Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town. While it is not named in the film itself, the town at the center of Mythological Time is a re-imagined incarnation of Sun’s hometown of Fuxin, in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Sandwiched between North Korea and Inner Mongolia, Fuxin is a poor coal-mining region that used to contain one of China’s largest open-pit mines and has historically been the site of significant conflict, thanks to its rich mineral resources.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sun’s animated film 21 Ke (21 Grams) is based on the 1907 research by the American physician Dr. Duncan MacDougall who claimed the measured weight of the human soul to be twenty-one grams. Sun used this episode—which was not fully recognized by the scientific community—as a point of departure for his depiction of a dystopian world in which the narration of history and notion of time are interrupted. Because each frame was drawn by hand with crayon, it took Sun and his animation studio team a few years to complete this thirty-minute film of a surreal journey through mysterious cities, plagues of mosquitoes, broken statues, cawing ravens, waving flags, and flooded graveyards.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Pianoiss . . . issmo (Worse Finish)

NFT (NFT)

Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022). Sun produced this NFT from a still image of the animation that features a drawn notation of the sign “echo” in American Sign Language. Visually the black and white image depicts two side by side mounds, one labelled ‘Hand’ and the other labelled ‘Palm’.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Indexes that either allow or inhibit the establishment of communication exist in both signed as well as spoken languages. Some differ radically depending on a variety of social, economic and geographical factors, while others are universally understood. Seemingly small and fleeting gestures can determine a sense of affiliation or a feeling of rejection.

Photography (Photography)

The photographic series Tonatiuh (The Son of the Sun) by Juan Brenner is an in-depth visual study of current Guatemalan society from the perspective of miscegenation and the incalculable consequences of the Spanish conquest. Establishing Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado as a central figure, not only in the conquest of Guatemala, but also in the formation of a complex, segregated society, Brenner proposes a series of images that re-establish the lens through which to consider both a historical and contemporary Guatemala. Tonatiuh is a visual essay on the state of a country on the verge of failure and its incapacity to address its own history and learn from it.

Textile (Textile)

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange , Asli Çavusoglu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey. The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance?

Photography (Photography)

In Are You Lonely Mr. Claus? , a bottle of whiskey, a red rose, a lit cigarette, and an assembly of kitschy Christmas memorabilia (Santa’s hat, a sugar cane) are displayed side-by-side with artifacts that denote some sort of (typically Californian?) summer leisure time (sea shells, sun block and goggles).

Painting (Painting)

Beau Soleil #7 ’s title (translated as Beautiful Sun) gives a good sense of its effect. By virtue of a grid of dots, slightly different in size and placement, a subtle shimmering is created. In readily showing its effect as an image of light, the work exists between abstraction and representation—and perhaps points to the folly of such a distinction—rows and columns of spots become the dawn breaking through thick morning air.

Installation (Installation)

Entre Chien et Loup is an installation incorporating a variety of media: rubber, discs, feathers and confetti that the artist weaves, sews and glues together. Influenced by Mike Kelley’s Memory Ware series, the artist creates an object-memory from found materials. The found objects used recall the artist’s mother – it is somehow her portrait, her cape-.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

9’oclock (my time is not your time) pertains to a series consisting of three numbers: 5, 10 and 11 works were made for the exhibition “Signs and messages from modern life” at the Kate McGarry Gallery in 2007. The notion of time is a recurring theme in Tobias Rehberger’s work. We can recall the exhibition ‘Night Shift’ at the Palais de Tokyo ( Paris) in 2002 where the works could be seen only from the angle of the sun, exploring the relationship between day, night, and other natural cycles like the sun and moon, life and death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One Universe, One God, One Nation was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s analysis of space exploration and by the astrological horoscope of Chinese political and military leader Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975). Chiang was born with the sun in Scorpio and at the Ninth House, moon in Aries, and ascendant in Capricorn, signifying an individual who is headstrong, intense, and persistent, with a desire for leadership. Yin-Ju juxtaposes images of outer space, war, and subservient masses, calling attention to how the dictator’s violence and charismatic power over the crowd was predicted by his particular astrology.

Painting (Painting)

Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings incorporate motifs drawn from her day-to-day environment, often reworked with multiple variations. The development of colour palettes in her painting work could be compared to the work in her films where she delicately draws an internal visual language which provides the viewer equal space to her protagonists. Possible readings of her work are left deliberately open, encouraging thought in terms of association rather than the imposition of a narrative structure.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness. Combining fictional and non-fictional content, the film slips an interpretative script based on the writings of the painter Vassily Chekrygin, and the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, within the context of an ancient pagan fertility ritual still practiced in the region. The film’s impressionistic plot revolves around the ecological dimensions of Russian Cosmism.

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.

Installation (Installation)

The title of the work Eridanus refers to the constellation of the river of ancient Athens that meanders across in the night sky. The constellation is visible uniquely from the Southern Hemisphere. The artist evokes a story from the past, where with the installation of modern street lamps, has resulted in the residents of Paris being disturbed by the difficulty of seeing the stars in the sky as a result of light pollution.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Oliver Laric’s video Versions is part of an ongoing body of work that has continued to evolve and mutate over time. Comprised of several video and sculptural works that share the same title, the Versions series reflects Laric’s key concerns: the mutability of images and objects and the negotiation between original and copy. In this video, we see several 3D renders of recognizable objects and places, while an ubiquitous feminized robotic voice that evokes the domestic familiarity of voice recognition tools such as Siri and Alexa, speaks of issues relating to identity, language, and translation.

Photography (Photography)

On January 7th, 2020, artist D’Angelo Lovell Williams was diagnosed with HIV. Only a handful of chosen family members knew up until the public announcement that coincided with the release of this body of work. According to the artist, “discovery” is key to this group of large photographs.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Baumgartner’s own excursion into war imagery is the diptych Formation . She was watching a television documentary on the Second World War, was struck by the extraordinary nature of the colour film and decided to video it. The two frames she isolated depict the shadows the planes cast on the ground and the sun glinting off their steel fuselages.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marché Salomon by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz depicts two meat vendors, a young man and woman, chatting in Marché Salomon, a busy Port-au-Prince market. Amongst the surrounding bustle, the two have an unsentimental discussion about the mystical qualities of common products sold at the market, wondering whether the divine can inhabit any kind of object—mass produced bottles, toxic rivers, beheaded goats. Their musings weave together the cosmic and the mundane, with the work of butchering a goat and the characters of the market serving as existential metaphors for the universe, time travel, ghosts, and death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development. The single-channel video Waltz of the Machine Equestrians is a response to the overwhelming number of motorbikes and scooters overtaking the streets of Vietnam as small agrarian communities have been displaced by the construction of skyscrapers. The video shows 28 “equestrians” on motorbikes and scooters arrayed into a rainbow cavalcade held together by strings clipped onto brightly colored ponchos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain.

Painting (Painting)

Miercoles cerca de las 7 de la tarde by Caroline Fusilier portrays two quantum computers that are mobile, with human-esque legs, these are systems at the edge of biology. The floor is awash with fluid; perhaps a chemical resource consumed by the advanced computers or a heat-sink. Where their legs meet the fluid there’s a soft glow, less intense but related to the vibrant radiation on the wall above the figures.

Photography (Photography)

Sam Contis’s photographs explore the relationship of bodies to landscape, and the shifting nature of gender identity and expression. Horseback is part of a photographic series Contis made at Deep Springs College, one of the United States’s last all-male institutions of higher learning, located in a remote desert valley on the California–Nevada border. Horseback is a black and white photograph that depicts the arched shoulders of a horse, its slick mane splayed across its neck.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Alicia Smith’s video work, Teomama , means “God Carrier” in the Aztec language of Nahuatl. It was the name given to medicine men and women who carried the bones of Huitzilopochtli—the god of war, sun, and human sacrifice in ancient Mexico, and the national deity of the Aztecs. Of the many legends featuring Huitzilopochtli, the origin story of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) is perhaps one of the most well-known.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The word Coyolxauhqui refers to femicide or the killing of women in rural Mexico on the basis of gender. The mutilation of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the sun god and human sacrificer, is reimagined in this film. Coyolxauhqui by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is the first in a trilogy of films that positions itself as a form of political resistance, delving into the relationship between current Mexican femicide and broader cultural traditions.

Painting (Painting)

Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu initiated the series 1000 Pieces (of White) in 2009, as a way to produce objects and images as a portrait of their shared life as partners and collaborators. Interweaving public and private, personal anecdote and pop cultural appropriation, their work attests to the poetry of the everyday. In addition to found and original materials, the artists have occasionally incorporated drawings and sketches by artist friends, and even by their own daughter into the ongoing work.

Photography (Photography)

Kovanda’s ‘discreet’ actions (leaving a discussion in a rush, bumping into passers-by in the street, making a pile of rubbish and scattering it, looking at the sun until tears come…) are always documented according to the same format: a piece of A4 paper, a concise typewritten text, and sometimes a photograph taken by someone else. This action, walking abnormally slowly, questions the place of the individual within the space of a city with regards to social habits. Kovanda places himself slightly outside the regulated rhythm of the city walking.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The short two-channel video Pause/Tanmpo takes its cue from a coincidental encounter artist Bili Bidjocka had in Dakar. Walking down the corniche, he saw a boxer, a Senefalese man, training at the beach. It immediately reminded the artist of Le Boxeur—the most well-known brand of matchsticks in Cameroon.