NFT (NFT)

Indiscreet Units by Harm van den Dorpel is a group of more than 266 hue-rotating flags, stored on the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS. This is a project about the indeterminacy of color, and that variability as a metaphor for larger social and political forces. Each NFT in the series is the official flag design for nations (and related entities) around the world.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Drought Mask by Rajni Perera is a prototype that is suggestive of dire implications for human survival. Directly addressing the urgent climate crisis, specifically wide-spread drought, this sculpture imagines hybrid cultural aesthetics of the near-future after global collapse. Composed of various woven textiles complete with frills and fringes, leather, a gas mask, and pencil, Rajni’s mask prefigures future dystopian characters who are resilient and resourceful; self-fashioning tools for survival.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Heat Waves by Kent Chan examines the contexts, politics, and proliferation of the different aesthetics of heat by drawing from the aesthetics of regions defined by hot and humid climates and associated with histories of coloniality such as ‘the global south’ and the ‘developing world’. The video takes the form of a curated broadcast or music video of historical and contemporary imagery and videos of both found and filmed footage, including media broadcasts; TikToks; DJ sets; an interview with Keanu Reeves; an excerpt of Ho Tzu Nyen’s 4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art (2005); an interview with KADIST Collection artist Julian Abraham Togar; and DJ sets. The barrage of footage weaves together contrasting tropes about the tropics: depicting it as a diseased paradise; naturally abundant, yet economically poor; filled with people who are at once energetic and lazy; with dynamic aesthetics, but lacking order.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Color Strip by Elsa Werth two-dimensional versions of all the national flags of the world (197 in all) are compiled into a long horizontal strip. The video is presented on a large flat-screen, approximating the size and dimensions of a national flag. As each flag slides across the screen, connections between the colors, signs, and forms of different countries and parts of the world create unexpected associations.

Photography (Photography)

Nakayama is part of a larger body of work by Pierre Gonnord focusing on the analysis and description of the lifestyles of urban youth in large Western cities. These images reflect on new canons of beauty, and the appearances and simulacra of fashion for a new generation. In particular, these works consider themes of androgyny, crossbreeding, and recycling.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Sculpture by Musquiqui Chihying comprises a two-channel lecture performance and a photograph. The video begins with 2017 footage of French president Emmanuel Macron announcing his commitment to the restitution of French-held African objects looted during the colonial era. Moving through the video, the artist’s voice narrates over archival images and videos, explaining how so many African artifacts came into the possession of European museums.

Photography (Photography)

Bimba y Delfin is part of a larger body of work by Pierre Gonnord focusing on the analysis and description of the lifestyles of urban youth in large Western cities. These images reflect on new canons of beauty, and the appearances and simulacra of fashion for a new generation. In particular, these works consider themes of androgyny, crossbreeding, and recycling.

Painting (Painting)

Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.

Installation (Installation)

Sylbee Kim’s Unindebted Life is a single-channel video, commissioned and premiered at the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021). This work is a major production by the artist, addressing her attempts to attractively integrate and intersect elements such as bodies and minds, ancient spirituality, heterogeneity, class and capital, digital temporality, and particular aesthetics of the post-internet generation. In the work, the vitality and the movement in calligraphy motifs, revealed through the flashing light presented in the screen panels and video sequences, are related to the moment of change inherent in the body’s cell energy and living things.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Baumgartner’s own excursion into war imagery is the diptych Formation . She was watching a television documentary on the Second World War, was struck by the extraordinary nature of the colour film and decided to video it. The two frames she isolated depict the shadows the planes cast on the ground and the sun glinting off their steel fuselages.

The various distinct but connected lineages of Himalayan painting remain thriving languages employed by artists from across the region to express their unique perspective in our shared contemporary world. In Bhutan in particular, this language is prevalent and its maintenance is seen through the political prism of preserving Bhutan’s identity in the global world. That being said, o ffering by Gyempo Wangchuk presented an attempt to bring a critical dimension within the traditional Himalayan forms of expression.

Installation (Installation)

30 Proposals of Flag explores the relationships between signs, meanings, aesthetics, and nations. The artwork consists of 30 flags layered together and hanging from the ceiling. Each flag is illustrated with Jao’s rendition of a possible coat of arms derived from Taiwan’s economic and political history.

Photography (Photography)

In Stilleben mid Zierlauch ( Still Life with Aluminum) Annette Kelm utilizes visual juxtaposition to bring together a gridded aluminum backdrop, a pot with a vaguely indigenous pattern on it, and two purple dandelions. The aesthetic dissonance between the mechanical, gridded aluminum and the grainy clay pot signify an interaction between systems of visual production, furthered by the aluminum grid’s inward tilt, visually apparent due to the grid pattern’s convergence at the top of the photograph. Contrasting the stark slant of the grid, the pot sits on a level surface, while the two tall stems protruding from it run at a non-parallel angle to the grid.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017. The video is a shot-for-shot remake of the film “The Perfect Human” by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (1967). The original is narrated in an anthropological manner, or as if listening to a guide at a zoo, but Da Corte’s version is stranger and more philosophical.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Fashion is the focus of Blood Sugar , which consists of a video projected onto a vintage vinyl jacket set at torso height on a dressmaker’s dummy. As suggested by the work’s title, Cheryl Donegan uses the body as a metaphor, relating the continuous cycle and recycle of images that characterizes consumer fashion culture to the flow of sugar in our blood. Formally, the work borrows strategies from conceptual art, and specifically video art from the 1960s and 1970s—such as the use of repetition, patterns, found materials, and a DIY, low-tech aesthetic—and combines it with contemporary cultural forms, in this case, the world of fashion.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Kan Xuan’s four-channel video Island , a series of objects like nail clippers, hairbrush, toothpaste, and house decorations are shot in close-ups. These highly polished and aestheticized images create a poetic visual flow. However, in front of each object lies a coin of different value—two yuan, one pound, one euro, one dollar—that silently reveals the material value of the household supplies.

In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste. There is a missing organ in our social metabolism which would work as a stomach or intestines. The Recyclone is a device made of plastic containers that fit into each other.

Photography (Photography)

Materia en Reposo II (Brasil)