Photography (Photography)

Lenora de Barros’s poetics are known for setting in motion an intimate relationship between image and the written word. This was precisely one of the questions raised while producing the photographs that compose Poema , one of de Barros’s first and most iconic visual poems. The work consists of a sequence of six black and white photographs where language acts in a performative movement with the typewriter, forging a connection between word and image.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Discrepancies with Oaxacan Textile II by Leonor Antunes is a hanging sculpture composed of three elements made of brass. This sculptural work was originally produced for the exhibition Discrepancies with Clara Porset (2018) at Museo Tamayo, which featured reassembled objects from early 20th century Cuban designer Clara Porset. Antunes’s work explores Mexican traditions through a contemporary context.

Painting (Painting)

Jorge de León most well-known work was a radical gesture, and one of his earliest artworks: in his 2000 performance, The Circle, de León sewed his own mouth closed as a protest against the silencing of citizens in the face of social corruption. His Cristal series is more demure, but follows a similar theme. In these works, delicate, web-like lines emerge against dark backgrounds, creating orbs of negative space, pitch black.

Installation (Installation)

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there. The neon translates as “this is not in Spanish,” making reference to both the famous Rene Magritte painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” as well as signs posted in the windows of Chinese establishments in Mexico.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Adam is an emblematic work within Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s oeuvre. The artist has created a number of pieces entitled Adam , referring to original man, incarnated in multiple objects at once. Materially, Adam is a fluorescent yellow walking rope with an epoxy coating on one side, rendering the structure rigid, demonstrative of his sculptural practice which is both conceptual and sensual.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

davi de jesus do nascimento’s earthy paintings, from the series sorvedouro , recall his memories as an essentially organic matter. Watercolor painting carries water as its foundational element and was the first technique that the artist applied to base his painting research on the river. He used to dip the brush on the prow of the boats: “I realized that the water is in deep dialogue with the flows of the river that I descend”.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object.

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Textile (Textile)

Sombras de los Valles (Shadows of the Valleys) is part of a series of works created by Bayrol Jiménez in which he is influenced by hand-painted signs and large billboards in Mexico. From small artisanal store-front insignia to widespread symbols and lettering, Jiménez looks at how this iconography shapes Mexican cultural identity. It is worth noting that the hand painted signs especially are highly unique, especially in an age of homogenised digital images and reproduced typefaces.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Carlos Amorales, based in Mexico City, works in many media and combinations thereof, including video, drawing, painting, photography, installation, animation, and performance. Central in his work is the construction and alteration of what he calls his Liquid Archive, a collection of images, narratives, drawings, shapes, and ideas that he uses to construct his unique visual language—a critical and stimulating space for fantasy, reality, and the blurring of the two. Amorales creates tensions between revealing and hiding the personal and the universal in his often-ambiguous and fluid constructions.

Installation (Installation)

Part of the exhibition PIÑA MATRIZ (2014) at Despacio Art, this untitled work by Carlos Fernández is a wood panel (formerly a section of a wooden table top) that bears the residue of insects interacting with fermented pineapple. The exhibition considered the production of pineapple monocultures and the agricultural monopolies for this product. Fernández used the exhibition space to portray alternative possibilities of diversified and ecologically sustainable production that could be mobilized in place of mass produced pineapple monocultures.

Photography (Photography)

Searching for We’wha is composed of five photographic triptychs combining photographs from the American West (New Mexico and Arizona) with excerpts from American Indian poetry in an attempt to reconstruct imaginary aspects of the life of We’Wha, a famous member of the Zuni tribe, who was born male but who lived a feminine gender expression. With this work, Carlos Motta aims to question gender fluidity, indeterminacy, neutrality and non-conformity, using We’wha as an image of the ways in which Two-Spirit American Indians express gender in non-Western non-traditional ways. They are often accepted and revered by their tribes, and in We’wha’s case she even became an official representative of their social interests.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico. Working with this unsettled mystery, De La Torre’s video inquires into the historical and continuing tensions between Chinese and Mexicans. As such, Nuevo Dragon City depicts a symbolic act of self-entrapment in which six untrained actors of Chinese descent silently blockade themselves inside in an empty Tijuana storefront.

Painting (Painting)

Caetano de Almeida’s abstract compositions in acrylic use delicately-rendered swirls of overlapping, colorful lines. Intersecting at regular angles within six bubbles, these thread-like lines spiral chaotically outward once they leave these spheres of order. De Almeida’s abstractions don’t imply randomness and chaos, the way much abstract painting might, but rather seem tied to algorithms, precision, and the networked realities of the contemporary moment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ecotone by Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a video work presented in six chapters, each beginning and ending with a one-sided telephone dialog with an informal, friendly and conversational tone, that leads quickly into complex philosophical subjects. The first chapter is an introduction, and the last is an epilogue, and both employ interfaces (a smartphone screen, and an optical illusion, respectively) to invite the viewer to make conceptual connections across the chapters. An “ecotone” is a region of transition between two biological communities.

Installation (Installation)

Following a series of related works, Brutalismo Americano by Marlon de Azambuja is a site-specific sculptural installation produced during the artist’s residency at Kadist, San Francisco in 2017. Treating the city as an object of attention, de Azambuja collected building materials from the surrounding area over a period of ten days to conceive of an architecture in situ. The work is not meant to mimic any of San Francisco’s own architecture, or to be a maquette or portrait of the cityscape, but instead a singular, constructive gesture.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany. Here, Garaicoa’s interest in vernacular Cuban architecture shifts towards the European context: a series of twelve nineteenth-century French engravings have been reworked into delicate paper models. Here, the two-dimensional old-school architectural renderings have become the foundation for new hollow three-dimensional structures.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Personaje 21

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The chapter Ayousha , of Judith Barry’s Cairo Stories , is a portrait-like work that consists of one plasma screen and one framed photograph. The project developed out of oral archives made from 215 interviews, which Barry conducted with women of varying social and economic classes in Cairo between 2003 and 2011. Her research started at the beginning of the Iraq War and concluded just after the Arab Spring.

Installation (Installation)

Barry McGee’s Untitled is a collection of roughly fifty, framed photographs, paintings, and text pieces clustered together in corner. Its tiled effect can perhaps be seen as a vertical Carl Andre work and also bears some resemblance to another work in the Kadist Collection, Jedediah Caesar’s JCA-25-SC. McGee’s installation also echoes the votive altars in the chapels he visited during his residency in Brazil in 1993.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The series of works gathered under the title Heure de Paris combines footage of Turkey from Turkish and French media reportage from the 1980s. Using archival material, including maps, television emissions, footage, Dogrusöz’s brings to light the state monopoly on radio and TV that ended in 1994 and the impact this had on documentation and reportage in this period. In Heure de Paris: The map and the territory , Dogrusöz collected and displays all the occurrences where maps of Turkey, frequently used in public French television, were reported.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Originally commissioned for the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the film Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things) depicts the subculture of Brega music, a fusion of American Hip Hop, Brazilian techno and Caribbean reggaeton that emerged in North Eastern Brazil over the last decade. Part anthropological documentary and part musical the film speaks about the realities of Brazil with its enormous social and economic tensions.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The work, Promesse d’endettement provisoire (Promise of temporary debt) , begins with a contract signed with KADIST. The value of the debt is decided by the collector and determines the duration of the contract before the artist proposes a final output. Discussions and negotiations occur during the awaiting period.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Home (good infinity, bad infinity) by Lêna Bùi sheds light on the experiences of those who live along, and on, the waterways of Saigon, Vietnam and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Vietnam is a tropical country of major sand extraction; the UAE a desert country of major land reclamation. Scenes of the Saigon river being heavily eroded due to industrial machines mining sand for construction of skyscrapers are interspersed with images of concrete jungles, and aerial views of Saigon and Sharjah varying in scale and style.

Installation (Installation)

Halfway between a painting and an installation City Sound of Rug gathers found images, synthetic foam, painted metal plates, and prints placed on the floor. Rugs are elements representative of commerce and related to the idea of territory, handicraft and community. In City Sound of Rug, the rugs are used as surfaces upon which prints are manually made.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter. As the artists dice, mix and plate meals, they begin throwing food at each other—the scene rapidly turning into a battlefield made of food projectiles, broken glasses, and dirty settings. Disruptive, playful, and aggressive, the protagonists’ actions fuse the spontaneity and innocence of children’s games with the force and reality of adults.

Photography (Photography)

In Amantes (Lovers) Juan Carlos points his lens at his own environment, his underground (literally) studio in Havana. A beautiful and intimate image of a seedy yet casual scene of two lovers in the background foreshadowed by a beautiful young woman smoking a joint in the foreground, a very powerful and not too subtle political representation of the current realities and truth of youth life in Havana. Juan Carlos Alom is an artist known for his documentary photography of Cuba’s subcultures and underground scenes.

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524. Each choir was filmed separately, and the artists weave together the audio while the video features each choir individually. The juxtaposition of different contexts in which singing occurs functions as an embedded sociological study of various communities throughout the region.