrounded by a dense and varied field of other K s.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities. A newspaper is both reproduced and modified to call attention to the newspaper as a means of information transmission. This also emphasizes the effect of various seemingly unimportant support mechanisms: the role of visual layout and images.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. The Call is an ongoing video project of performances by descendants of prominent civil rights activists across the United States.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In the first part of Cosmic Call by Angela Su the voiceover proposes in a neutral, documentary-like tone, a series of stories to rethink the way we usually understand, justify, or place blame for epidemiological events. Comets carrying an infective bacterium are linked with the invasion of viruses—our current nemeses—coming from outer space. Second-century BCE medicinal writings correlated the appearance of 29 comets over 300 years with events including plague and drought.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Angelica Mesiti’s piece, The Calling (2013-14) is a poignant exploration of ancient human traditions evolving and adapting to the modern world. The three-channel work focuses on traditional whistling languages and shows the communities of the village of Kuskoy in Northern Turkey, the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and the island of Evia, Greece, where such languages are all still in use. For these communities, whistling languages are in a process of transformation from their traditional use as tools for communication across vast lands into tourist attractions and cultural artifacts and are being taught to local school children.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A Place to Call Home

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this two-channel video installation, Spaniards Named Her Magdalena, But Natives Called Her Yuma , Carolina Caycedo gathered footage during numerous research trips to dam sites in the Harz Mountains, Saxony, Westphalia and the Black Forest in Germany interspersed with images of the Rio Magdalena region in Colombia. Extending beyond the documentary form, the work illuminates social power structures and control mechanisms, particularly in connection with the activities of multinational corporations: images of controlled bodies of water are spliced with footage of urban crowds, visualising overlaps in the ways these various bodies are managed. The film is overlaid with the narrator’s voice whispering in Spanish and English, speaking of the artist’s personal perspective, and her own experience with a river she has known since childhood when family lived by its edge.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Interested in the collection of object and their potential to evoke various emotional reactions in the audience, Bopape’s “Why do you call me when you know I can’t answer the phone” is an invitation into the limitless netherworld of the unsaid and unspoken. Exploring the metaphysical landscape of secrets, lies and psychosexual ambivalence, this work is an attempt to create a site for contemplation. The video ventures to provoke a rhythmic trance through transporting the mind into a distant illusionary world constructed by vignettes of fractured spaces.

Photography (Photography)

Calvin Warren calls it an ‘ontological equation’/or methods of estimating the odds to rise in the coming centuries by Kameelah Janan Rasheed is part of A Casual Mathematics , a series of interpretive art diagrams, which revisit W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic data portraits in The Exhibit of American Negroes . This was a landmark exhibit within the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris that demonstrated the progress of Black Americans through the visual display of quantitative sociological information.

Photography (Photography)

LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel. His photograph of this throwaway object calls back the body, and the handprint is in fact his own right hand; thus the piece can function as a self-portrait of the artist, in an ironic twist on the art historical genre.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Canoas by Tamar Guimarães is a film made for the 2010 São Paulo biennial as an exercise in the projection of national identity. The main subject and setting of the film is Casa das Canoas, the home that architect Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. Overlooking the bay on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the building has achieved iconic status in Brazil.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Commissioned for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, Hearsay of the Soul (2012) is Werner Herzog’s ode to the landscape paintings of the 17th-century Dutch artist Hercules Segers. The work is a four-channel digital projection of Segers’s artworks accompanied by the emotive music of the Dutch cellist and composer Ernst Reijseger. Herzog sees Segers’s vast landscapes as powerful representations of our own interior worlds, resounding with feelings of anger, joy, fear, and loneliness.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The year 2016 is organized like a telephone book; the data corresponding to the contributions are classified in alphabetical order by the name of the donor. With this database as well as other types of information, the 900-page book presents a material representation of the scale of the cross over between cultural philanthropy and the financing of political campaigns in America. It also provides an unprecedented resource for discovering the political leaning of the museum sector.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula. This bite caused various symptoms, such as nausea, difficulty to speak, delusion, excitability and agitation. The victims suffered then from convulsions and the only way to heal them was to engage in a frenzied dance, as it was believed.

Painting (Painting)

The Fifth Quarter might have taken its mysterious inspiration from the eponymous Stephen King story collated into the Nightmares & Dreamscapes collection. Various vanishing points and interior perspectives, like in another painting dated the same year called Continental Breakfast , create a complex matrix in which motifs, shadowy or geometric forms coexist to further confuse the map of this space. A disturbing yet alluring virtual reality composed of a medley of seemingly abstract designs is depicted through digital and painterly means.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010. Numerous passive demonstrations against the government have led to numerous police repression of the protestors. The demonstration ‘Euromaïdan’ in 2013 is a perfect example.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Feet Under Fire by Lungiswa Gqunta depicts the artist’s lower legs swinging in and out of frame, above a bed of charcoal. She wears a pleated white dress, two identical white anklets, and a set of bristle brushes as shoes. Affixed to the base of each scrubbing brush is a black strap so that the brushes don’t fall off of her feet.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Choke documents the artist filming a wrestler “choking out” his teammate until he is unconscious. This closed circuit of dominance and submission between two powerful men, is echoed by the closed circuit of the video through which the viewer takes on the role of voyeur. The artist’s presence in the piece not only calls attention to its staging, but inverts the traditional power dynamic of the “male gaze” and gender roles.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three cut-outs are made of three aerial photographs coming from the archives of the Ecuadorian Military Geographic Institute. These are views of the Amazon forest. The photographs are cut following an optical illusion pattern called “reversible cubes” or “tumbling blocks”, based on the Necker cube, a multistable object of psychophysics that is constantly switching perspectives.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

East of Ukraine became a place of armed conflict with Russia-backed separatists, who proclaimed parts of (the) Donetsk and Lughansk oblast (administrative region in Ukrainian) to be ‘People’s republics’. This region, in conflict since spring 2014, is where most of the charcoal is extracted. It is with this same coal that artist Nikita Kadan realizes this drawing in 2018, representing a field on which is juxtaposed a small photograph.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Goicolea has made drawings based on a family album of relations that he did not know but who in one way or another contributed to his history and to the predicament in which he now finds himself as a Cuban in America. He then mounted the drawings on trees, telegraph poles or buildings and photographed them. Taken in these situations the drawings appear like advertisements for lost people or even posters for wanted criminals that of course conjures up images of loss not only of boat people but those who perished in other disasters, whether natural catastrophes or 9/11.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010. Numerous passive demonstrations against the government have led to numerous police repression of the protestors. The demonstration ‘Euromaïdan’ in 2013 is a perfect example.

Painting (Painting)

Bernard Piffaretti was born in 1955 in Saint-Etienne. He graduated from the school of Fine Arts of Saint-Etienne, and he now lives and works in Paris while expanding his carrier internationally. Like On Kawara, Stanley Brouwn or Roman Opalka, Bernard Piffaretti is also a “protocol artist”.

Painting (Painting)

El mar y sus múltiples afluentes (The Sea and its Multiple Tributaries) builds on the concept of trafficking that Adriana Bustos has been exploring over the last decade. The piece represents an apocryphal river and illustrates the routes of the slave trade between the coasts of Africa, Europe, and South America, departing from the Congo River (once called Zaira), and arriving at Río de la Plata, the main river in Buenos Aires that divides Argentina from Uruguay. The work collapses time and space, placing the coasts of colonial empires across the colonies where slaves were taken.