In 1940 Rivera came to San Francisco for what would be his last mural project in the city, Pan-American Unity . Currently housed at City College of San Francisco as a permanent installation, for a time it was in storage and not on public display. During the same period, he created the charcoal sketchentitled Shasta (1940), of large construction machinery that the artist saw near the Mount Shasta dam.

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.

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 the film La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age) Javier Castro asks several children to describe what they want to be when they grow up and what their best career option is in Cuba. Their responses are telling: some hopeful or playful in nature as one would expect, and others crudely revealing the harsh reality that the children perceive. The work takes its title from a children’s magazine produced by José Martí in 1889, during the years leading to the Cuban War of Independence from Spain in which Marti lost his life.

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.

Photography (Photography)

La manzana de Adán (La Palmera, Santiago) by Paz Errázuriz is part of the celebrated series La manzana de Adán (Adam’s apple) that spans 5 years (1982-1987) of documenting the lives of transgender sex workers in La Jaula and La Palmera brothels in the Chilean cities of Talca and Santiago. The series, whose subjects were extremely subversive, as well as critically vulnerable to the repressive political regime, were finally shown in Chile shortly before the end of the dictatorship in 1990, and later compiled in a book of the same title with texts by Peruvian writer Claudia Donoso. This work portrays a scene at La Palmera brothel in Santiago.

Installation (Installation)

A woman pronounces parts of sentences. Via rigorous editing, the artist creates anticipation with the silences, rhythm by the repetitions, temporal ellipses with music. The recording is diffused by a loud speaker placed on a plinth which gives the whole an anthropomorphic status which reminds one of Box with the sound of its own making by Robert Morris.

Photography (Photography)

Les princes de la rue by Clarisse Hahn is part of Boyzone , a long term project in which the artist observes how men’s bodies reflect their relationships to public and private spaces. Hahn’s photographs move beyond gazing at the Other; they demonstrate how outcast, among themselves, can reproduce the gaze that is cast on them as a means of expression. As such, this series makes space for Hahn’s subjects to intimately express their strength, fragility, and pain, as well as their history.

Photography (Photography)

La Cultura de la Felicidad (The Culture of Happiness) is a series of five photographs addressing everyday life—a couple in a bed, lovers on a bench and a family reunion. The subjects wear masks made of white cardboard. The series suggests the idea of a reality hidden under the appearances of the power in place that denies violence to citizens.

Painting (Painting)

Miercoles cerca de las 7 de la tarde by Caroline Fusilier portrays two quantum computers that are mobile, with human-esque legs, these are systems at the edge of biology. The floor is awash with fluid; perhaps a chemical resource consumed by the advanced computers or a heat-sink. Where their legs meet the fluid there’s a soft glow, less intense but related to the vibrant radiation on the wall above the figures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

El gran pacto de Chile (The Great Pact) and La balserita de Puerto Gala (The Raft) were part of the “Museo Futuro”, an exhibition in which the artist presented nine miniature dioramas staging fragments of Chile’s history, from its colonial invasions to the present. Through the episodes he chose to depict, the artist focused on historical narratives, the way the story is told, and the supposed irrefutability of historical facts. Museo Futuro (“Future Museum”) stands within a tradition of artists who re-read history and offer their interpretation of it through the distopic lens of the museum display.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread. The work is self-supporting and stands in a crack or a hole in the floor. The work suggests precariousness, frailty as well as humanity through its verticality, and its gentle sinuous form, referencing perhaps the work of Giacometti.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The headdresses, woven from artificial hair braids, symbolize historical icons including Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, Fela Kuti and King Guézo of Dahomey. The wigs portraying these grand figures also unambiguously recall Africa to mind. By declaring Cotonou, one of Benin’s cities, the Art Museum of Real Life, and by having thirty white-clad figures wearing Gaba’s latest series of tresses cross through it, he draws attention to the urban space and its inhabitants’ strategies of survival and improvisation.

Installation (Installation)

Escultura publica en la periferia urbana de Monterrey is a public sculpture on the periphery of the city of Monterrey. It consisted of a concrete foundation that was free to use by the people of Monterrey. Apart from being used as a platform for a political rally, it was transformed among others into a marketplace, a hangout, until eventually becoming claimed by a man who built his house on it.

Photography (Photography)

The half-length portrait of Joe Shirley presents a man with a great presence, wearing several items that point to ancestral Native American culture. In this photograph, which is relatively poor in information, the projection screen in the background acts as a clue about the event: Bruno Serralongue went to the second phase of the ‘Sommet Mondial sur la Société de l’Information’ (or SMSI, World Summit on Information Society, in Tunis in November 2005). This portrait echoes another picture in the same series (Native Peoples Claim Their Right to Participate in the Information Society) in which Joe Shirley is just a silhouette amongst the speakers, whereas here he occupies the entire frame.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

-In which predicting its past it lives working and dies fighting- Fifth episode of The Unmanned , “La Mémoire de Masse” unfolds during the second Canuts revolts in Lyon in 1834. These riots now known as the ‘bloody week’ came as a reaction to the automation of work in the silk industry by the Jacquard Loom and its implementation of the punched card – first historical ‘mass storage’ system allowing the inscription and replication of complex weaving patterns. This inaugurating event in the history of workers emancipation movements of the 19th century is actually the first revolt against modern computation.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head.

Textile (Textile)

During the years of President Senghor, Papa Ibra Tall was influential in the cultural dimension of Senegalese politics, participating in the implementation of the Dakar School, a movement of artistic renewal born at the dawn of the country’s independence between 1960 and 1974 and which was encouraged by President Senghor. The artist set out to transcribe ‘negritude’ in his works, according to Senghor’s definition in Problème de la Négritude: “To assume the values of civilization of the Black world, to actualize them and to fertilize them, if necessary with the foreign contributions, to live by oneself and for oneself, but also to make them live by and for others, thus bringing the contribution of the new Negroes to the civilization of the universal.”

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

La Masacre de el Aro (The Massacre of El Aro) by Jorge Julián Aristizábal refers to a massacre in Colombia which occurred on October 22, 1997 in the municipality of Ituango, Department of Antioquia. On this day, 15 individuals accused of being leftist supporters of FARC were massacred by paramilitary groups. Perpetrators also raped women, burned down 43 houses, stole cattle and forcibly displaced 900 people.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Like many of Dr. Lakra’s works, Cortes y la malinche is a drawing done on a found vintage magazine page. The text at the bottom of the page, “reclinandose inocentemente sobre el regazo de Hernan-Cortés,” translates to, “reclining innocently in the lap of Hernan Cortés,” and refers to the Spanish conquistador who brought down the Aztec empire. Malinche was a native Mexican who served both as Cortés’s translator in both the Mayan and Aztec languages, as well as his lover.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The piece consists of sculpture of 10 elements, among them: a globe, a picture of a gorilla, a chair, scrabble letters, 3 glasses of black ink, a book whose title is illuminated by the beam of a 8mm projector, a pair of boots, etc. The display is a collection of selected objects chosen in response to the reading of a text by Alain Badiou (the first chapter of the seminar “Le réel est l’impasse de la formalisation; la formalisation est le lieu de passe en force du réel” from February 4, 1975). The elements are a visual way to question the transposition of an idea into reality.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico. I painted them sky blue, creating a “Hole in the Wall” This deconstruction of “feminized” work explores the difficulties in reconciling both low wages and undervalued work via social and political infrastructures, confronting issues of labor and power. The images that I myself perform, present a duality: women dressed in a black tango dance attire while engaging in de-skilled domestic chores; the surreal within non-fiction.

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.

Photography (Photography)

YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic. The mural contrasts and mixes multiple layers of these satellite images capturing the progressive devastation of the El Quimbo dam on the Yuma river (Magdalena), in the Department of Huila. The project was originally produced for the 8th Berlin Biennale, and developed out of the artist’s research into waterways, their political and cultural impact, and their historical development.

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.

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.

Photography (Photography)

La Vigie (extrait 6), Paris 2004-2011

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Cuba, due to the lack of materials, workers of state-owned construction companies must remain at work without doing anything, waiting for the end of the working day. Interested in this phenomenon, Adrian Melis asked the workers of a construction company to reproduce the sounds and noises characteristic of their work. The making of forty rectangular pieces for a floor construction is the recording of a “work performance” during a day from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon.

Installation (Installation)

A residency program in the blazing hot city of Honda, Colombia, inspired artist Nicolás Consuegra to consider the difficulty in understanding the needs of a distant community. An important town during the colonial era as the main port on the Magdalena River, Honda is presently rife with poverty, unemployment, and environmental deterioration. Here he produced the work Nadie sabe de la sed con que otro bebe (No one knows the thirst with which another drinks) , a variable arrangement of cut glasses in front of a mirror so that they appear whole.