Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les Chenilles by Michelle and Noël Keserwany is a sensual film that translates the source of women’s oppression into the means for their liberation. In this narrative film, protagonists Asma and Sarah meet while working as waitresses in France. They both come from the Levant and, each in their own way, carry burdens of the past and the consequences of colonialism.

Painting (Painting)

As he investigates the forms that slavery took through different events that occurred during the sixteenth century in the Huasteca region of Mexico, Noé Martínez tells, in a non-linear narrative, the history of human trafficking in Relación de tráfico de personas 1525-1533 I (Study of Trafficking of Persons 1525–1533 I) . Both the departure of Huasteco Indians from the Americas, and the arrival of Africans from Cape Verde, Angola, Congo and Mozambique unravel in Martinez work as a story that has remained sealed in the colonial archives, and that continues under different guises in contemporary times. Relación de tráfico de personas 1525-1533 I is part of a series made of interventions in tanned leathers that refer to the exchange of human beings for pack animals and cattle in the Caribbean Sea.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Michelle Handelman’s video work Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes its inspiration from Musidora, a famous French silent film actress, and a character she played called Irma Vep, from the film Les Vampires (1915), directed by Louis Feuillade. The work uses these characters as metaphors to highlight the lives of those who live in the shadows—or feel like they do—and the anxiety they experience as marginalized figures. Musidora was a 20th-century feminist, who was known not only for acting in movies, but also for directing her own plays and films, and having secret affairs with Colette and other famous people of the time.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present. Developed from a literary work, it deconstructs notions of narrative forms, styles and conventions. It is a hybrid piece, an example of the elasticity of the medium.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Poised with tool in hand, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Carpenter (2012) reaches forward, toward his workbench. It is difficult to tell whether the work represents just any carpenter or Christ, the most famous member of the profession and the subject of innumerable parables and artworks. His stilted pose is not too Messianic; drips of ochre glaze render his handiwork and hammer equally soft.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Man and Pet (2012), two benign ceramic figures smile sweetly upward. The man wraps his small companion in a hug, his arms extending in round arcs all the way to his feet. Though the expressions are strikingly similar—suggestive of Rockwellian Americana—the pet seems somewhat more genial and familiarly fuzzy than its owner, whose saurian pupils lend his face a reptilian air that belies his warm grin.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Time is a 24-hour video in which the artist rests, hangs and clings onto the minute hand of a large clock, 4 x 4 meters in diameter, arduously counting out a full 24-hour cycle so that the video becomes a functional time-keeping device. In standing in for and becoming time, Mitchell ultimately examines its essence as it passes before her. Dressed in blue work overalls, Mitchell appears like a maintenance or quality control worker, making sure every moment is up to muster.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Though the title might suggest an Adonis, Jeffry Mitchell’s The Swimmer (2012) is a squat, jolly man with a protuberant belly. The stocky figure lets his arm drop to his side, towel dripping on the ground. Mitchell’s umber-toned glaze makes everything look earthy and wet, primordial and warm.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings. At the time of recording, like all of this films, there was no particular intent. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, this film becomes prescient and ominously prophetic.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Michel François’s work, « it is the real, physical and emotional experience that stimulates creation which is therefore highly charged with a vital force. There lies also the profoundly and clandestine figurative nature of his work » (Guillaume Désanges). Contamination is a constant in Michel François’s work.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Part of a series entitled “Looking at Listening”, 2011, the piece invited the spectator to experiment and consider sound as a kinetic and synesthetic process, where multiple experiences and senses can cross. The presented photographs were selected from the New York Public Library and found in an archive called ‘Listening,’ with the sub-genres ‘town meetings,’ ‘investigation,’ ‘audiences 1960–1970’ and ‘conversation.’ Taking the photographs from the city’s archive of frozen moments of audio exchange, Arakawa and Tcherepnin give sound and movement back to past moments. In each of the photographs, people are listening in different situations—public, and private.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s earliest works, Device features Harrison performing a series of actions, assisted by the titular ‘devices’, that use physics to force his body into unusual and uncomfortable positions. Maintaining his signature deadpan expression throughout the video, in one scene Harrison is thrusted into the air by a slowly inflating balloon until only his feet are visible in the frame, while in another he levitates in diving position with the help of a pulley system. Wood uses his body and specially-designed props created by the artist duo to explore the space of the screen in hilarious, and sometimes clumsy or violent, ways.

Photography (Photography)

Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways. “Tiko drink-Kumba drunk” is an adage that is commonly used in the Southwest province of Cameroon to speak of how one’s actions affect others. Civil liberties are next to non-existent in Cameroon, the law is lawless, and structured in a way that is intended to attack its citizens’ human rights.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Historically, blondeness has been a signifier for desirability and beauty, speaking to “purity” — the purity of whiteness — like no other bodily attribute except, perhaps, blue eyes. In the twenty-first century, blondeness is the look desired by American presidents, pop stars, rappers, television announcers, Hollywood celebrities, the boy next door, and some Asian Americans, African Americans, white Americans, Arab Americans, and LatinX Americans. The desirability of blonde hair has no genre boundaries, no pronoun limitation, and no class limit.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Mohawk, the emblematic Frontier river in the period of American colonisation, is here a cable of data transmission, and the 7 Sultans Casino is a virtual destination, one of the three hundred online casinos hosted by the servers located in Kahnawake, a small native american indian reserve to the south of Montreal. Incorporating poker, challenges to the law, a struggle for the control of a new territory where the stakes are high, our film ‘La Nouvelle Kahnawake’, between fiction and documentary, pushes these analogies with the Western to explore both our relationship to the figure of the ‘Indian’ and the confusion of our perception of space that new information technology has brought about. As the artists state: “We are neither anthropologists nor journalists.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Beyond Guilt the two artists create a portrait of our generation in three parts. In Tel Aviv, in confined spaces such as toilets or bar of hotel rooms, they create situations in which participants answer questions and describe themselves. Camera in hand, there is little editing in their works, leaving a rather crude result.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fade In (the whole title of the film is actually the entire five page script) is a collaboration with the Danish artist collective Superflex (group of freelance artist–designer–activists committed to social and economic change, founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen). There are several time layers to understand the story behind this film. In 1601, the San Jago set sail from Goa for Lisbon; the cargo included the first consignment of South East Asian porcelain destined for the European market.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Salomania sees choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer and artist Wu Tsang rehearse scenes from Valda’s Solo , a chapter of a film Rainer made in 1972 after having seen women perform the dance of the seven veils in Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film Salomé . The script is based on the Biblical New Testament story of the Jewish princess Salomé, who in the Christian tradition has been depicted as an emblem of feminine seduction and danger. In the twentieth century, her character was made popular through English playwright Oscar Wilde’s famous theater piece, Salomé .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

3-Legged is an early video work by John Wood and Paul Harrison in which they appear with their legs tied together (as one would do in a three-legged race). Wood and Harrison stand together in a narrow alcove built into their studio, dressed similarly in grey long sleeve shirts and jeans. Facing a tennis ball machine that is almost completely out of view, with only the barrel of the machine protruding from the bottom of the frame, they hobble back and forth across the alcove attempting to avoid the tennis balls launching toward them, with varying degrees of success.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Nepal and China signed an agreement for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017. The BRI is a strategy that was set forth by China in 2013 to expand its influence by building a network of economic corridors around the globe. BRI projects in Nepal include the Kathmandu-Kerung Railway, the Galchhi-Rasuwagadhi-Kerung 400 kilovolt transmission line, the 762 megawatt Tamor hydroelectric dam, and the 426 megawatt Phukot Karnali run-of-the-river hydropower project.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ana Navas uses humor to address formal, aesthetic, and societal conventions that are interwoven in the everyday through the normalization of gendered behaviors and style choices used to project personal and collective signifiers. In her Donation Vases she uses quotes taken from corporate coach Lois P. Frankel’s book Nice girls (still) don’t get the corner office: Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (2004). The aspirational, somewhat cynical tone of the sentences – “When given a choice, sit next to most powerful person, their power will cascade over you,” “Why is it that women buy those little chains to hang reading glasses around their necks,” “If you see your reflection on a glossy surface & notice something wrong, avoid fixing it there” – reveals a particular understanding of what a professional, ambitious cis woman should look like, the persona she should project, and the type of desirable behaviors that constitute a stereotypical “successful woman” according to a capitalist morality.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Displacements works use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalogue for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico. Using pre-Columbian objects and other artifacts from Mexican history, the exhibition aimed to explore various representations of death in the Mexican cultural tradition. Roldán’s works begin with these rich black-and-white photographs and break them apart into fragments, slicing and dismembering the artifacts they depict.

Photography (Photography)

Office Lady with a Red Umbrella restages a figure from a 1980 postcard made from a photograph from 1950’s. The retro-glamor of the 1950s style is restyled devoid of the original context of a Hong Kong street scene, where the “office lady” is walking on Queens Road of the Central district. With the “office lady” facing away from the viewer with a bare background, an introspective tone is created in Leung’s restaging while highlighting the red umbrella resonating with a red pencil skirt emblematic of the identity of the professional urban woman when Hong Kong was under British rule.

Painting (Painting)

Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu initiated the series 1000 Pieces (of White) in 2009, as a way to produce objects and images as a portrait of their shared life as partners and collaborators. Interweaving public and private, personal anecdote and pop cultural appropriation, their work attests to the poetry of the everyday. In addition to found and original materials, the artists have occasionally incorporated drawings and sketches by artist friends, and even by their own daughter into the ongoing work.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Indexes that either allow or inhibit the establishment of communication exist in both signed as well as spoken languages. Some differ radically depending on a variety of social, economic and geographical factors, while others are universally understood. Seemingly small and fleeting gestures can determine a sense of affiliation or a feeling of rejection.

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.