Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s work brings together spoken and written language, photography, vintage television and computer animation to pay homage to African-American popular culture. Figuration (B) is a mediatic dumpster dive through the not-yet-historical past, its fantasia of purloined images flowing to an interruptive, channel-surfing logic. A stream of TV clips, commercials, news segments, video memes, and movie scenes—at times run backwards, doubled, or layered over other clips—incorporate archival and pop cultural sources layered with a soundtrack constructed of found and made sources to make something akin to a video mixtape.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Uncomformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

CAMARADERIE is a precursor to and a blueprint for Mahmoud Khaled’s later forays into queer aesthetics and modes of visual representation. This work is based on videos that the artist collected over the years through YouTube, of Egyptian professional bodybuilders exercising or rehearsing before posing in local and international competitions. The selection also includes videos of amateur young men from Cairo, who obsessively train and exhibit bodily transformations resulting from their admiration for those bodybuilders.

Photography (Photography)

450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site. The cut shape mirrors the precise shape of the Kadist gallery floor, where the concrete was relocated as part of his residency exhibition entitled Somewhere, Elsewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere. Through this concrete graft, Cidade inextricably links the city with artwork.

Painting (Painting)

Marcelo Cidade interrogates the city, architecture and urban planning. This architectonic drawing proposes modular possibilities, adaptable variations based on the form of the concrete block (a material which is often actually integrated in his practice). The “re-definition” announced in the title is in construction, in process, under development, in flux.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Marcelo Cidade’s sculpture Abuso de poder (Abuse of Power, 2010) is a mousetrap elegantly crafted in Carrara marble. Originally made for the Carrara Biennale in 2010, it re-creates the iconic form down to the piece of cheese waiting for an unsuspecting victim. In this sculpture, Cicade challenges the viewer’s participation and intervention into the artistic object.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.

Photography (Photography)

Rocket Society refers to a space project led by a group of Armenian researchers at the beginning of the 1960s. They created the first Middle Eastern rocket and carried out a dozen launches. Today, there is a kind of amnesia related to this space program while at that time the newspapers would talk about it frequently; a postal stamp was even issued for the occasion.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wonderland is a music video for the Turkish hip-hop group Tahribad-I Isyan (Rebellion of Destruction). The young hip-hop artists respond with anger and defiance to their forced expulsion from Sulukule, a historic Roma settlement in Istanbul, due to a redevelopment project. Their lyrics address issues of gentrification and inequality, while their actions show the possibilities for both violent and artistic rebellion.

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.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him. He captures incongruities or everyday simplicity and highlights their suggestive power. The composition and framing of these interventions specially emphasizes the object of interest and the humor of the context.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Transaction/Evacuation is a collaborative painting by Khadim Ali and Sher Ali, and is part of a larger collaborative body of works by the artists, which share the same title. Like Khadim Ali, Sher Ali is also part of the Hazara people, and experienced massive personal and social trauma early in life, losing his parents at the age of ten and witnessing the devastation of the Afghan Civil War in his native Kabul. The horned figure in the foreground represents Rustam, a legendary hero in Iranian mythology and central character in the Shahnameh, who depicted here by the artists as a potbellied demon, stripped away of its heroism.