Chalis Katesi Ramaula is a series of 240 prints capturing Nagendra Gurung’s life, work, and colleagues from the construction sites where he has worked in Dubai and Saudi Arabia. When seen together, the sequence appears to have a cinematic temporality, as one feels the passing of the years he has endured as a migrant worker. Gurung’s subjectivity is highly present, even when looking at the most banal scenes of cranes, concrete, and other machinery, which are rapidly transforming the landscape and society of the Gulf into its own version of capitalist futurism built through the exploitation of others.
The Real. Retrato de Norman Mejía. (The Real. A Portrait of Norman Mejía.)
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Nagtzaam’s medium is drawing and his repertory of forms varies from abstract hard-edge and wall drawing to the reproduction of written material that he collects from art magazines. The artist uses abstract architectural elements that he reproduces on the wall in which he inserts drawings, elements from photographs and drawings of texts collected from art magazines. The repetition, control and imperfection of the movements create a tension, a particular vibration in his geometrical drawings and in the drawings of texts.
Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats. The dreamlike video is filmed among abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, connecting the three locations in an attempt to convey the experience of being in Gaza from these monumental sites. Colorful flickering lights, sun, earth, stone, rock, sky, and water inundate the scenes, and the rhythmic sounds of waves, chimes, and footsteps remain.
Like many contemporary photographers who play with the codes of realism, Valérie Jouve composes her images, having already a more or less predetermined result in mind, in order to deliver a complex representation of the world instead of a bold presentation of facts. A part of the series “Les Figures”, this “portrait’ of P. Faure carries a strong ambiguity, typical of the photographer’s images, between realism and mise-en-scene . This photograph is exemplary of Valérie Jouve’s work: inscription of an inidual within an urban landscape, relation to architecture, simplicity of composition and strong, yet imprecise narrativity – related in part to seemingly familiar characters or places.
Tadmur by artist Majd Abdel Hamid is influenced by a book by Mustafa Khalifa titled The Shell: Memoirs of a Hidden Observer , which details Khalifa’s imprisonment in the Assad ‘desert prison’ Tadmur. Khalifa’s compelling testimonial is now considered to have enlightened the Syrian public to the atrocities being committed in their country by the Assad regime and catalyzed a political resurgence in Syria. The prison was destroyed by ISIS in 2015 and though the initial reaction by the Syrian public was largely positive, the complete leveling of the prison erases the brutal experiences of the prisoners, many of whom died and those that survived.
Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways. “Tiko drink-Kumba drunk” is an adage that is commonly used in the Southwest province of Cameroon to speak of how one’s actions affect others. Civil liberties are next to non-existent in Cameroon, the law is lawless, and structured in a way that is intended to attack its citizens’ human rights.
Curtis Talwst Santiago has been creating intimate and performative environments within these small spaces for several years; the artist used to carry them around to show visitors one on one, opening up a scene in the space of his hand. Santiago considers these mobile box enclosures a method of transporting narratives of home and intimacy, diasporic identity, and experiences most often hidden or concealed from view. These Walls is a sculptural piece made from a reclaimed jewelry box, clay, paint, wool, plastic figurines, and human hair.
Tectonic Model is made from a number of leather bound books piled up in different formations that resemble architecture on top of a sawhorse desk. Tiny cranes of about ten centimetres in height are attached to the top of the books, which have their tassels laid out. The intricately balanced arrangements, with some books standing free and upright, gives the impression that the cranes might have stacked the books themselves by lifting the tassels.
Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants. It complements von Wedemeyer slightly earlier and more artistic film Silberhöhe (2003) which decried imposed Modernist living model. In Die Siedlung , a voiceover describes and criticizes the different sites on view while the camera moves slowly past a vast abandoned 1930s Nazi army barracks which has yet to be converted or demolished, the building site and wastelands for the new private single family housing area, a constructed pond and finally the 1960s or 70s communal blocks of flats.
His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training. Using a still camera to compose the fifty images of the series, Jones turns his lens on the vernacular architecture of California’s southern region, looking at the iconic and idiosyncratic spaces that define a region. William E. Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and artist whose interests lie in the circulation of images—images that are broadcast, images that are hidden, and images that become imbedded in our collective consciousness.
Following a series of related works, Brutalismo Americano by Marlon de Azambuja is a site-specific sculptural installation produced during the artist’s residency at Kadist, San Francisco in 2017. Treating the city as an object of attention, de Azambuja collected building materials from the surrounding area over a period of ten days to conceive of an architecture in situ. The work is not meant to mimic any of San Francisco’s own architecture, or to be a maquette or portrait of the cityscape, but instead a singular, constructive gesture.
Canoas by Tamar Guimarães is a film made for the 2010 São Paulo biennial as an exercise in the projection of national identity. The main subject and setting of the film is Casa das Canoas, the home that architect Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. Overlooking the bay on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the building has achieved iconic status in Brazil.
Halfway between a painting and an installation City Sound of Rug gathers found images, synthetic foam, painted metal plates, and prints placed on the floor. Rugs are elements representative of commerce and related to the idea of territory, handicraft and community. In City Sound of Rug, the rugs are used as surfaces upon which prints are manually made.
Head Box by J ean-Luc Moulène i s not the representation of a space but a real space that remains in the domain of sculpture which the artist develops in parallel with his photographic practice. Created for an exhibition in Kitakyushu in Japan, it is painted green, a color that symbolizes life and creation in Japanese culture. Even though we are confronted with a hollow presence, this is above all a space to lodge a body in the vertical posture of the living.
Ground Plan by Louisa Bufardeci is a large-scale, digitally-printed, architecturally rendered, wall drawing that pictures the permitted global flow of the world’s population. Utilizing data from UNESCO, the national census, opinion polls, and the CIA World Factbook, Bufardeci presents each country as a room in a labyrinthine building. Each room is composed of sometimes incomplete walls, with open or closed doorways, in reflection of their border immigration policies; each room is scaled according to its population density.
In her work, Maids Room (2012) which is part of a series, Daniela Ortiz undertakes an architectural analysis of the houses belonging to the upper class of Lima. Her research highlights the position of ‘service architecture’, the vital space given to the domestics. The project offers an analysis of this room, its size and its position in relation to the rest of the house.
Oscar Tuazon‘s sculptural oeuvre is situated at the border of art, architecture and technology. Engaging different methods of construction, he frequently uses wood, concrete, glass, steel, and piping as materials to create his structures and installations. Tuazon’s works have roots in minimalism, conceptualism, and architecture, and have a direct relationship with both the site in which they are presented, as well as with their viewer, often through physical engagement.
Gated Commune , a video by Camel Collective, is a critique of the complex, and often obtuse, language used to describe sustainable development projects. To construct a future scenario in the imagination of the viewers, a voiceover narrates two perspectives of futuristic practices in architecture and social behaviors: neo-primitives on one hand, who value organic materials and design based on geometric forms, and futurists on the other hand, who value organic forms and computer design. In this constructed universe, both perspectives lead to societal structures that malfunction due to issues with their design, which are not in line with their users’ needs.
Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance. Dilapidated and empty, the ghostly presence of the car park comes to life. Beer composed the piece to resonate with this architecture, finding the frequencies that would bring the building to life, acting as a sound box and in effect another voice.
In 1995, the personal and professional archives of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán were acquired (including the rights to the name and the work of the architect) by the Swiss furniture enterprise Vitra. Frederica Zanco, wife of the owner of Vitra, had received these archives as an engagement present, rather than a solitaire diamond. In this video, The Exhumation , the artist poses the question: how to navigate the laws that render Barragán in public space?
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon. Designed by the architect Richard Neutra, its gray glass, white expanses, and simple forms exude austerity. Luisa Lambri’s photograph Untitled (Sten-Frenke House #04) (2007)recalls the unembellished elegance of the structure while also alluding to modernist painting; the image is less a picture than an abstract expanse that conveys its own flatness.
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground.
Marcelo Cidade interrogates the city, architecture and urban planning. This architectonic drawing proposes modular possibilities, adaptable variations based on the form of the concrete block (a material which is often actually integrated in his practice). The “re-definition” announced in the title is in construction, in process, under development, in flux.
Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945. Yoneda focuses both on the original Japanese features of the houses and on details that have been altered since the end of the occupation. The yet-to-be acknowledged history of the occupation of Taiwan and other East Asian countries by Japan during World War II is subtly disclosed in these pictures.
All his artworks utilize the use of body – the artist’s own body and that of others. The Result of 1000 Pieces typi?es an image of Lin: Lin is standing in an empty hole of a brick wall. By incorporating the brick wall for his work, Lin develops a speci?c strategy to question and negotiate with the relationship between people and the changing environments.
From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany. Here, Garaicoa’s interest in vernacular Cuban architecture shifts towards the European context: a series of twelve nineteenth-century French engravings have been reworked into delicate paper models. Here, the two-dimensional old-school architectural renderings have become the foundation for new hollow three-dimensional structures.
Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage. Both through its title and formally—through how the shapes in the composition resemble a mountain or natural formation—the piece relays us to a mineral quarry or a deep mining pit where materials are extracted. Interspersed among the block-like figures and rocky textures, we also see several human silhouettes, either cut-out, or as if they were whited out by a shining light, or lost in the shadows.
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture. By re-appropriating the structure as a temple and imbuing it with a dance performance based on movements and postures found in ancient pottery and murals, the choreography takes its influence from the house’s design and the body positions on ancient Maya ceramics and buildings. A pulse, breathing, and a pre-Columbian clay flute are among the sounds on the soundtrack.
Chantal Edie and Zacharie Ngnogue are a photography duo who channel their personal experiences into social commentaries...
Charlotte Moth has been constituting an image bank since 1999...
Rocky Cajigan is a Bontoc Igorot artist working in the contemporary contexts of Indigenous people from the Cordilleras region in the northern state of Luzon island in the Philippines...
Beverly Buchanan initially trained as a public health educator having studied medical technology and came to art later, training at the Art Students League under Norman Lewis and finding mentorship in Romare Bearden...
The work of Oliver Beer explores the resonances in buildings and objects, exploiting the occurrence of natural frequencies that turn buildings and objects not only into amplifiers but musical instruments...
Bahar Noorizadeh is filmmaker, writer, and platform designer...
Basma Alsharif is an artist and filmmaker of Palestinian origin, born in Kuwait, and raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip...
Hassan Massoudy trained as a classical calligrapher in Baghdad before attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1969...
Palestinian artist Majd Abdel Hamid’s work is akin to an archeology of violence and trauma from which he unearths the materials that weave a web of new imagination...
Born 1975, Frankfurt / Main, Germany Lives and works in Berlin Nora Schulz explores the relations between painting, sculpture, performance, and language...
Luka Yuanyuan Yang is a photographer, filmmaker and visual artist based in Beijing...
Ryan Villamael’s deeply layered practice is informed by a rare degree of skill and dexterity as well as by vivid imagination and haunting intellectual preoccupations...
Growing up in Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Pozarek experienced political aggression, spying and ludicrous impediments...
In recent years Bettina Pousttchi’s work has dealt with themes related to memory, time and history and she is particularly interested in the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall...
Cao Shu’s works span three-dimensional digital moving images, sound installation, and interactive games...
Adrien Missika (1981, Paris, France) studied and developed his career in Lausanne where he founded 1m3 artspace...
born in 1961 in Cotonou, Benin...
Diane Simpson is interested in a seamless shifting from body to architectural form in the melding of the wearable with the structural un-wearable...
The Italian photographer Tina Modotti is known for her documentation of the mural movement in Mexico...
Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
Like many contemporary photographers who play with the codes of realism, Valérie Jouve composes her images, having already a more or less predetermined result in mind, in order to deliver a complex representation of the world instead of a bold presentation of facts...
His series, The Golden State, harkens back to his early career and his photographic training...
Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...
This photograph seems to be awaiting meaning, it more or less evokes known elements without really identifying with them completely: a motorway interchange, a bridge, an electric pylon… In fact this is the end of the tracks of the Aérotrain, a wheelless monorail invented by Jean Bertin in the 1970s, which acts like ‘a fossil of movement on landscape scale’, as explained by the artist...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
Die Siedlung is a filmic documentary about the recent shift in housing developments in Leipzig-Grünau in former East Germany and its consequences on some inhabitants...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
Chalis Katesi Ramaula is a series of 240 prints capturing Nagendra Gurung’s life, work, and colleagues from the construction sites where he has worked in Dubai and Saudi Arabia...
This series of photographs reflects Marcelo Cidade’s incessant walks or drifting through the city and his chance encounters with a certain street poetry like the Surrealists or Situationists before him...
Drawing & Print
Many of Araujo’s works depict reproductions and Libro Ponti II is a recreation of a book on Italian architect Gio Ponti...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
An early work in Sung Hwang Kim’s career, the video Summer Days in Keijo—written in 1937 is a fictional documentary, the film is based on a non-fiction travelogue, In Korean Wilds and Villages , written by Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman, who lived in Korea from 1935 to 1937...
Drawing & Print
Ranging from Baudelaire to the Koran, each of Hassan Massoudy’s drawings are titled with a quotation from a text...
Head Box by J ean-Luc Moulène i s not the representation of a space but a real space that remains in the domain of sculpture which the artist develops in parallel with his photographic practice...
For Bettina Poutsttchi’s large-format, site-specific photographic work Echo (2009–10), the four exterior walls of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin were covered with a digitally edited collage of archival images of the glass-and-steel facade of the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), which had once been located nearby...
Canoas by Tamar Guimarães is a film made for the 2010 São Paulo biennial as an exercise in the projection of national identity...
Tectonic Model is made from a number of leather bound books piled up in different formations that resemble architecture on top of a sawhorse desk...
From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany...
Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945...
The headdresses, woven from artificial hair braids, symbolize historical icons including Martin Luther King, Kwame Nkrumah, Fela Kuti and King Guézo of Dahomey...
Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance...
In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street...
In the early 20th century, the Hercules Engine Company was doing a brisk business producing customized, heavy-duty engines...
In her work, Maids Room (2012) which is part of a series, Daniela Ortiz undertakes an architectural analysis of the houses belonging to the upper class of Lima...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
Simpson’s sculptural practice connects architecture, clothing, furniture and the body to explore the functional and sociological roles and the influence of the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history...
It is with the eye of a sculptor that Charlotte Moth records modernist architecture and its copies which she encounters during her trips and residences...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
It is with the eye of a sculptor that Charlotte Moth records modernist architecture and its copies which she encounters during her trips and residences...
Halfway between a painting and an installation City Sound of Rug gathers found images, synthetic foam, painted metal plates, and prints placed on the floor...
Adrien Missika follows in the footsteps of the Brazilian landscape architect and artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994), a designer of gardens, parks and promenades who introduced modern landscape architecture to Brazil...
Deep Sleep draws from historical avant-garde cinema to produce a poetic, sound-based meditation following brainwave-generating binaural beats...
Oscar Tuazon‘s sculptural oeuvre is situated at the border of art, architecture and technology...
Drawing & Print
Nagtzaam’s medium is drawing and his repertory of forms varies from abstract hard-edge and wall drawing to the reproduction of written material that he collects from art magazines...
Drawing & Print
Related to Edie Fake’s Memory Palaces series — reimagined facades of urban lesbian bars and gay nightclubs — Personal Business draws an association between architecture and the body, with ornamental structures that are decorative and protective...
In 1995, the personal and professional archives of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán were acquired (including the rights to the name and the work of the architect) by the Swiss furniture enterprise Vitra...
Following a series of related works, Brutalismo Americano by Marlon de Azambuja is a site-specific sculptural installation produced during the artist’s residency at Kadist, San Francisco in 2017...
Curtis Talwst Santiago has been creating intimate and performative environments within these small spaces for several years; the artist used to carry them around to show visitors one on one, opening up a scene in the space of his hand...
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
From the Ending by Rocky Cajigan consists of an assemblage painting, with accompanying sculptural objects presented on the floor...
From the Beginning by Rocky Cajigan consists of an assemblage painting, with accompanying sculptural objects presented on the floor...
Monelle by Diego Marcon was filmed at night inside the infamous Casa del Fascio, the headquarters of the local Fascist Party in Como Italy, designed by Giuseppe Terragni under Mussolini’s rule...
Made between 1986 and 2015, Buchanan’s Shack Sculptures are a result of the artist’s close observation and extensive research of ‘shotgun’ houses, where one room is arranged in sequence one behind the other; the rural poor inhabited these houses...
Gated Commune , a video by Camel Collective, is a critique of the complex, and often obtuse, language used to describe sustainable development projects...
Be Kind to Your Demons is a series of paintings by Hulda Guzmán that presents a variety of scenes in which female characters carry out ubiquitous activities in the company of secondary characters (mostly men) and devil-like creatures...
Tadmur by artist Majd Abdel Hamid is influenced by a book by Mustafa Khalifa titled The Shell: Memoirs of a Hidden Observer , which details Khalifa’s imprisonment in the Assad ‘desert prison’ Tadmur...
Composed of three photographic panels, Three Times at Yamato Hotel by Luka Yuanyuan Yang is a part of the artist’s ongoing project Dalian Mirage , a seven act play in a theatre staged as the city of Dalian...
Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space...
Behold A City 4 extols the old grandeur of Manila, the nation’s storied capital – the complex nexus of heritage, modernity, and all sorts of compulsions, political or otherwise, that attempt to define it...
Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways...
Cardón Cardinal by Patricia Esquivias is part of a series of video works in which the artist develops a narrative in front of her computer screen...
Oren Pinhassi’s work examines the relationship between the human figure and the built environment...
Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways...
Au non de la liberté (Tiko drink Kumba drunk) is a photographic series by Zacharie Ngnogue and Chantal Edie that considers the correlation between those who hold power in Cameroon and how their actions affect the populations they rule in often compromising ways...
RUINER III by Nikita Gale is part of an on-going numbered series of abstract sculptures in which various ancillary materials necessary for sound production and recording such as towels, foam, and audio cables, are riddled around piping resembling crowd control bollards, lighting trusses, and other like stage architecture...
The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism is part of a three project lineage, following Bahar Noorizadeh’s research on the architecture of the Soviet Union...