Painting (Painting)

The painting is composed of nineteenth century linen collected over five years. The pieces started out as offcuts from a large work called Fabaceae, which refers to the carob bean, an African staple found in the rainforest and tropical forests. The artist took these already dyed offcuts and dyed them further and then put them out in the sun to fade.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In 1872, a German scientist, Sir Julius von Haast, found the fossilized remains of a giant bird in New Zealand, that was soon connected to the Maori legend of the Hokioi. The Maori folklore recounts the story of an eagle of immense proportions that was said to be capable of devouring human beings. The bones uncovered by the scientist included a femur, one rib, and two claws.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Estratos II by artist Cynthia Gutiérrez features a large white plinth with a transversal cut through the lower half, revealing a collection of archeological objects. These pieces of history have seemingly been lost to time and have lived covered under a sterile exterior. To create the ceramic objects for this project, Gutiérrez worked closely with an artist that creates Mesoamerican replicas.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series of drawings Cancha Abierta (Yellow Series) derive from a project in which Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón worked with the community of El Rosario, located in the region of Beni, Bolivia, approximately 500 meters away from the Mamoré River. Due to a major flood that affected the vicinity–the largest recorded to date–the location had been practically buried under mud. One of the most distressed areas was the basketball court, which was buried underneath three feet of mud.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Cristóbal Lehyt has conducted thorough research on the historical and cultural complexity of the northern region of Chile where the Atacama Desert is located. This area, rich both in terms of its cultural heritage and its natural resources (such as the copper mines), is at the origins of some of the most dramatic episodes in the country’s recent political history. With the series Untitled (Given a wall, what’s happening behind it?)

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eschewing their current musicological function, 4 mourners on a mantel presents photo-realistic depictions of said figures on top of a hypothetical collector’s fireplace. Herein, these funerary objects are displaced as curios which stare back at the viewer in signs of grief and confusion.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

First exhibited as part of the recent multidisciplinary project Code Switching and Other Work , at Art Mûr, Berlin in late 2018, Nadia Myre’s Untitled (Tobacco Barrel) takes inspiration from the cylindrical vessels used to import tobacco from North America to Europe during periods of early colonial settlement. Responding to the history of clay pipe production in the ports of London, Bristol, and Glasgow by weaving together the literal detritus of the colonial tobacco trade, Myre’s work poetically untangles material links between the British Empire, Canada, and Indigenous peoples. Following contact with the so-called New World in the 1600s, the growing popularity of tobacco use in Europe led to the design and widespread manufacturing of disposable, pre-stuffed clay tobacco pipes in Britain.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Intersticio (Interstice) by Elena Damiani traces the topography of a non-specific site, an in-between zone. The video presents a panoramic view of two territories of a shifting and unresolved character, composed out of segmented events that visually intersect at a shared horizon point. Over the images, a fragmented and ambiguous poetic narration describes, by means of images found in digital archives, a hybrid site that permutes the representation of nature through its fusion of source material.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After two years of research in close conversation with anthropologists and archaeologists, Linares eventually enrolled in classes to study archeology—specifically the history of material artifacts. He became obsessed with the origin of metaphor, and the stick as the Ur (earliest) object used by humans that led to the formation of meaning itself. This video, which accompanies the “Museum of the Stick,” is part of major work surveying material culture collected and presented by the artist through a complex narrative of associations and anthropological research.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Unconformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Photography (Photography)

For the works KAKERA, Bullet Train and KAKERA, Loving God Tatsuki Masaru traveled throughout Japan to visit museums holding kakera (which translates to “fragments”) of Jomon Period potteries –Japan’s pre-history 2,300-15,000 years ago. Small and fragile, the kakera were donated by farmers who had found them in their fields, or by archeologists, and then wrapped in newspapers and stored away. Today they sit quietly on the shelves of museums, unknown to people.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

As a discipline born at the same time as colonialism, archeology is struggling to rid itself of this sad context. It is simultaneously the science of the creation and the restoration of ruins. Ali Cherri is interested in auctions of archaeological objects and the desire they inspire in this context.

Installation (Installation)

Produced for the Prix Marcel Duchamp and presented at the Centre Pompidou in October 2017, the installation Uncomformities is comprised of photographs, archaeological drawings, and narratives, based on the analysis of core samples from different sites in Beirut, Paris and Athens. The work questions how, at a time when traces and memories no longer exist, and the earth remains the only witness of our past, history is produced, and how the stories of our civilization are written and told. In each location, the artists collected soil samples, which they asked experts to analyze before creating a series of narrations and coded drawings.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Blue Elbow (Coude bleu) is made from plaster, burlap, lacquer, pigments and plastics. The materials related to the techniques of the sculpture or the painting but also others, which refer to commerce, to objects of consumption. The chair refers directly to the body as does the title of the work, Blue Elbow .

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As an artist Francisco Camacho Herrera seeks ways in which his work can exist within, and challenge, official social channels. His practice revolves around the possibility of art to bear practical effects on cultural assumptions and reflects on redefining common concepts that can lead art to change the ways in which we conceive society. Camacho Herrera speculated that Chinese sailors might have reached the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean before the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

Installation (Installation)

Dale Harding’s installation Body of Objects consists of eleven sculptural works that the artist based on imagery found at sandstone sites across Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland. Mouth-blown with ochre on sandstone, these extraordinary stencilled images depict weaponry, domestic tools, and ceremonial objects that are specific to the region and that relate to Harding’s own ancestry. In response to these enduring indexes of Indigenous material culture, Harding produced a suite of cast objects using the stencilled imagery as a guide, along with objects that relate to his family history: boomerangs, spears, clubs, and whips are all part of the display.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

Installation (Installation)

Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object. They are playful and exaggerated representations of “kill hole pottery” — ceramic dishes in the Mimbres tradition with distinct circular holes located in the center of the pots. Although very little is known about the Mimbres culture’s specific beliefs, they are loosely understood to have terminated the object symbolically in preparation for funerary use.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015. The sculpture, employing the technique of traditional Atzompa pottery originating from Oaxaca, Mexico, is an examination of the way in which archaeological heritage is remembered in the earthenware made by Atzompa potters today. Accompanied by the publication ‘Ixiptla Vol.