Film & Video (Film & Video)

Satirizing an airport security checkpoint, The Ecdysiast – Molt (Body Inspection) by Yao Qingmei offers a comedic and critical inquiry into the logics underpinning collective control and surveillance culture. The three channels of the video respectively feature a dancer (left), a chorus (middle), and a security inspector (right). The dancer and security inspector enact a mechanical burlesque performance that parodies the body inspection procedures implemented by airport security.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate. The form used for this drawing is a request for medical attention. This work illustrates an assembly-line of severed bodies being pumped full of feet and other body parts.

Photography (Photography)

La Cultura de la Felicidad (The Culture of Happiness) is a series of five photographs addressing everyday life—a couple in a bed, lovers on a bench and a family reunion. The subjects wear masks made of white cardboard. The series suggests the idea of a reality hidden under the appearances of the power in place that denies violence to citizens.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate. The form used for this drawing details a weekly menu for the prisoners. Hough’s drawing depicts three grimacing figures, riding atop the back of a larger, female figure on all fours.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Untitled” was filmed in Bodh Gaya, India during a residency in 2011. There, he came across a scene that appealed to his interest in the political and social aspects of modernity. He filmed a policeman who, seemingly, is controlling traffic.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate. This drawing uses a pink form on which an inmate can list telephone contacts for approval. The drawing depicts two uniformed figures, with backwards feet, berating a figure on a toilet.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this four-channel 10 min video installation different episodes play simultaneously on the four screens. The artist has arranged several different scenarios and symbolic props which make it easy for viewers to feel the pervasive ambiguity which cannot be put into words. On the one hand, our imagination is tempted by the delicate details, but on the other hand, our imagination is limited through a very rigorous structure.

Installation (Installation)

In the nine-channel video installation, Against Step by Yim Sui Fong, a phantasmagorical image of a male dancer appears on a large-scale video projected on a floating retro-projection screen. His cathartic sequence of movements is based on an index of the bodily behavior of random people previously recorded by the artist while observing thousands of Hong Kong citizens in public space. Some of this recorded footage, done in poor mobile video quality, is played on loop in a set of TV monitors placed below the large projection.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (2016) is characteristic of the artist’s practice. Apostolos Georgiou invites us into a scene of cinematic tension. In the foreground, a man is kneeling with his hands on his head.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s – 1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future. Vindicating this other internet , the work presents the economic application of socialist cybernetic experiments as extraordinary to financial arrangements and imaginations of our time.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin. As a symbol of the past there could be none more powerful than this. By carving into its floor, Kilpper laid bare its history by making images of its occupants and political figures associated with that period of history.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jessie Stead’s Punched Interlude works are made out of found police barricade tape that she punches holes in and then runs through a music box, the music is composed by her as audible reflection on barricades and no go zones throughout the city of New York in area of Donald Trump. The music box is attached to a gum ball machine globe which acts as a resonator, amplifying the music that results from the punched holes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The artist asked his parents to perform a flags-raising-lowering ceremony on their home’s cloths drying rack, with the HKSAR regional flag, and the flags of PRC and The UK. Artist Lee Kit hand-painted the HKSAR regional flag following the detail instructions in “The State’s Standards of The People’s Republic of China, GB16689-1996”, issued by The State Authority of Technical Monitoring.

Photography (Photography)

“These are negatives that were scratched because of a jealous husband from the Baqari family, who never let his wife out by herself. He was upset to know that she came to be photographed in my studio without telling him. He came asking for the negatives.

Photography (Photography)

Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.