Installation (Installation)

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race.

Installation (Installation)

Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail. These works epitomize the idea of perpetual movement and migration while carrying a deep personal meaning in the creative process, as the artist’s father himself, still living in Chile, mends and sends the sails to his son, living in Europe. The reversed position of the sail recalls both the shape of South America itself and the Eurocentric view that in the Southern Hemisphere, everything is “upside-down.” The stitches themselves create an illusion of an alternative political geography, and the framed-cuts impose a cartographic grid.

Painting (Painting)

The Shedding by Anju Dodiya is part of a series of mattress paintings the artist creates using fabric stretched on padded and shaped boards. The imagery relates to other paintings in this body work that expresses the visceral and vulnerable side of creativity. The posture of the protagonist—a part-human, part-carapaced animal—is opening herself outwardly.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia (Colombian Satellite Space Center) , Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) play tribute to two “stunning” satellite antennas installed in the small municipality of Chocontá where, in 1970, the Space Communications Center of Colombia was inaugurated. That same year, the first antenna, responsible for the transmission (via microwave) of radio and telephone signals was put in place and eleven years later, the second antenna or Ground Station for International Communications would complete the complex known as Space Communications Center. Excursions to visit what became known as the “Satellite City of Colombia” were common for decades.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A Ripe Volcano , a collaboration with Yasuhiro Morinaga, revisits two sites of violence and aggression in Thailand’s recent past: The Rattanakosin Hotel, the site where the military troops captured and tortured the civilians, students and protestors who were hiding inside the hotel during the Black May of 1992; and Ratchadamnoen Stadium, a Roman amphitheater-style Muay Thai boxing arena, which was built in 1941-45 during the Second World War and since then has become the theatrical labyrinth for more acculturated and commercially “acceptable” displays of bloodshed. The work builds around the recollections of human experiences that took place within these spaces and shifts through the mental space distilled from the possessed memory of wounded time. Within the medium of the multi-channel video/ sound installation, Sakpisit and Morinaga create dreamlike variations sprawling through darkened room where the haunting images and ambient sounds float through the space, creating an exquisitely hypnotizing experience.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The installation “East Side Story” is based on events that took place in the streets of Belgrade in 2001 and Zagreb in 2002, during the Gay Pride demonstrations, where the participants were the victims of verbal and physical injury by neo-Nazi groups and other citizens. This work is composed of two projections: the first uses television images of the demonstrations while the second is the reconstitution of the events performed by dancers. This piece witnesses nationalism at work in society, aiming particularly at the “internal enemy that sexual minorities might represent”.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Freedom Farming presents how, after being given the right of farming, Li Binyuan began to re-dig his land. He attempted to physically open a space for conversation with the generation of his parents. On the second day, villagers that were gathering in the field, including his mother, started to watch a strange event: Li Binyuan’ s 2-hour long jumping and falling in his land until he finally stopped, exhausted.

Photography (Photography)

Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances. Not to be mistaken as mere portraiture, however, Simmons’ works are explorations of the Black body in relation to landscape and other dimensions of non-linear space and time. Concealing and flattening her subjects with costumes and collage-like, abstract pictorial devices, the artist arranges archival photographs, printed textiles, and anthropological artifacts in configurations that highlight the power of visual culture to shape contemporary understandings of the self.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Curtis Talwst Santiago has been creating intimate and performative environments within these small spaces for several years; the artist used to carry them around to show visitors one on one, opening up a scene in the space of his hand. Santiago considers these mobile box enclosures a method of transporting narratives of home and intimacy, diasporic identity, and experiences most often hidden or concealed from view. These Walls is a sculptural piece made from a reclaimed jewelry box, clay, paint, wool, plastic figurines, and human hair.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The installation work Men from Hyperion and Women from Phoebe (2011), for examples, features six guitars mounted on steel crossbar stands and connected to one another with slack wires. The electric guitars’ faceplates have been removed, revealing the built-in circuitry and electric pick-ups hidden under the surface. A DIY electronic circuit controls various sounds produced by the installation, while a pair of headphones allows participants encounter the work to engage on a different sensorial level.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leyla Stevens’s two-channel video Patiwangi, the death of fragrance is an immersive video installation that addresses erased histories. In the left channel, set in a fine museum storage facility, art conservators unfurl and inspect modernist Balinese paintings, prints, and sculptures. In the right channel, Javanese-Australian dancers, Ade Suharto and Melanie Lane, echo each other’s movements.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The short video Inside the Studio by Neïl Beloufa follows a humorous Toy Story -esque conversation between the artworks inside the artist’s studio. In the personless space, two animated paintings express their hopes for their future, contemplating the beverage options at the exhibition opening at which they intend to be presented, while a third painting forgoes such superficial conversation to consider their significance and purpose in the context of the art institution and the public’s perception. Interrupting their conversation, the artworks become the backdrop for an in-studio interview with the artist and a film crew.

Painting (Painting)

In Seven Deadly Sins (2006), Shen utilizes abstraction to produce complex topographies of color that evoke associations with violently tumultuous landscapes. Streaks of blue and burgundy paint scatter across a peach colored silk backdrop, dripping into rough floral and botanical forms. At once both diffuse and dense, Shen’s compositions feel both expansive and contained, the colors overlaid atop another with a seemingly free spontaneity that belies more ordered and considered deliberation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including the Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-metre cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.

Painting (Painting)

El Hadji Sy is an important figure in the critical movement that followed Lépold Sedar Senghor´s Négritude ideology. Senghor supported El Hadji’s work from the start and continued to follow it, but they came together again in another cultural policy initiative, inaugurated by Senghor: the famous Villages des Arts. The village is a co-operative for artists in Dakar where each one has a professional studio.

Photography (Photography)

It is with the eye of a sculptor that Charlotte Moth records modernist architecture and its copies which she encounters during her trips and residences. Photographed in black and white, these architectures seem empty, out of time, and open to any interpretation. The artist creates a classification of her species of spaces, called the “Travelogue”, which is both artwork and tool since it allows her to ceaselessly generate new works.

Installation (Installation)

You have given the world your songs by Francisca Benítez is a poem in American Sign Language (ASL). It employs ten handshapes arranged in a numbering sequence from 1 to 10. This visual rhyme sequence is standard in Deaf poetry, as is the Tenth in Latin American popular oral/written poetry traditions.

Photography (Photography)

It is with the eye of a sculptor that Charlotte Moth records modernist architecture and its copies which she encounters during her trips and residences. Photographed in black and white, these architectures seem empty, out of time, and open to any interpretation. The artist creates a classification of her species of spaces, called the “Travelogue”, which is both artwork and tool since it allows her to ceaselessly generate new works.

Photography (Photography)

In 2015, while in residence at the Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF) located in the village of Jatisura in Jatiwangi, West Java, Indonesia, Togar initiated the Jatiwangi Cup in which the artist, together with communities in the area, established an annual bodybuilding contest. The area is renowned for its roof tile factories, and the cup aims to celebrate the factory worker’s physiques, sculpted by intense, daily, physical labor. Togar based the idea of the cup on the simple notion of collectivity.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Happy Birthday

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Something contained removed

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Hama Goro works with a traditional method called the Bogolan technique, which is inspired by a method used in Mali to color clothes. The ingredients of the various colors originate from natural products such as clay, leaves and bark. The colors had a symbolic significance and were used during ritual ceremonies.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father. Jonathan Monk bridges a conceptual art and his family privacy, and ironically ensures that there is “no difference between Sol Lewitt and my mother, he does not know more than she do not know. ” What is the status of the O-backed chair rail to the white cube?

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Meeting #100 is one in a series of text works by Jonathan Monk. In this series, the artist attempts to organize meetings somewhere in the world. The audience is given the details of a meeting—the place, date and time—and nothing more.

Photography (Photography)

In 2015, while in residence at the Jatiwangi Art Factory (JaF) located in the village of Jatisura in Jatiwangi, West Java, Indonesia, Togar initiated the Jatiwangi Cup in which the artist, together with communities in the area, established an annual bodybuilding contest. The area is renowned for its roof tile factories, and the cup aims to celebrate the factory worker’s physiques, sculpted by intense, daily, physical labor. Togar based the idea of the cup on the simple notion of collectivity.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

APA JIKA, The Mis-Placed Comma is one of three works Erika Tan filmed within exhibition spaces during the final stages of their transition from colonial period law courts to the National Gallery Singapore. Part of an on-going body of work, this video focuses on the figure of a forgotten weaver, Halimah Binti Abdullah, who participated in the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in the United Kingdom. A minor figure in the exhibition histories of what was formerly known as Malaya (today, Singapore and Malaysia), Halimah exists as a series of footnotes, gaining historical attention only for the act of a premature death from pneumonia, in London and away from home.

Installation (Installation)

Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family.