Photography (Photography)

Kovanda’s ‘discreet’ actions (leaving a discussion in a rush, bumping into passers-by in the street, making a pile of rubbish and scattering it, looking at the sun until tears come…) are always documented according to the same format: a piece of A4 paper, a concise typewritten text, and sometimes a photograph taken by someone else. This action, walking abnormally slowly, questions the place of the individual within the space of a city with regards to social habits. Kovanda places himself slightly outside the regulated rhythm of the city walking.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In City Golf (2008) the artist Gao Mingyan films himself playing 18 “holes” of golf throughout the mega-city of Shanghai. For each hole, Gao traveled to significant places from his memory – his first school, his childhood playground, and his former date hangouts – and proceeded to play a makeshift round of golf at each location. In revisiting locales from his youth, Gao attempts to forge a linear connection between all the important places that comprise a life’s experience, his performative “passing” through each location poetically referencing his own passage through time.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Part of the series Still Life Analysis II: The Island , the two photographs The Objects under the Civic Boulevard and A Yellow Blanket on a Wooden Pallet feature household objects of vagrants living beneath the Taipei’s Civic Boulevard expressway. Such objects include trash, unidentified discarded objects, and plants. For the artist, the underside of Civic Boulevard resembles a subtropical island with its artificial stones and potted plants decor.

Installation (Installation)

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.

Iván Argote’s As Far As We Could Get comprises a series of video chapters made in the municipality of Palembang, Indonesia and the small town of Neiva, Colombia. The two cities are exact antipodes. The geographical usage of the term antipode – designating points diametrically opposite one another on the globe – stems from the ancient belief that the other side of the earth held a kind of netherworld, where everything was inverted, causing the men who lived there to walk backwards.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pasajes I is the first in a series of Sebastián Díaz Morales’s four videos Pasajes , which focuses on a solitary man walking through Buenos Aires. He walks through churches, shops, and libraries—accessing completely different interior spaces simply by going through doors. The seamless editing allows the man to transcend locations: after he enters a house from a busy intersection he emerges in the halls of a school.

Photography (Photography)

450 Hayes Street (excavation site) by Marcelo Cidade is a large scale photograph documenting the artist’s excavation of a parking lot located at 450 Hayes Street in San Francisco, a former section of the city’s Central freeway and current condominium site. The cut shape mirrors the precise shape of the Kadist gallery floor, where the concrete was relocated as part of his residency exhibition entitled Somewhere, Elsewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere. Through this concrete graft, Cidade inextricably links the city with artwork.

Installation (Installation)

The title of the work Eridanus refers to the constellation of the river of ancient Athens that meanders across in the night sky. The constellation is visible uniquely from the Southern Hemisphere. The artist evokes a story from the past, where with the installation of modern street lamps, has resulted in the residents of Paris being disturbed by the difficulty of seeing the stars in the sky as a result of light pollution.

Photography (Photography)

Unregistered City is a series of eight photographs depicting different scenes of a vacant, apparently post-apocalyptic city: Some are covered by dust and others are submerged by water. Yet, ambiguous lights blink from buildings and yachts still sail on the water, and further observation reveals these structures to be miniatures manipulated by the artist through Photoshop and other postproduction image tools. The model city’s surroundings are themselves real abandoned spaces, perhaps an empty room, a wait-to-be demolished building, or a discarded bathtub.