Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Erin Jane Nelson’s 2019 body of work Av, panels are covered in collaged images and shellacked with resin or epoxy: photographs of plants intermingle with pictures of men and women engaging in various spiritual activities, cartoons of mothers and their children, or black and white images of window panes. The panels and ceramics act as backdrops upon which Nelson attempts to establish connections between the natural world and the various cultural and religious orders we impose upon it. She incorporates Jewish symbolism and archival photographs alongside her ongoing photographic practice documenting the environmental collapse of her home region.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

Matt Kane initiated the project Right Place & Right Time – Bitcoin Volatility Art in 2019. Estimated to run for the next 10 years, the series of NFT artworks speaks to the volatility of the bitcoin market and the political, social, and financial events that led to it. Every day, a new composition is generated autonomously using a data feed of Bitcoin’s last 24 hours of price action.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In a society saturated by images, Eric Baudelaire is interested in political events that have not found their representation. For the film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, Baudelaire conducted research on 1970s Japanese cinema and more specifically on Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi’s filmography. In 1971, as the two legendary filmmakers of Japanese Nouvelle Vague were on their way home from a presentation at the Cannes festival, they stopped in Beirut, where their thinking concerning the image took the form of political activism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Baudelaire’s latest film, Also known as Jihadi (2017) tells the story of a young French boy from Parisian suburbs and his assumed journey to the Al-Nusra front in Syria to join ISIS and fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Employing the cinematographic approach known as ‘landscape theory’ — or fûkeiron — developed out of Marxist film criticism in the 1970s where the landscape of a film is read as an expression of the political climate, thus becoming a significant character, motivation or reasoning for the films development. The 101-minute follows Abdel Aziz from the socially and politically rife milieu of the Parisian suburbs, weighted by division, segregation, development and poverty to, what the viewer assumes, Syria.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.

Photography (Photography)

Erin Shirreff’s A. P. series of prints investigates how objects are “constructed” at the level of the image. For each composite photograph, Shirreff fabricates two sculptural forms from what appear to be metal or plaster, although the precise materials are unidentified. Her sculptures resemble miniature architectural models or renderings of buildings as-yet-to-be fully conceptualized, both elemental and elegant in their use of sharp angles and clean lines.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series of drawings Cancha Abierta (Yellow Series) derive from a project in which Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón worked with the community of El Rosario, located in the region of Beni, Bolivia, approximately 500 meters away from the Mamoré River. Due to a major flood that affected the vicinity–the largest recorded to date–the location had been practically buried under mud. One of the most distressed areas was the basketball court, which was buried underneath three feet of mud.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government. Through interviews, scripted acting, and illustrations, Hershman Leeson outlines the series of absurd events that led to New York state’s case against the former SFAI Associate Professor and artist Steve Kurtz. By closely following Kurtz’s story, Hershman Leeson reveals a strange ripple effect of the Bush administration’s destructive policies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome by Andrew Norman Wilson is a multi-channel video that uses three different imaging technologies—a photographic lens, photorealistic ray tracing animations, and fractal ray-marching animations—to travel through three constructed environments. The work’s subtitle, Lavender Town Syndrome, is named for a conspiracy theory in which more than 200 Japanese children were driven to suicide by a particular board in the game Pokémon Red and Green for Game Boy. Many others suffered serious migraines or nosebleeds, or turned violent when their parents tried to take the game away.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco. VertiGhost features the re-creation of select scenes from Vertigo (which takes place in San Francisco), documentation of the life of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani in the Legion of Honor’s collection that was enshrouded by questions of authenticity, as well as interviews—including with the original film’s star Kim Novak— about the construction of realities in life and art. By thoughtfully overlaying these conversations and events, Hershman Leeson distills complex conversations around identity and authenticity into concise insights in just over 12 minutes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York, Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” For Wilson, the uncanny synchronicity of this encounter with a stranger tuned into the same frequency resonated with the inspiration for Phil’s song, which he first heard as a teenager while getting high in a friend’s basement.

Painting (Painting)

Like the film Le Mouton noir, this dimension is counterbalanced by a burlesque element. The piece of fabric on the rat’s paw or ‘graft’ becomes a patchwork made out of colorful geometric shapes recalling a Harlequin costume, thus referring directly to the burlesque tradition. This leitmotiv creates a contrast with the dull colors, the humility of the countryside, and makes the figurative scene look unreal to reveal its superficiality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

With the war-torn Beirut cityscape as its backdrop—urban alleys, glistening beaches, abandoned buildings—Eric Baudelaire’s complex film, The Ugly One , unfolds in a time and place that vacillates among revolutionary narratives of the past, the fragile and ever-changing political situation of the present, and attempts to piece together the memories of those that live, or once lived, in the city. Conceived as a sequel to his documentary The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), Baudelaire builds the structure of the film around a story told by Japanese New Wave film director Adachi, who also narrates the film. The plot line pivots around two lovers and former resistance fighters, Michel (played by Lebanese artist and actor Rabih Mroué) and Lili (Juliette Navis); their narratives fragment and reconfigure around the screenplay, which itself intertwines with Adachi’s own history, the act of making the film, and the self-conscious and sometimes improvisatory process of writing the script.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

246247596248914102516… And then there were none narrates a semi fictional account centered around the ambiguous history of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, and on the aftermath of the 1973 demonstration of 400,000 people who marched against the military junta from Thammasat University to the monument. Built on archival and oral history, the story interweaves the personal with grand historical narratives to consider the complicated history behind the monument – symbolic of the unrest and violence that led to the Thammasat University massacre on October 6, 1976.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Unfollow is a music video by Yung Jake featuring a man haunted by the shadows of a former relationship. With the omnipresence of social media in our daily lives, breaking up in the physical world no longer suffices: posts by his ex-lover still appear in his newsfeed, reminding him of her presence and thus making it harder from him to let go of his relationship. As the ‘unfollow’ button on social media appears to be the only way to break up completely, Unfollow underlines the barrier between our online and offline identities and the difficulty to separate them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

I don’t remember is a video by Yung Jake that combines his passion for both music and the visual arts. As per several of his works the video borrows from the vernacular of rap and relies on the aesthetic and stylistic qualities of music videos. A humorous interpretation of the rap and hip hop genres, the video combines scenes from urban settings and snapshots of a party as the artist raps in a drowsy monotone about having forgotten the wild night.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As the video Datamosh begins to play, Yung Jake emerges out of a colorful, smoke-like background and breaks into rap. Malfunctioning green screens and pixelated digital mash-ups bleed into each other in a parody of the music video trope and specifically of the trend of ‘datamoshing’—a digital technique commonly used across this genre. The song’s lyrics distinctly borrow from the lexicon of rap, combining mentions of clubs, money and fame, with self-referential and humorous lines that literally describe the way in which the artist subverts the medium.

Painting (Painting)

Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger begins with the sound of women’s voices describing histories of violence, of things repressed and silenced. Gradually, their voices accumulate into a cacophony of pure sonic intensity against an extreme slow-motioned image of a woman survivor of Japan’s military sexual slavery who, in the absence of words to accurately account for her suffering, gets up and walks into the center of a war crimes tribunal court room and gestures wildly before she faints. This work by Jane Jin Kasen and Guston Sondin-Kung explores ways in which trauma is passed on from previous generations to the present through a sense of being haunted.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Andrew Norman Wilson’s work Kodak the artist uses computer-generated imagery to create narratives that question the reliability of images in the age of post-production. The artist creates disturbances in typical notions of time and space to highlight the existential terror of humans trying to make sense of their memories and perception in the 21st century. On its surface, Kodak questions how improvements in digital imagery have affected the analog film industry, but it also showcases the consequences for how humans relate to their memories.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chase ATM emitting blue smoke, Bank of America ATM emitting red smoke, TD Bank ATM emitting green smoke was shot in the American Southwest at Mid-century modern architectural structures that were built to house regional independent banks and have since been bought up by Chase, Bank of America, and TD Bank. The video utilizes transparency and opacity effects in multimedia software to question the perceptibility of finance. It offers a complex metaphor (toxic assets, emergency flares, house/mortgage on fire) about the financial sector and the effects of the ‘crisis’ that led to the disappearance (and the ghostly memory) of many local and regional banks.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.

Photography (Photography)

New Landmark No. 1 is part of the series New Landmark . In this series, Tsang reversed the direction of his camera lens, and capture images of skyscrapers from an upshot angle.