Photography (Photography)

Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s is from the series “As We Walked on Water” (2010-2012), which looks into Singapore’s history around the phenomenon of land reclamation. After exhausting the country’s own soil from its tiny hills and ridges, the government had to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue its reclamation efforts. At the early stages of a land reclamation project, the imported sand would sit idle for some time, forming an artificial desert-like landscape.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Mapa-Mundi BR (postal) is a set of wooden shelves holding postcards that depict locations in Brazil named for foreign countries and cities. When installed, viewers are invited to fill out and mail a postcard to any destination, an act which parallels the dissemination and global circulation of image, text, and the idea of place.

While most of Ashmina Ranjit’s work has been large-scale installations, often immersive and site-specific, the series Hair Warp – Travel Through Strand of Universe is a brilliant concentration of both her beliefs and aesthetic. In this series, human hair is treated as a sacred element that connects womanhood and as Ranjit states, “all phenomena beyond the sky”. In the painting, the sinuous hair strands morph constantly into different braids, swirls, and landscapes, emitting a mysterious force of life.

NFT (NFT)

For his first NFT release artist Walid Raad made a series of animated birthday cakes, titled Festival of Gratitude , for some of the world’s most toxic and larger-than-life leaders. The series of looping three-dimensional animated videos are only seconds long—a timespan familiar to gif and online meme culture—and feature global dictators, strongmen and strongwomen, kings and queens, princes and princesses, emirs, sheikhs and sheikhas, sultans, shahs, emperors and empresses, popes, ayatollahs, presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and GOATs. The subject of cakes has a specific personal meaning for Raad, whose first job as an adolescent was photographing pastries at a bakery in Beirut.

Photography (Photography)

John Houck’s brown- , sienna- and golden-toned composition, Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors , features densely packed lines of color moving diagonally across the creased page. Houck uses a series of self-designed software programs to create these intricate grids of color and line, riffing off of Sol LeWitt, perhaps, in a digital age. Houck takes the output of these programs and then manipulates them manually, creasing the pages of the index print, and then re-photographing them.

Photography (Photography)

Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society. Named after an American daytime soap opera that been running for over forty years, Days of Our Lives is a series of six photographs that explore contemporary Europeaness. Here, domestic, everyday scenes drawn from French paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon——preparing food, relaxing, reading and playing music, giving charity to the poor, being evicted from home, or going off to War—are reenacted by Muslim Nigerians, Iranians, Turkish, and Buddhist Burmese minorities.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eric Dizambourg’s film presents a bucolic and ludicrous world used as a background for a character who is an actor as well as a performer. This character comes and goes throughout the countryside, the barn and an urban setting, a world of odds and ends where objects often seem to be used for other purposes than their original ones.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot a few months before the USA and Cuba restored diplomatic relations in 2015, The New Man and My Father looks into the quiet aftermath of one family’s individual experience of the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). The film brings to the fore a socio-political system made for a country whose successes and failures fell upon the individual men and women who experienced it. In the film, Melis interviews his father about the Cuban Revolution, as well as the more recent re-introduction of capitalism to the island after 60 years of the US-imposed embargo.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Haris Epaminonda’s work questions the manipulation and the flow of images as well as their power of fascination. The images she works with to create her collages (paper or video) come from magazines or history books, film extracts or soap operas from the 1960s and 1970s. By readapting a universal past (in her work on monuments) as well as personal (with tv series she used to watch as a child, etc.)

Sculpture (Sculpture)

22022021, Yawnghwe Office in Exile by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe belongs to a body of work made in response to the Myanmar military coup that began in February 2021. The work employs traditional Burmese textiles, which have been employed by protesters harnessing the power of old Myanmar lore. It is said that women’s bodies and the garments that cover them sap men of their power.

Painting (Painting)

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s recent drawing of cutout figures on architectural tracing paper takes a statement by Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo, as a point of departure for the work. Stating, “migration problems can and should find their solution within the affirmation of ‘freedom of movement’ as the new inalienable right of humans. No human has chosen or chooses the place where they were born.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities. A newspaper is both reproduced and modified to call attention to the newspaper as a means of information transmission. This also emphasizes the effect of various seemingly unimportant support mechanisms: the role of visual layout and images.

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The artist’s Passings series are hand-sewn works composed of radiological scans of items of clothing loaned by the Tiraz Foundation in Jordan. These articles – Palestinian, Jordanian and other Arab costumes from the 19th and 20th centuries from the Widad Kamel Kawar dress collection – are mixed in with contemporary clothing sometimes borrowed from participants in Kiswanson’s performances. In this particular piece, a tracksuit is overlaid with an 18th century Jordanian Robe.

Installation (Installation)

The title of the performance video work Impression by Amol k Patil refers to an Indian tradition. During a Hindu or Muslim weddings, all the inhabitants of the chawl (very modest buildings) cover their chests, arms, and feet with henna. For this work the artist covered his chest with temporary henna tattoos before applying Fervicol, a synthetic resin adhesive.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Winter is a film installation of multiple tenses—shot in the recent past, depicting an unknown future, unfolding (and changing) in the present of the exhibition. Shot in the white-washed homes of New Zealand architect Ian Athfield, including his own communal compound high above Wellington harbor, the film suggests various temporal and cultural conditions of instability, hinting at concerns of global warming and nuclear accidents, pushing at the boundaries of science fiction, stripped of narrative explication and causal explanation.

Photography (Photography)

Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated. Shot from directly above, they are lavish views of very private spaces. The artist plays to her viewers’ voyeuristic impulses, inviting us to look, but then denying us the opportunity to study the figures to whom the sheets belong, so that the rumpled covers become like anthropomorphic stand-ins inviting empathic projection.

Painting (Painting)

These two large format untitled paintings by James Collins feature the artist’s hallmark technique, which transforms abstraction into an optical illusion that creates dimension, space, and mass. These particular paintings expand on the optical illusion referred to as a moiré pattern. Moiré (or fringe patterns as they are also called) are known in mathematics, physics, and art as a type of interference pattern that can be produced when a partially opaque ruled pattern with transparent gaps is overlaid on another similar pattern.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fly was first commissioned as an immersive video experience for Meriem Bennani’s first solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2016, imitating the mosaic structure of a fly’s eyes with a patchwork of projectors. As a single channel video, this work focuses more on the succession of sequences, shot in Bennani’s hometown of Rabat, showing interviews with relatives, an open-air market or a wedding, and jamming them with surreal digital manipulations. A recurrence throughout the film is a fly that accompanies us along the journey, as a childish motif or the symbol of a vanitas , able to sing Rihanna’s song.

Installation (Installation)

Yuca_tech: Energy by Hand is an installation by Amor Muñoz that resulted from a local technology lab in a small village in the Yucatán henequen zone, in the Mayan region of Mexico. The lab was designed as a community technology space that focuses on developing forms of production through collaboration rather than through capitalist means of production based on private ownership and driven by financial profits. More specifically, the workshop and activities of the lab merge Indigenous crafting techniques with open-source technologies and solar energy to create technology-based artworks.

Installation (Installation)

A vehicle without light is a group of more personal photographs. This includes an image of a pirate radio in the 1960s, a story from the BBC website and the photo of Mary Aurore. Mary Aurore, is in fact a character he invented whose identity is impossible to determine but who appears in various works.

Painting (Painting)

Readymade Flea Market is part of a series of works developed by Hun Kyu Kim. While the artist’s previous work drew a parallel between capitalism’s inherent social violence and the evolution of weaponry, Hun Kyu Kim now focuses on political nihilism and how to overcome it. In this new work he uses the metaphor of 3D Graphic Space to represent our current reality.

Vallance’s Rocket is a vibrant picture in which masses of color and collage coalesce into a central vehicle, yet the whole surface seems lit with the roar of space travel. This varied use of media has enabled the artist to bring all of the life, energy, and objects he works with into a single image.

Photography (Photography)

One of Ilana Bar’s best-known works is the series Transparências de lar (Home Transparencies) in which, for four years, the artist photographed her family’s rural home in Atibaia where her father lives with his two brothers and Ilana’s own brother, all three with Down Syndrome. Transparências de lar is the record of a serene, though certainly not a perfect, place. In this place Down Syndrome is not considered an alienable difference in the way that it is in Western culture, it is not problematic or a cause for social exclusion.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Bassoonist

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For many years Tripp has been involved in reviving Karuk ceremonies that had been discontinued for decades, he developed his signature abstract style, based in Karuk design, ceremonial regalia forms, and related cultural and political iconography. The two works in the KADIST collection are a continuation of these forms with in the medium of sculpture.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

His large installation entitled The Museum of Proletarian Culture (2012) looked at the changes in artistic practice that have occurred in Russia throughout the last thirty years – from the amateur art of the late Soviet era to the commercialized post-Soviet cultural practices and the more recent self-expression via contemporary social networks. Thus, the exhibition becomes a whole installation where it is impossible to distinguish architecture from assemblage, facts from fantasy, document from fiction. It is a museum of museums where viewers find themselves in the era of didactic exhibitions; whereby the main protagonists are workers, engineers, and amateur artists, and finally replaced by the creative class of 1990s and 2000s.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled print by Wade Guyton depicts an iteration of elements that are characteristic of the artist’s work. Inkjet printed on canvas is a duplicate flame motif overlaid with a stripe pattern. This work originated in Guyton’s interest in collecting various editions of the novel Firestarter by the popular horror and science fiction author Stephen King.