Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Study of History VI 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)

Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure. The courtroom as a space for the implementation of justice and of legal argumentation, but also through which different affective forces, some hegemonic and others marginalized, battle each other out in their respective quests for acknowledgment, accountability, and retribution. The work was produced at a time during which several popular revolts, such as in Egypt, seemed to have effectively been hijacked by reactionary forces, resulting in the violent dismissal of collective demands for emancipation, including through sham trials and wrongful convictions criminalizing activists, journalists, and protesters.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Like many of Dr. Lakra’s works, Cortes y la malinche is a drawing done on a found vintage magazine page. The text at the bottom of the page, “reclinandose inocentemente sobre el regazo de Hernan-Cortés,” translates to, “reclining innocently in the lap of Hernan Cortés,” and refers to the Spanish conquistador who brought down the Aztec empire. Malinche was a native Mexican who served both as Cortés’s translator in both the Mayan and Aztec languages, as well as his lover.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Makeover

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Agatha Gothe-Snape’s POWERPOINTS is an ongoing series of digital artworks that have been created with Microsoft PowerPoint. They are endless loops with sound. POWERPOINTS parallel Gothe-Snape’s broader conceptual practice stemming from improvisational performance.