Installation (Installation)

The installation Hey Daddy, Hey Brother comprises a series of “Sukajan” jackets, which Tamura collected over a period of several years. They were a popular souvenir among the US military stations in postwar Japan during the Korean War (1950-1953). With origins rooted in military occupation of in the East Asia region, the jackets fuse the American “bomber,” or baseball jacket, with traditional hand-stitched designs of Japanese iconography, including dragons, tigers, Mt.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Haunted by You documents Taiyo Kimura’s struggle to use a record player, satirizing the normal actions of everyday life in order to question the meanings that underlie ordinary modes of living. The performance narrative unfolds upon the circular movements of the turntable. A chicken’s leg replaces the turntable’s arm.

Installation (Installation)

In Permanent Laughter (2011), dozens of portable compasses are scattered under a sheet of acrylic board, which is in turned covered with what appear to be the diffuse remains of an unidentified skeleton. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization. His work frequently interrogates how we organize space and time through discretely measured units, and in parodying that obsessively precise ways that we mark our very existence – through instruments that direct our bodily movements or denote our sense of time – Taiyo invites us to consider our relationship not just to devices but to our very sense of ontological being.

Photography (Photography)

Kastura (2012) is an installation consisting of 24 black-and-white photographs of the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto bequeathed by Kimura’s grandfather; free-standing structures on which they are hung; and ornamental plants. The photographs appear to have been taken in late 1950s soon after tours of the villa were first offered to the public. Then, as today, visitors were led by a guide and could only follow a designated route.

Textile (Textile)

Like most of Laura Rokas’s hand-stitched works, Once in Two Moons was made while she sat in bed, imbuing the work with a tender sense of domestic intimacy. The scene’s dominant figure is a faceless woman whose blood red, dagger-like fingernails, polka dot jacket, and jet black hair resemble a sort of avatar of the artist. The figure surveys a chaotic scene that might be described as a “cute apocalypse” (a phrase Rokas says is characteristic of her work in general).

Painting (Painting)

The impressionistic surface of Wild Money (2017) recalls the 1950s paintings of Philip Guston. Its creases recall human skin, while the filigree pattern of red skeins implies what lies beneath. The body is fully implicated in this work.

Photography (Photography)

N°001 Djoubi et sa meute is part of a series of photographs by Laura Henno titled Ge Ouryao! . This particular work depicts a young man named Djoubi posing proudly, surrounded by his pack of dogs, along the shoreline of Mayotte.

Textile (Textile)

Anonymous by Laura Lima consists of a series of fabric-based forms, over which rope has been arranged in varying textures and patterns. Visually, the work evades more complex descriptions, demanding a separate set of conventions to describe its semi-textural, semi-sculptural surface. Lima’s principle of demanding alternative descriptive conventions and exploring the experiential dimension of interacting with her work is fully visible in Anonymous , which is in many ways best qualified, in its sheer variety of shapes and textures, by its title.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La libertad is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life at the Navarro´s, counting threads and time, wondering and wandering around words as emancipation, labor, and freedom (la libertad), the word that most appeared in our conversations. The “greca”, the meander, is the main symbol weaved in the textiles made by the Navarro sisters, from Santo Tomás Jalieza, México. A geometrical form of an endless braid of diamonds, the “greca” represents corn, an entity worshiped by the pre-hispanic civilisations of Mesoamerica.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The wall installation Friction/Where is Lavatory (2005) plays off anxieties about time but utilizes sound to create a disconcerting experience of viewership: comprised of dozens of wall clocks sutured together, the work presents a monstrous vision of time at its most monumental. The clocks, however, are effectively broken, altered so that the second hand of each clock obstructs one another as they sweep across the face. Often combining a sense of physical incongruity and visceral displeasure with touches of humor and cruelty, Taiyo utilizes conceptual approaches as a means of challenging preconceived ideas about social organization.

Photography (Photography)

At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops. A closer examination, however, reveals that a key element—the minaret—has been systematically removed, thereby changing profoundly the history and religious character of the city. The work is a response to a November 2009 referendum in Switzerland that approved a ban on the construction of new minarets in that country.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2009, Laura Henno began research in the archipelago Comoros for her first film Koropa the first episode of a triptych— completed in 2016. Mayotte is the only remaining island belonging to France in the archipelago of the Comoros, which gained independence in 1975, creating an invisible border that divides the islands from Europe. Koropa is the portrait of a particular relationship: that of Ben, a former fisherman turned smuggler, and Patron, a child who makes his first smuggling voyage between the island of Anjouan and Mayotte.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Canoas by Tamar Guimarães is a film made for the 2010 São Paulo biennial as an exercise in the projection of national identity. The main subject and setting of the film is Casa das Canoas, the home that architect Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. Overlooking the bay on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the building has achieved iconic status in Brazil.

Installation (Installation)

For her telephone sound composition Dial Tone Drone, Aura Satz commissioned a conversation between two old friends, the sound pioneers Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) and Laurie Spiegel (born 1945). Carried out via iPhone and Skype and prompted by a series of questions from Satz, the pair congenially discuss aspects of drone sounds, which for years have been an important component of their unconventional electronic work, both audio and video. Their interest in drone sounds and use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters aligned with Satz’s own interest in alert signals, and the latter’s attempt to forge a new understanding of hypervigilance and emergency through sound as a perceptual trigger of high alert.