Sculpture (Sculpture)

Plane is an inflatable sculpture in the shape of an aeroplane made from numerous pieces of plastic bags assembled by an iron. The object is inflated by a fan at the structures base and deflates when it is deprived of its power source, causing the plane to sink. It is in this process that plane leans on its wings, evoking a crash, a defeat, or a failure.

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Darbyshire has made several Furniture Islands, all of which employ different objects and different color values. Furniture Island No 3 looks like a shop display tastefully arranged in complementary colours. Darbyshire’s use of colour is like that of a designer or a painter.

Installation (Installation)

Executed in 2012, A World Undone revolves around a single, metaphorically rich substance, drawing on geological research into an ancient mineral, Zircon, unearthed in remote Western Australia. These rocks are now studied, like a time capsule, revealing intriguing clues about the state of the planet more than 4 billion years ago. Mangan procured a sample of the material and reduced it to a fine dust that he then filmed, in flux, with a high-speed video camera.

Installation (Installation)

Matthew Buckingham presents a narrative directly connected with a highly symbolic site in the United States, the Mount Rushmore Memorial*. He elaborates a historiographic narrative of this place and switches it into the domain of science fiction by proposing a photograph of the Memorial as it should appear in 500 000 years. The effigies of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt become unrecognizable.

Painting (Painting)

Hybridized drawing is a continued exploration in Moshekwa’s practice, integrating elements of graffiti, thread and yarn to enrich his abstract drawings of maps and space. Through the combination of ready-found materials with drawing, in the case of “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)”, employing string, Moshekwa’s creates tension lines across the image, both physical and metaphysical to explore the traumatic events of South Africa and more specifically the passing of his grandmother. Referencing gestural painting of the 1940s and 50s, “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)” is a disfigured and layered mapping of both the African and psychological landscape.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In “Untitled II (Mapping text)”, 2009, Langa abstracts language in an attempt to change the familiar into the absurd. With reference to comic speech bubbles, Langa combines in a sea of blue gouache a series of nuanced references to identity and politics with “Black Maria” alongside nostalgic and subtle phrases such as “mom be with me, I need u now” and “I didn’t listen.” Through this gathering of references “Untitled II (Mapping text)” forges a poetic and vulnerable site to engage with his personal experiences while simultaneously suggesting the senseless structure of language. This work resonates to larger world of art, politics and popular culture through layering assorted references, piling up meanings that are cryptic and ambivalent, yet resonant with multiple interpretations.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Bodily Study of Unthinking Groups, Harrison combines two disparate materials into one stratified stack: automotive clay (used in detailing cars) forms the earthy base, while fragments of zebra skull become imbedded in this falsified soil. Harrison’s forged archeological artifact compresses two cultural contexts together: that of Africa, represented by the bleached zebra skull; and that of Detroit, the birthplace of the American car. Detroit’s Matthew Angelo Harrison works at the intersection of sculpture and technology, building his own 3D printers (which rise to the status of sculpture), and using these creations to formulate others.

Installation (Installation)

The Chair (2012) foregrounds media-based tensions between analog and digital imaging technologies as a means of challenging the continued circulation of visual ephemera from India’s colonial past. A mix of found photographs and staged studio portraits deliberately made to look older, The Chair features multiple portraits of figures dressed in period costumes that reference the ornate fashions popular during Great Britain’s imperial rule of India. A hybrid frame wraps around this assemblage, a composite of variously ornate and simple wood finishes culled from disused and forgotten pictures.

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.

Painting (Painting)

The Lion’s Hunt by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is a large format painting that recalls Delacroix’s paintings and tapestries from the 19th century, where the painterly surface became a garden invaded by wild beasts. In Lutz-Kinoy’s painting, two ferocious lions appear to be preying on several horses. Accentuated by luminous browns and yellows, the lions evoke imperialist fantasies.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Hole #1 a zebra scull stands in as a representation of Africa, while the plexiglass box and the hole made through it represent the inaccessibility of that culture to African-Americans.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

L’effeuillage des effacements (The Stripping of Erasures) 2016, presents a piles of posters gathered in decreasing chronological order from 2015 to 2400 B. C. of 150 historical episodes of debt cancellation (one event per poster). Unlike usual stacks, each poster is different, in its content, but equally in its design (realized by the graphic studio Vier5). As the public takes the posters, the artwork developed into a verified history of cancellation that emerges, a kind of counter-history of indebtedness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

There is no there by Gabriella and Silvana Mangano is a black and white looped video with sound, in conjunction with a live performance. The work is inspired by the Blue Blouse, a political propaganda theater movement which spread across the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. More specifically, the work takes the form of ‘Living Newspapers’, which were performances based on topical news events.

Photography (Photography)

Calvin Warren calls it an ‘ontological equation’/or methods of estimating the odds to rise in the coming centuries by Kameelah Janan Rasheed is part of A Casual Mathematics , a series of interpretive art diagrams, which revisit W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic data portraits in The Exhibit of American Negroes . This was a landmark exhibit within the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris that demonstrated the progress of Black Americans through the visual display of quantitative sociological information.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.

Photography (Photography)

Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo. The materiality and form of this traditional headpiece represents the strength and fierceness of forest warriors. Their ‘chimneys’ on top are intended to resemble trees in the jungle onto which hornbill feathers would once have been stuffed.