Installation (Installation)

Gabriel Kuri has created a series of works in which he juxtaposes perennial and ephemeral materials. Untitled (Ticket Roll) belongs to this group of sculptures and consists of three smooth ornate marble elements and a roll of public transport tickets. The artist poetically associates finesse and fragility as in a number of these works.

Installation (Installation)

he woke up with seeds in his lungs by Prajakta Potnis is a set of x-ray films presented through backlit light boxes of found objects constructed to evoke the body or organs that turns the host into a foreign element. The title of the work is inspired by a story the artist came across during her research, according to which a man had swallowed seeds that started to grow inside his organs. In the work, interior scapes of the body appear as radioactive rays pass through various materials.

Painting (Painting)

Maria Taniguchi works across several media but is principally known for her long-running series of quasi-abstract paintings featuring a stylized brick wall device. Full of subtle gradations and low-key modulations, these are her trademark: a sustained, reiterative practice, steeped in repetition but carefully attuned to the economies and the sculptural presence of painting. Her approach to painting is conceptual.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine.

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)

The Third Seal—They Are Already Old. They Don’t Need To Exist Anymore is part of The Seven Seals , Tsang’s ongoing series of digital videos that are projected as installations onto the walls and ceilings of dark rooms. Using texts and computer technology, the series draws its reference from various sources—the Bible, Judeo-Christian eschatology, existentialism, metaphysics, politics, among others—to articulate the world’s complexity and the dilemmas that people face while approaching “the end of the world.” The Third Seal is a nineteen-by-twenty-seven-foot projection on a single wall that, together with sound, creates an immersive and dynamic environment.

Photography (Photography)

Noticing the lack of archives on the queens of various African kingdoms, artist Ishola Akpo created several series of work that retrace their history. Akpo uses different mediums in these projects, as a metaphor to the complex stories of the figures and their true political weight. One part of the project, the Agbara Women photographic series, employs fictional portraits that sheds light on the queens’ histories.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nos visages ( Our Faces ) continues Nidhal Chamekh’s research around visual souvenirs of figures of the past and the light they might shed on our contemporary era. For this series of drawings, the artist draws from articles of French colonial propaganda, specifically the magazine Le Miroir , founded in 1910. In these documents Senegalese and Berber “infantrymen” participating in the First World War were represented in a way that situates them “somewhere between the ethnographical survey and the hackneyed colonial and orientalist image” says Morad Montazami.

Installation (Installation)

Sweet Jesus is a sound installation by Lutz Bacher that consists of a found recording of James Earl Jones’ iconic voice reciting biblical genealogy from Matthew, Book 1. Lutz has edited the recording by slowing it down slightly and adding background sound from the same recording. In Lutz’s edit, these are all the names of the ancestors of Jesus leading up to Joseph, but she leaves Jesus out of it, then reverses chronologically.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey. At once attractive and repulsive, the sculpture combines objects of adornment with what appears to be viscera. The sculpture’s curious delicacy evokes a ritualistic catharsis, in response to persistent forms of medical racial violence and objectification for Black people in America and around the world.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel. In the video, a fallen parachutist hangs tangled by his own lines, suspended between two electrical towers in a surreally desolate landscape of overgrown fields in the Jordan Valley of Israel. A group of over a hundred men and women approach the towers, working with almost mechanic efficiency to free the parachutist from the power lines overhead.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video work Si Señor by Abigail Reyes is about the typical representation of women in Latin American office culture. Collaging together a chorus of subservient snapshots of women responding to an off-screen man with “si señor”, the accumulative effect of these spliced together scenes weighs heavy as the film plays on both humour and collective discomfort. In order to complete the work the artist watched hours upon hours of telenovelas, the impact of which on the collective consciousness is explored through her film.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

Painting (Painting)

Adnan’s paintings are simple images with bold contrasting colors and rich textures. This particular work has an iconic feel and a strong physical presence in spite of its diminutive size. All of her paintings are small but, like Howard Hodgkin’s work, their intensity gains from their diminutive size.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

“We both died at the same moment” is a humorous observation of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human emotions to nature and animals. A siliquaria armata is a slitworm that loosley-coiles a shell. Growing inside a sea-bed, a siliquaria armata will grow vertically until it touches another siliquaria armata, at which point they will knot together.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Game (Six Pieces) by Erbossyn Meldibekov is inspired by the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle and is composed of three colors (red, green and white) instead of six, referencing the colors of the Afghan flag. The work provides a revisionist interpretation of the legacy of The Great Game (the original 19th-century standoff between Russian and British empires over Afghanistan), and Afghanistan’s position as a centerpiece of the longstanding War on Terror, (the military campaign led by the United States and their allies against organizations and regimes they identified as terrorists after 9/11). Game (Six Pieces) mobilizes dark humor and irony to illustrate the complex and unstable relationships between communism, Islam, and American and British imperialism.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

David Gustav Cramer’s are composed of simple, descriptive texts accompanied by found photographs, letters or other materials. The elements juxtaposed in each work operate like the lines of a Haiku. It is the tension between them that opens space for thought.

Photography (Photography)

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair. Marshal Tie Jia is a frog god, who was born in a pond in Jiangxi, China, before fleeing to Matsu Island off the coast of Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution after his temple was destroyed. Spirit Writing attempts to reconstruct the original temple using 3D modeling software, operated in real time as Hsu asks the Marshal questions, receiving answers through a divination ritual in which the chair is swung violently around by his acolytes.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Now; 1992 is Ali Yass’s attempt to remake his childhood drawings, which were lost after he was forced to leave Iraq following the 2003 US occupation. The drawings are chimeric compositions of animated limbs, animal, human, and machine, that seem to hurl in all directions and mediums, unified as colorful figurations posed against blank backgrounds, rendering the curious characters suspended in time. This suspension materializes the artist’s view on violence and temporality, on which he has claimed: “I will not talk about war because it is from the past.

Painting (Painting)

Abel Rodríguez’s precise, botanical illustrations are drawn from memory and knowledge acquired by oral traditions. They are the visions of someone who sees the potential of plants as food, material for dwellings and clothing, and for use in sacred rites. Terraza Alta V is part of a series of drawings that track the changing appearance and life of an area identified as Terraza Alta.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A child and dreamer my whole life long (broken tree) (2004) is a sculpture made of filler, wire, copper, oil paint, and wood depicting a tree just at it’s moment of breaking into half – one part alive with foliage and blooming branches and the other the crisp of the break exposed, with the trunk adhered solidly to a plinth. The sculpture appears to speak quite bluntly about Isaac’s own sense of bleak pessimism when exposing a severed tree, the universe’s sacred sign of life and birth. Through the perfect rendering of this encapsulated moment, Isaacs demonstrates the strength of the sculptural artifact and his interest in failure and fragility.

Installation (Installation)

For the exhibition 1440 sunsets per 24 hours at KADIST Paris in 2017, Haig Aivazian presented a sprawling installation, which sought to enact various instances of the deployment of light and darkness within public space and sports, reflecting on the double-edged abilities of lighting systems to expose, highlight or dissimulate subjects. For the installtion 1,2,3 soleil ! the space was structured like a material index, posing limbs and skins from stadiums and public spaces —namely floodlights, electric poles and asphalt— alongside abstract drawings inspired by policing and sporting data visualization iconography.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate. The form used for this drawing details a weekly menu for the prisoners. Hough’s drawing depicts three grimacing figures, riding atop the back of a larger, female figure on all fours.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Something To Do With Being Held by Jordan Ann Craig is inspired by a Cheyenne bead bag. Intrigued by the two shades of blue used for the source object (a deep dusty blue and a bold vivid cobalt blue) the artist replicated these shades in her painting. Craig then added in her own colors, including the pink-orange hues, to achieve a bold but soft quality about the work, as she states that she intended the work to convey vulnerability.

Photography (Photography)

Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages. The artist used found images from the internet, including a viral photo of an elderly woman who took part in the 2016 “Black Monday” strike against a proposed anti-abortion law in Poland, and another image taken the same year of a group of protestors in the United Kingdom, rallying for the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing parallels with Hank Willis Thomas’s I Am a Man (2013) painting in the KADIST Collection, Wong employs the visual language and terminology of mass media, specifically borrowing images from protests on civil rights issues.