Installation (Installation)

Misting Miner is a vapor sculpture by Alexey Buldakov from the Urban Fauna Lab collective that gives material form to the invisible phenomenon of mining cryptocurrency. The work is comprised of a water cooling system attached to technology that continuously mines cryptocurrency, and in the process also generates an extraordinary amount of heat. As a latent and untapped source of energy, the artist harnesses the heat and reveals its transformative potential by turning it into fog through the water cooling system, which he then reroutes to follow a cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. Central Station shows a character reaching to wipe a tear from her face as the blues of her wardrobe seem to blend in with the dismal blue of the background.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The figure in Alignment slouches with his head in his hands in a gesture of failure or despair, speaking to the difficult task of balancing individual freedom and societal rules.

Painting (Painting)

Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds. These portraits explore the relationship between the psyche and contemporary social environments, focusing on isolation, identity, and distress. The two characters in Argument interact in an ambiguous gesture of conflict or embrace as the world around them pulsates in agitated waves.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) refer to Sólheimasandur as a work that tackles the issue of “the ruin as a tourist destination.” As they say, “at the end, tourists become an essential part of this unusual, beautiful, and—at the same time—banal landscape.” The video features a plane wreck on Sólheimasandur beach in Iceland, where a navy plane belonging to the United States Army crashed in 1973 due to fuel exhaustion. The plane appears as an anthropomorphized figure: lying on the sands of the beach without its wings, it resembles a sculptural torso that has lost all its limbs, with cables coming out of its body appearing as internal organs. These injuries remind the viewer of the danger inherent in these artifacts, and the potential for both heroism and death implicit in flying them to far-away territories.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Chinese restaurants have been a familiar feature of Swedish cities since the late 1970s, embodying the foreign and the exotic. Lap-See-Lam started the project by documenting the interiors of several Chinese restaurants in Stockholm at a time when many of them were about to be taken off the map. Her own family was selling their business in 2015.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Lam Tung Pang created Sketches from train ride Chicago to San Francisco during his travels through the United States researching American curatorial strategies for representing traditional Chinese painting in museums and cultural institutions. The drawings incorporate both traditional and contemporary Chinese landscape techniques to reflect on the memory, history, and aesthetic practices of the Chinese laborers who played a prominent role in the American westward expansion. By representing the Western landscape according to Chinese aesthetics, Lam calls attention to the distortions and cultural specificity of American representations of the Western landscape and non-Western cultures.

Photography (Photography)

Back images is a series of six photographs by Sarah Lei Cheuk Wah that explore the semiotics of power and their intersection with representations of masculinity. The photographs feature what seem to be stock images of several policemen—their rugged uniforms, vehicles and weapons drenching the photographs with signs of masculinity and power as the policemen carry on with their usual tasks. The series was part of a larger exhibition entitled In Stasis where Lei transformed the booth of an art fair into what appeared to be a security area inside an airport.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia (Colombian Satellite Space Center) , Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) play tribute to two “stunning” satellite antennas installed in the small municipality of Chocontá where, in 1970, the Space Communications Center of Colombia was inaugurated. That same year, the first antenna, responsible for the transmission (via microwave) of radio and telephone signals was put in place and eleven years later, the second antenna or Ground Station for International Communications would complete the complex known as Space Communications Center. Excursions to visit what became known as the “Satellite City of Colombia” were common for decades.