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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Takeshi Murata developed an interest in space inspired by his architect parents. OM Rider features the artist’s characteristic absurdist humor and aesthetics–a mélange of highly attuned lighting and composition (in homage to Ken Price), with retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species. In parallel to the feature film version, Vaz created a three-channel installation format meant to be displayed in contemporary art spaces. This edition includes three complementary video works that expand on the conceptual frameworks of the film.

Photography (Photography)

Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment. Referring to China’s modernization and its capitalist and utopic visions, RMB City explores the ways in which global communication impacts imagination, values, and ways of life. By appropriating virtual reality, Cao Fei opens up a new frontier in the field of art production that surpasses conventional materiality and invites collaboration and exchanges with her public and clients.

Photography (Photography)

His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training. Using a still camera to compose the fifty images of the series, Jones turns his lens on the vernacular architecture of California’s southern region, looking at the iconic and idiosyncratic spaces that define a region. William E. Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose interests lie in the circulation of images—images that are broadcast, images that are hidden, and images that become imbedded in our collective consciousness.

Installation (Installation)

Qui vivra verra, Qui mourra saura is an installation by Minia Biabiany composed of the plan of a house made out of strips of salt, and a “garden” made of ceramic pieces, hanging from the ceiling and on the floor, and non woven fabric. She uses blue and red filters to alter the hues of light coming from the outside. The work focuses on the disappearance of traditional knowledge associated with the “jardin de case” outside Guadeloupean houses.

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.

Photography (Photography)

This image is an extract from a notebook in the archives of doctor Fakhouri that lists the cars that have been used for bombs between 1975 and 1991. Each page of the notebook contains a collage of an image of a car with the same make, model and color as the exploded car with a text in Arabic that gives the details of the place, time and date of the explosion, the number of people in the accident, the perimeter of destruction, the weight and the type of explosive. The images of the cars made visible are only equivalents since the cars that actually exploded are totally destroyed.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Xu’s works provide a satiric and provocative alternative to the official system and make publicly visible images of many realities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In his video work Beyond Geography , Li dramatizes the role of the artist-as-imitator to the point of sheer parody. Dressed to toe in the costume of a typical Discovery Channel adventurer-explorer, the artist dashes suavely through the uncharted jungle habitat of a primitive tribe. Li modulates his own voice in laughably accurate mimicry of the dubbed Discovery Channel protagonist familiar to Chinese viewership, daringly gulping fresh water from a river, expertly admiring exotic vegetation, and whimpering in fear of the dark sounds of the night (screaming, even, as he trips on a human skull) in an full-scale exaggeration of a nature show personality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lens Flare and the series Untitled Basel Lens Flare (6168, 5950, 7497) were part of a solo project by the artist presented at ArtBasel in 2009. Included in the Kadist Collection, these works continue to explore the ontology of the image to investigate the relationship between painting, photography, and a new time-based variable: film. Reduced here to the essential function of recording the exposure of light through the apparatus of a lens, Kantor then translated these film stills into painted colored canvases that retain the 3:4 aspect ratio of the 16mm film as well as the exact size of the projected image.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory. Gupta created each map by superimposing 100 separate drawings of each country. The project investigates modern notions of the nation-state, national identity, and borders by looking at countries in which boundaries are contested and the history of the land far precedes such ideas.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Libro Azul (Ayer-Mañana) (Blue Book (Yesterday-Tomorrow))

Film & Video (Film & Video)

If one had been guessing at Takeshi Murata’s criticism of American consumerist culture up until watching Infinite Doors , it would be solidified after hearing the announcer from The Price is Right squawk prizes one after the next. In the two minutes of the film’s runtime, can count the word “new” used twenty-eight times, and “car”—the holy grail of prizes on that show—used eight times. The bodacious women introduce free prizes, the doors slide open repeatedly, and the crowd cheers with an insatiable appetite in a clear signal of an American propensity for numbing overconsumption.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Related to Edie Fake’s Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — Personal Business draws an association between architecture and the body, with ornamental structures that are decorative and protective. Fake notes, “More and more I’m trying to bring an anarchy into that architecture, or a fantasy and ecstasy of what queer space is and can be.” A beautiful building that’s defended by an imposing front. In this way, the architecture becomes a metaphor for the constructed layers of the self.

NFT (NFT)

For his project Book of Veles artist Jonas Bendiksen travelled to the small city of Veles in North Macedonia, inspired by a series of press reports starting in 2016, that revealed Veles as a major source of the fake news stories flooding Facebook and other social media sites celebrating Donald Trump and denigrating Hillary Clinton. Scores of young people in the impoverished city had discovered that they could make a decent living by fabricating and circulating stories online. Originally presented as a book, Bendiksen’s haunting images show the city of Veles and its inhabitants.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

escenario chacana by Claudia Martínez Garay is a sculptural work composed of a frame-like structure that contains a series of ceramic pieces. It references the Chakana, an Andean cross that encompasses the different levels of existence (known as Pachas) and sacred elements contained in the Indigenous cosmologies of the region. It often appears in the geometrical motifs of textiles and ceramics.

Painting (Painting)

Secrets Between Her and Her Shadow 10 by Maryam Hoseini is from a series of paintings of the same title that are inspired by the story Layla and Majnun – an Arabic love story about Majnun, a 7th century Bedouin poet, and his lover, Layla. Hoseini’s compositions are visually inspired by the illustrations accompanying the Khamsa of Nizami , a manuscript of five poems, including Layla and Majnun , produced by the Persian poet Nizami in the 1590s. Unlike the original tale, Hoseini’s paintings focus entirely on Layla, any male characters are purposefully erased from this narrative.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Planets, Chapter 32 (2017) is a short video that depicts the world at a time of great anxiety. However, it is done with a sharp sense of humor. It starts with a voice explaining that Africa will be partially inundated in the coming year, ending with the impossible relationship between the artist and a chatbot (primitive form of artificial intelligence).

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These hand drawn maps are part of an ongoing series begun in 2008 in which Gupta asks ordinary people to sketch outlines of their home countries by memory. Gupta created each map by superimposing 100 separate drawings of each country. The project investigates modern notions of the nation-state, national identity, and borders by looking at countries in which boundaries are contested and the history of the land far precedes such ideas.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Loretta Fahrenholz’s video is composed of a patchwork of sequences. She constructs her film by juxtaposing stylized takes of street dance performances or images of the disasters at Far Rockaway caused by hurricane Sandy. A dancer goes back and forth in a corridor, a crooked silhouette contorts itself from anxiety on an unmade bed, bodies collapsed on the ground suddenly come to life, dancers, characterized by pixilated gestures, pretend to fight to the death.

Painting (Painting)

Taken from the title of the incredibly influential punk/hardcore record I AGAINST I by the Bad Brains, Untitled (blue) is an acrylic painting on reflective paper by Chris Duncan is part of a larger body of work titled EYE AGAINST I . This title references Duncan’s early artistic influences from the punk and hardcore music communities in tandem with his conceptual interest in perception and optics. This small painting features a glowing cluster of colorful dots on a bright blue background, also created from an accumulation of blue dots in varying tones.

Photography (Photography)

The series Funerals under Neon Lights by Tomoko Kikuchi focuses on how transgender people’s ritual became a vital part of funerals in rural China. Funerals in China have diversified to very unique forms, especially in rural areas. Shot in Sichuan province, Guizhou Province, and Chongqing between 2014 to 2017, the three photographs: Liangzi offering prayer, Chongqing , Liangzi at the funeral, Sichuan province , and Bereaved family at the funeral, Sichuan province feature funerals where eccentric performances by transgender performers, little people, young female performers and singers dressing bikini costume, magicians and acrobatics performers take place under gaudy neon light.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Photography (Photography)

In the Family Portrait series, Akiq AW documents reliefs and statues in Jogja, Indonesia that present an image of the ideological nuclear family. Following Indonesia’s communal and political conflicts, and its economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the second Indonesian President Suharto established the “New Order” regime. During this period, there were efforts to control the national birth rate through a programme called Keluarga Berencana (Family Planning).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The central point of Vanishing Point is the most direct physiological reaction of the body to the environment. Chen Xiaoyun has added a written narrative and a poetic quality to his works. Image fragments containing different pieces of information are linked together by the text, their interplay producing a synesthesia effect.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In “Untitled II (Mapping text)”, 2009, Langa abstracts language in an attempt to change the familiar into the absurd. With reference to comic speech bubbles, Langa combines in a sea of blue gouache a series of nuanced references to identity and politics with “Black Maria” alongside nostalgic and subtle phrases such as “mom be with me, I need u now” and “I didn’t listen.” Through this gathering of references “Untitled II (Mapping text)” forges a poetic and vulnerable site to engage with his personal experiences while simultaneously suggesting the senseless structure of language. This work resonates to larger world of art, politics and popular culture through layering assorted references, piling up meanings that are cryptic and ambivalent, yet resonant with multiple interpretations.

Painting (Painting)

Madani works on a small scale and a large scale. This work is from a series of small paintings called Dazzle Men that take as their starting point the Dazzle patterns used by artists to camouflage ships during the First World War. Dazzle camouflage was designed to confuse the aim of U boat commanders.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

My Name as Written by Bruce Nauman