Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Blalock resists the immediacy that we have come to expect from photography—that each photograph should communicate its message without delay. Within the dark obscurity of three, three, three (2013), he frustrates and complicates this conditioned response to the photographic medium, questioning the photograph’s purpose.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Photography (Photography)

Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram. Bold shapes, and the breaks between them, create a rhythm and compose an engaging abstract image. At the same time, the work deals with the conditions of the photograph’s manufacture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This film refers directly and fictionally to one of the first media dramas: the burning of the Zeppelin aircraft LZ 129 Hindenburg as it landed in New York in 1937. The power of these images, which were widely diffused in the press, had a profound haunting impact on people’s consciousness. This mode of transport – both futuristic and obsolete – crystallizes a collective imaginary which was fed by cinematic, literary and mythological fiction as Barthes would put it.

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)

Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways. He is usually depicted with two faces as he looks both forward and backward, to the future and the past. The video, which is deftly animated in collaboration with Aimée de Jongh, presents a close-up of a dying “duck-rabbit,” a vivified version of an ambiguous illustration made popular by the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations .

Rachel E. Foster uses printmaking, sculpture, and photography to illuminate the nearly invisible. For her source material she combs the digital world for bits of strange information that seep into our daily reality. These clues, be they coded sequences or simple phrases, become part of her puzzle; by reframing information she makes us reconsider it through a different lens.

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)

In the video Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black. Gradually, the face of a man becomes visible as he steps out of the darkness and closer to the camera. As suggested by Castro, the color of this man’s skin allows him to pass unnoticed perhaps literally, but also metaphorically as he alludes with certain humor to the iconic work Black Square by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, often referred to as the “zero point of painting” in Western art-historical discourses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Satirizing an airport security checkpoint, The Ecdysiast – Molt (Body Inspection) by Yao Qingmei offers a comedic and critical inquiry into the logics underpinning collective control and surveillance culture. The three channels of the video respectively feature a dancer (left), a chorus (middle), and a security inspector (right). The dancer and security inspector enact a mechanical burlesque performance that parodies the body inspection procedures implemented by airport security.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Wedding is a silent film, a probing observation of marriage rituals in Qatar in which we soon notice that there is not a single woman visible. The film is part of the broader project The Challenge through which the artist depicts the boredom and rituals endured by young Qatari men throughout various forms of costly and codified entertainment, including the highly theatrical practices of falcon hunting or car racing. The strange, almost surreal, choreography set against an artificial, overexposed backdrop, highlights the privileged presence of men in this part of the world, grouped together by sex and social class.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflection Paper No. 2 is one of four videos in which Wang attempts to accurately illustrate the writings of influential Chinese Eileen Chang, who published her works during the Japanese occupation of China. Image and text reflect on the everyday experiences of women in society, family, marriage, love, and death.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The film The Anatomy Classroom is part of a research project developed by Hikaru Fujii around objects and artifacts evacuated from the Futaba Town Museum of History and Folklore, which is located in the “difficult-to-return zone” since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. In order to avoid radioactive contamination and biological damage, the objects have been removed from the museum, where they were once part of a collection that the curator had developed over twenty years to represent the local community and its long history on the land. Fujii has been closely following the movements of these historical objects, while organizing visits to the site and hosting discursive events on the crisis of memory and culture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body. The Buddhist master Padmasambhava achieved this state from his union with Mandarava, a female spirit (dakini) and princess in Tantric Buddhism. Through study and physical connection, each played a key role in the other’s enlightenment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Words by Meiro Koizumi: “The video installation work In the State of Amnesia is made with Mr. Nobuhiro Tanaka, who damaged his brain when he had an accident when he was 21. Since then he has been living with a memory disorder. I asked Mr. Tanaka to memorize a testimony of a Japanese soldier who served in the war in China during WWII.

Textile (Textile)

The title of this work by Egle Jauncems, The Paler King I , is taken from an unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace called The Pale King, published posthumously in 2015. Jauncems notes that the book is fragmented, following unrelated characters struggling with ennui and depression, navigating the pressures of modern reality. In her art practice, Jauncems has been interested in the lives of powerful and influential men for many years.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Study of History IV by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949. Wentzel’s original color photographs document the transportation of a Mercedes Benz, carried on a wood armature by sixty porters, over a rocky trail from Bhimphedi to Kathmandu in Nepal. At the time of Wentzel’s photographs, paved roads in Nepal only existed within the Kathmandu Valley and cars had to be carried into the city from the surrounding hills on foot.

Painting (Painting)

Be Kind to Your Demons is a series of paintings by Hulda Guzmán that presents a variety of scenes in which female characters carry out ubiquitous activities in the company of secondary characters (mostly men) and devil-like creatures. Like much of her work, Be Kind to Your Demons is an invitation to embrace the devil in each of us, to surrender to bodily and external pleasures, and to engage in a conscious dialogue with our own existence. Guzmán’s paintings are a reminder of the brevity, potential intensity, and frailty of human existence.

Photography (Photography)

The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together. These houses are more than just places of survival; they are a physical embodiment of radical queer expression that encourage solidarity. The Royal House of Allure was initially conceived following an investigation of how social media influences celebrity culture.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive. and abstract silhouetted motifs, in a black and white palette, are combined to create a world lodged between fantasy and reality typical of the tarot game. Airplanes, letters, naked women, Osama Bin Laden, Che Guevara, mythological figures, skulls, wrestlers’ masks are some of the visuals that populate this printed object.

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).

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his photographic series Périphérique (2005–2008), Mohamed Bourouissa used the composition of classical paintings to stage the portrait of friends and young people in the banlieue s (suburbs). He states “by deconstructing the clichés surrounding this subject, I deal with the problematic power struggle and its mechanics.” This series follows various themes explored throughout the work of Bourouissa. For Temps Morts, his first film, he depicted a yearlong series of mobile phone exchanges with someone in prison.

Photography (Photography)

The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together. These houses are more than just places of survival; they are a physical embodiment of radical queer expression that encourage solidarity. The Royal House of Allure was initially conceived following an investigation of how social media influences celebrity culture.

Installation (Installation)

Joe Namy’s Half Blue is an installation consisting of a video, a sound, and a sculpture, that triangulates a personal experience of the artist’s cousin Khalid Jabara, who was murdered by hate crime in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U. S. A in 2016. An event that garnered international attention, Jabara’s murder led to the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act passed by US Congress in 2021. The act was named after Jabara and Heather Heyer, two hate crime victims whose murders were prosecuted as hate crimes but not reported in hate crime statistics.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Intersticio (Interstice) by Elena Damiani traces the topography of a non-specific site, an in-between zone. The video presents a panoramic view of two territories of a shifting and unresolved character, composed out of segmented events that visually intersect at a shared horizon point. Over the images, a fragmented and ambiguous poetic narration describes, by means of images found in digital archives, a hybrid site that permutes the representation of nature through its fusion of source material.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Audra Knutson’s work, The Death , is a hand-pulled linocut print inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . Set in what appears to be a pathway inside a small town, the scene features two central figures: a man seated on a chair with a skull on his lap, and a girl writing the message ‘voilà votre mort, monsieur’ on a nearby wall. The girl’s message echoes the expression in the man’s face, who appears resigned or as described by Knutson “accepting death or a monotony in living, and not embracing beauty.” The large areas of solid ink in contrast with the delicate linework create a sense of theatricality and drama, and add to the mysterious and surreal nature of the scene.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney. This ubiquitous form of public transportation, originally built from U. S. military jeeps left on the islands after World War II, is normally exuberantly painted and personalized. They are known for their crowded seating and kitsch decorations, which have become an omnipresent symbol of Philippine culture.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program. T. Hong’s research is not only an effort to revisit a dark time that complicates certain histories, but more importantly an investigation of how violence is enacted in the name of rationality.