Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Audra Knutson’s work The Oblivion was carved and printed in conjunction with the print The Death . Also a hand-printed linocut, many of the details in this work are based on photocopies of images sourced by the artist from her local library. At the time she was making these works, she recalls looking at ‘beautiful, sad, timeless and stark photographs taken in old-work segments of Europe and being influenced by their aesthetic and emotional gravitas.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Note on Multitude is a chilling black-and-white short movie recorded with a single camera in Prishtina, Kosovo, in 2015. The film, beginning in an unidentifiable location, shows a large, bustling and anxious crowd. Soon, the viewer is privy to the setting: a bus station.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2009, Laura Henno began research in the archipelago Comoros for her first film Koropa the first episode of a triptych— completed in 2016. Mayotte is the only remaining island belonging to France in the archipelago of the Comoros, which gained independence in 1975, creating an invisible border that divides the islands from Europe. Koropa is the portrait of a particular relationship: that of Ben, a former fisherman turned smuggler, and Patron, a child who makes his first smuggling voyage between the island of Anjouan and Mayotte.

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).

Painting (Painting)

Arima’s free brushstrokes gesture towards traditions in Expressionist painting, and Ticket could be seen as an attempt at “pure painting” in which the aesthetics of the medium supersede content. But if his portraits resist social commentary, they nonetheless challenge conventional standards of beauty through a decided embrace of decayed forms and colors. Inspired by underground creative cultures, his paintings have the slipshod spontaneity of graffiti and other types of street art.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age) Javier Castro asks several children to describe what they want to be when they grow up and what their best career option is in Cuba. Their responses are telling: some hopeful or playful in nature as one would expect, and others crudely revealing the harsh reality that the children perceive. The work takes its title from a children’s magazine produced by José Martí in 1889, during the years leading to the Cuban War of Independence from Spain in which Marti lost his life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier. Inspired by the artist’s father,a soldier in Algeria who then suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,the video depicts the delusions flowing from a mind ravaged by violence: a vision grown from the inside out. Like a mirage amidst a blank, desert expanse, specters are conjured as the inanimate comes to life.

Painting (Painting)

What Color is Luke Murphy’s outstanding digital painting that elegantly loops in nonstop motion. The artist cleverly usurped the familiar signage of brightly scrolling words that we ordinarily see calling out to advertise a Bodega or sidewalk cart’s fast food. In a DIY manner, Murphy constructed the extra-luminous LED panel screen and also wrote the code that sets the pace and pattern of the flowing words.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the work Cinema , Fang Lu explores in a meticulous yet un-dramatic — almost casual — way of how “the self” in our today’s life is a controlled and staged construction of oneself. What appears at first sight to be a not unusual performance of self-choreography, becomes at a second glance a disturbing portrait of a – female – persona brought to life under contemporary conditions of attractiveness, anxiety and narcissism. Unlike her previous works, which duel more on the internal, surrealistic human conditions, this seven-channel work elevates the individual relationship with its socio-political environment to a more recognizable and appealing set of behavioral actions of self-awareness and self-inflicted anguish.