Photography (Photography)

The series of prints titled Mr. Shadow by Nontawat Numbenchapol engages with the history of and current state of militarization in Thailand. Each print features an invisible person, their silhouette only outlined by the military fatigues that they wear.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video installation Tremble, Jiang projected the life-size images of seven naked men and women onto seven individual screens. Each person displays a different facial expression and body position such as reading a book, arms open for a hug, holding a knife, raising a fist to take an oath. Each gesture reflects some essential social aspect of everyday life: hugging is about caring, taking oath has to do with politics, reading relates to acquiring knowledge, and raising a knife indicates violence.

Painting (Painting)

In Untitled (after Paul Schultze Nuremberg’s Kunst) (2006), from a larger series of diptychs, Gmelin addresses the notion of entartete kunst ( “Degenerate Art”) . Each diptych juxtaposes a portrait of a person considered to be mentally handicapped with a painting that was branded by the Nazi regime as degenerate. Gmelin’s source for these images is Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), a book by Paul Schultze Naumburg published in 1928.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Castigos del caucho by Santiago Yahuarcani originates in the oral memory transmitted by the artist’s grandfather, who was a survivor of the Putumayo genocide where thousands of Indigenous people were annihilated and enslaved to extract rubber from the Amazon forest between 1879 and 1912. Yahuarcani’s complex narrative paintings on tree bark highlight a long history of colonial violence against the Uitoto and other Indigenous communities. They also show the destruction of the rainforest under Western models of extraction, privatization, and development.

Photography (Photography)

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot in Oliveto Lucano, a village in the south of Italy, AUTOTROFIA (meaning self-eating) by artist Anton Vidokle is a cinéma vérité style film that slides fictive characters into real situations, and vice-versa, to draw a prolonged meditation on the cycle of life, seasonal renewal, and ecological awareness. Combining fictional and non-fictional content, the film slips an interpretative script based on the writings of the painter Vassily Chekrygin, and the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, within the context of an ancient pagan fertility ritual still practiced in the region. The film’s impressionistic plot revolves around the ecological dimensions of Russian Cosmism.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Study of History III 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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The perceived effortlessness of power, projecting above experiences of labored subordination is examined in Death at a 30 Degree Angle by Bani Abidi, which funnels this projection of image through the studio of Ram Sutar, renowned in India for his monumental statues of political figures, generally from the post-independence generation. In a contemporary Indian society beholden by strongmen, Abidi uses Sutar’s studio to fictionalize a sculptor producing commemorative works for populist, preening figures, surrounded by the likenesses of idolized politicians of the post-colony. Abidi’s video presents one such aspirational bureaucrat, trailed by a cadre of lackeys who fawn over the varying statues that are laboriously carted out for his approval.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marshal Tie Jia (Turtle Island) explores the history of a tiny island off of the coast of Matsu in the Taiwan Strait that has been instrumental in the geopolitical relationships between China, Taiwan, and Japan. The Chinese frog deity, Marshal Tie Jia, is now exiled to the island where he is still revered by the Taiwanese people. The installation includes documentation of the artist’s correspondence with the frog deity placed upon an altar, while the video explores both Marshal’s birthplace in China and his current home on Turtle Island.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

HFT The Gardner by Suzanne Treister is a large-scale project that comprises drawings and computer works by fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg. HFT is an algorithmic High-Frequency Trader based in London, who experiences a hallucinogenic episode that triggers a journey into the exploration of psychoactive plants. In a nerd-like discovery of Discovering Hebrew, numerology, botany, and shamanic divination and healing, HFT becomes an ‘outsider artist’ whose works are collected by oligarchs, bankers, and museums, much like in the mainstream art world.

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 .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Composed of five episodes, Brine Lake (A New Body) by Shen Xin is set in a fictional factory where iodine is produced as a byproduct of natural gas sourced from deep sea brine lakes. Korean, Japanese, and Russian are spoken in multiple episodes. The protagonists have multiple encounters and conversations with two unseen employees of the factory whose visions are overtaken by the camera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways. The video begins with the pedestrian traversing a seemingly idyllic ivy lined stone and concrete thoroughfare. As his pace begins to accelerate, the camera follows him with greater urgency, slowly settling and become stable again as his pace decelerates.

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.

Installation (Installation)

South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Trinity , Wang Mowen uses video to tell the story of a young woman who wants to know the whereabouts of a person born sixty years ago. She visits three fortune tellers and provides the person’s birth date. Each psychic deliberates and comes to the correct conclusion that the woman in question is the seeker’s mother.

September 2007

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other. During World War II, the Walt Disney Company produced series of cartoon shorts that featured Donald Duck’s nightmare of working in an inhumane artillery factory in Nazi Germany and serving in the U. S. Army. By animating and normalizing war and military life, these cartoons not only achieved widespread popularity, but functioned as government propaganda.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Pyre , an installation by Mexico City-based artist Joaquín Segura, addresses corruption, impunity, and the role that failed governments play in the normalization of violence. The work references mass disappearances at the hands of corrupt armed forces and paramilitary groups that have taken place in Mexico since the 1960s and significantly escalated over the last decade due to the War on Drugs. While the piece may be installed any number of ways, it is marked by the precision of its material content: 71 liters of gasoline, 23 used car tires, and 760 kilograms of wood.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jeep Comics is based on the second of only two issues published by RB Leffingwell and Company in 1944–45. Though largely unknown, their protagonists, Jeep and Peep, embody the ethos of “Golden Age” comic books in which magically empowered heroes triumph over evils to boost patriotic enthusiasm.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For Piedras Blancas , arguably his most ambitious and visually arresting video to date, Miguel Angel Ríos made 3,000 “piedras” out of a concrete/stone composite. The video is shot in arid, mountainous locations in Mexico (his adopted country) and Argentina (his home country). Over several months, Ríos scouted locations for natural-worn tributaries where he eventually allowed these balls to then thunder down the mountain.

Installation (Installation)

KLAU MICH is a TV and performance project by Dora García with Ellen Blumenstein, Samir Kandil, Jan Mech, TheaterChaosium, and Offener Kanal Kassel, during the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13).

Photography (Photography)

In Eniko Mihalik (2012), the camera captures a glimpse of the eponymous Hungarian model as seen through a rearview mirror. They are both two examples of the artist’s many enigmatic photographs of models, actors, musicians, and other powerful figures rooted in the celebrity-driven culture of Los Angeles. Catching a glimpse of the model, the viewer enters into the world of the celebrity.

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.

NFT (NFT)

Gregory Halpern spent five years shooting ZZYZX , and another year editing the results, from an estimated thousand rolls of film, about half of which were shot in the final year after his Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to live in California. According to Halpern, the series “is grounded in reality, but it occupies an in-between space, between documentary and a certain sense of mystery.” …“I see ZZYZX as part of a continuum but edging a little closer towards fiction.” The series title is borrowed from the village Zzyzx (pronounced zye-zix), formerly Soda Springs, but rechristened by the mineral water pioneer, Curtis Howe Springer, in 1944. The eccentric Springer named it after what he claimed to be the last word in the English language.

Installation (Installation)

For The Reverse Sessions , the artist reversed the order in which instruments are usually created, taking the sounds of a collection of ethnic musical instruments from The Dahlem Museum as the starting point. The artist used the audio recordings of live performances that he wrote and directed, to collaborate with instrument makers on imagining and building the objects that could have generated these recordings. Without involving any images, Atoui proposed to engage with sound directly — contrary to the path of ethnomusicology that studies the shape and mechanism of an instrument with an emphasis on its cultural and social context.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Alka domo by Seba Calfuqueo is a performative video work that recontextualizes a story about Caupolicán, the Mapuche toki (meaning symbol of strength and perseverance in the face of adversity). Caupolicán was elected military leader by the Mapuche people of Chile after successfully completing the challenge of holding a log on his shoulders for two days. Caupolicán led the Mapuche army in the first uprising against the Spanish conquistadors from 1553 to 1558.

Painting (Painting)

Hybridized drawing is a continued exploration in Moshekwa’s practice, integrating elements of graffiti, thread and yarn to enrich his abstract drawings of maps and space. Through the combination of ready-found materials with drawing, in the case of “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)”, employing string, Moshekwa’s creates tension lines across the image, both physical and metaphysical to explore the traumatic events of South Africa and more specifically the passing of his grandmother. Referencing gestural painting of the 1940s and 50s, “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)” is a disfigured and layered mapping of both the African and psychological landscape.