Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The three Maiko s were included in Ron Terada’s 2008 exhibition, Voight–Kampf , at Catriona Jeffries gallery. More ambitious in size and subject matter, this show with its complex video installation marked a new path for Terada’s work. Voight-Kampf is based on a scene from Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner in which a giant advertising billboard in the midst of a dystopian city of Los Angeles in the future displays a geisha eating candy.

Photography (Photography)

Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground.

Photography (Photography)

Part of Tim Lee’s practice involves envisioning himself reenacting key moments from iconic peoples’ lives. In the photograph Untitled (Stanley Kubrick, 1945) (2010), Lee re-creates a self-portrait by Stanley Kubrick from 1945. Kubrick shot the original photograph in the mirror when he was just beginning his career as a photojournalist.

Photography (Photography)

Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-sized pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times and which he has used to photograph trees from various regions. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewers aware of their own retinal experience.

Photography (Photography)

Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California. The photograph is framed upside down; these “inverted trees” follow Graham’s early experiments with the camera lucida, a room-size pinhole camera that dates back to ancient times. Through these works Graham looks back at the history of photography while making the viewer aware of his or her own retinal experience.

Installation (Installation)

The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions. This work by Native Art Department International signals a reminder that we–the audience and institution–are located on and occupy traditional territories. The work appropriates and twists white artist Sam Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) in response to his work Scaffold (2012) installed in 2016-7 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Painting (Painting)

Kapwani Kiwanga’s Linear Painting series (2017) reflect the artist’s research into disciplinary architecture, including schools, prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities. When they were presented together, the paintings were arranged according to a black horizontal line placed at 160 centimeters from the floor, which traced the entire perimeter of the gallery. According to hygiene standards in Europe, this would mark the height below which walls should be washed in order to prevent the spread of illnesses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Stone Deaf (Video)

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U. S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A short video about Tate Modern by Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa depicts just two shots, both featuring the artist. The first scene portrays Wolukau-Wanambwa in a close-up frontal view, dressed in black, standing silently against a worn white wall. Through subtitles, the artist recounts her experience of participating in a workshop on the top floor of the museum.

Photography (Photography)

As suggested by its title, Pipe Opening (2002) depicts a hole in a wood wall exposed by the removal of a pipe. In contrast to his signature immense tableaux, Pipe Opening is a direct but modest document of a “real” scene that Wall “encountered by chance” in daily life. However factual, the image indicates certain enigmatic significance, allowing multiple interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This One, That One by Micah Lexier does not have one ultimate version, but instead consists of a source body of 51 separate chapters that are edited to make up different versions. These different versions are edited depending on the context in which the work is being shown. For instance, the version that was shown at the Power Plant consisted of 20 chapters and was edited specifically for that venue, keeping in mind its length and the other works exhibited in the other rooms.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China. For this video, Wong accompanied six male friends from art school to a group show of their work titled “Inside Looking Out” at Osage Gallery in Beijing. Throughout her visit, she was rarely acknowledged for her own creative accomplishments and was more frequently introduced as an artist’s girlfriend, and often without name.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Creole Portraits III alludes to the 18th century practice by slave women on Caribbean plantations of using tropical plants as natural abortifacients. As an act of political resistance against their exploitation as “breeders” of new slaves and to protest the inhumanity of slavery, some slave women chose to either abort or kill their offspring. Armed with practical knowledge passed on orally from their African ancestors and/or Amerindian counterparts, enslaved Creole women collected the seeds, bark, flowers, sap, and roots from various plants which allowed them to secretly put an end to their pregnancies.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Curtis Talwst Santiago has been creating intimate and performative environments within these small spaces for several years; the artist used to carry them around to show visitors one on one, opening up a scene in the space of his hand. Santiago considers these mobile box enclosures a method of transporting narratives of home and intimacy, diasporic identity, and experiences most often hidden or concealed from view. These Walls is a sculptural piece made from a reclaimed jewelry box, clay, paint, wool, plastic figurines, and human hair.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. Conversations with a Tropical Vulture is an experimental narrative video, co-directed by both artists, and blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all-too-real life approach, which creates and inspires a counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality. The video, shot on location in Acapulco, utilizes a “lo-fi” aesthetic and playful use of non-professional actors.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wonderland is a music video for the Turkish hip-hop group Tahribad-I Isyan (Rebellion of Destruction). The young hip-hop artists respond with anger and defiance to their forced expulsion from Sulukule, a historic Roma settlement in Istanbul, due to a redevelopment project. Their lyrics address issues of gentrification and inequality, while their actions show the possibilities for both violent and artistic rebellion.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Fig. 33. 9 Your Love is a King by Yeni Mao is a sculpture made of blackened steel, brass, glazed ceramic, and leather.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

AIDS Ring by General Idea is a cast metal ring, which takes as its basis Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” design, appropriating its pop aesthetic, and totalizing, simplistic universal messaging to instead emphasize the severity of the AIDS epidemic that occurred in the 1970s. This visual detournement of Indiana’s sculpture into the form of a ring is an indictment of pop art’s apolitical nature, as well as of its increasingly commodified status. General Idea instead proposes that art’s expansive platform for messaging be used to spread awareness and create accountability for political negligence of the AIDS epidemic.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jonas Van and Juno B’s video work Kebranto is anchored by the figure of Boitatá, a snake that is part of the imaginary Guaraní communities that live between the current nation-states of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The mythical figure Boitatá is a protector of jungles and forests. In GuaraníBoitatá is the union of two words: Mbói (snake) and tatá (fire).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site. Here, Tanaka has spread out various objects he collected throughout the city of Guangzhou. By fiddling with a window frame, water buckets, plastic bags, cardboard, soda bottles, and many other things, Tanaka creates fragile, temporary sculptures.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Of Action 26:15 leonardogillesfleur notes: “There is almost an ice-cream store in every corner of Buenos Aires. The family [in the video] is having an ice-cream in the hot summer afternoon. Small tics appear on people’s faces from a fly or the attempt to hold still while the ice-cream top melts or drops off its sugar-cone.”

Film & Video (Film & Video)

During Summer 2011, few months after the nuclear accident, performance artist Kota Takeuchi got a job at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and kept a blog about the labour conditions of clean-up workers. In 2012, he exhibited an ‘anonymous’ video taken from the 24-hour live feed on TEPCO’s website that monitored the clean-up activities. The video, which then went viral in Japan and became known as the “Finger Pointing Worker”, captured someone in a protective suit, entering the frame and pointing his finger at the video surveillance installed by TEPCO on the nuclear plant site.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Vertical Horizon by Wito Wibowo addresses a media scandal in 2010 that took over the cultural milieu of Indonesia. Someone uploaded on a sextape of pop star Ariel Peterpan with model-actress Luna Maya recorded on a mobile phone. Several days later, another video of Ariel Peterpan and Cut Tari, an infotainment news presenter in Indonesia, surfaced on the Internet.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video installation A Gust of Wind , Zhang continues to explore notions of perspective and melds them seamlessly with a veiled but incisive social critique. His ultimate goal is to reveal the ways in which social image is constructed and to cast doubt on the ephemeral vision of a middle-class utopia offered by mass media.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Endurance, 26 homeless youths stand still looking directly into the camera for an hour without speaking. As each stands, the video is rendered with a time-lapsed effect in which traffic and pedestrians pass by and light fades into night and back again; during the transition from one youth/performer to the next, the video reverts into slow-time. The audio tracks on the video combine street sounds with edited sequences of the pre-recorded interviews.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Rubber Man continues exploring issues related to land use, also noticeable in his Untitled series (2011). More specifically, Rubber Man addresses the French colonial legacy of land use for the exploitation of rubber –today exploited by multiple forces such as individuals, governments, multinationals and international banks– and its effects on Cambodia’s indigenous forests and culture today. The video takes place in Ratanakiri, an area in northeastern Cambodia increasingly known in local and international news for land grabs and protests, and where the artist frequently traveled to over two years.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

First exhibited as part of the recent multidisciplinary project Code Switching and Other Work , at Art Mûr, Berlin in late 2018, Nadia Myre’s Untitled (Tobacco Barrel) takes inspiration from the cylindrical vessels used to import tobacco from North America to Europe during periods of early colonial settlement. Responding to the history of clay pipe production in the ports of London, Bristol, and Glasgow by weaving together the literal detritus of the colonial tobacco trade, Myre’s work poetically untangles material links between the British Empire, Canada, and Indigenous peoples. Following contact with the so-called New World in the 1600s, the growing popularity of tobacco use in Europe led to the design and widespread manufacturing of disposable, pre-stuffed clay tobacco pipes in Britain.