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theme: cultural commentary

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Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam
© » KADIST

An-My LE

Photography (Photography)

The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture. In the background, the steel pillars creates a division of space implying a separation the two men according to their geographic regions of origin or residence, their vocations, their ethnicities, and their attitudes toward war. Yet, the mirrored body language of the two characters also suggests their reconciliation into a dialogue perhaps characterized by the protagonists’ physical and spiritual conversation.

Sickhands
© » KADIST

Petra Cortright

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects. Capitalizing and commenting on the ubiquity of homemade video, the short film replicates with banal proximity the amateur special effects that thrive on the web. This rather cliched visual trick recalls a funhouse mirror, or, perhaps more aligned with Cortright’s frame of reference, a dream-sequence cue from after-school 90s television.

Sentimentite (Invasion of Ukraine 38/100, from Chapter 4: Reshaping World Order)
© » KADIST

Agnieszka Kurant

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

Action No.1
© » KADIST

Yang Guangnan

Installation (Installation)

In Action no. 1 Yang Guangnan reflects on the interiority and exteriority of human-technological experience with mechanical gestures that are semi-human and semi-machine. A hanged shirt mounted upon the artist’s machine rhythmically bounces and rotates in a way that suggests a skeletal interior.

Fedex® 10kg Box 2006 FedEx 149801 REV 9/06 MP, Standard Overnight, Los Angeles-San Francisco, trk#800983717740, December 18-19, 2012, International Priority, San Francisco-Beijing, trk# 775046700145, October 27-November 5, 2021
© » KADIST

Walead Beshty

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

Cinema
© » KADIST

Fang Lu

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.

Automóvel
© » KADIST

Cinthia Marcelle

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time. Shot from an aerial vantage, the camera tracks the daily commute on a small stretch of concrete highway. The camera films the traffic below in short five-second excerpts before blacking out; time begins to collapse as the video shifts between scene, and the hours compress into minutes as daylight quickly turns into night.

Sentimentite (COVID-19 Global Lockdowns 53/100, from Chapter 6: The Pandemic)
© » KADIST

Agnieszka Kurant

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

Oakland Girls
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

Photography (Photography)

Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky. The women in the photograph exist ambiguously here. The photograph’s title, the subject’s outfits, and their environment suggest that they are both trapped and glorified within their position.

Itch
© » KADIST

Yang Guangnan

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands.

Fedex® Large Kraft Box 2004 FEDEX 155143 REV 10/04 SSCC, International Priority, Los Angeles-Beijing trk#875468976062, September 9-14, 2011, International Priority, Bejing-London trk#874594463978, March 13-15, 2012, International Priority, London-San Francisco, trk#777001529227, August 16-18, 2016, International Priority, San Francisco-Beijing, trk# 775046700145, October 27-November 5, 2021
© » KADIST

Walead Beshty

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

Gypsy
© » KADIST

Pascal Shirley

Photography (Photography)

Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter. The room seems messy and in disrepair, but simultaneously romanticizes the scene. The fruit and the sitter suggest a robustness in contrast with the mise-en-scene.

Sentimentite (First death caused by self-driving car 84/100, from Chapter 9: Tech Futurism)
© » KADIST

Agnieszka Kurant

NFT (NFT)

For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history. Kurant’s fictional mineral-currency is at once data visualization, a sly commentary on global markets, and a speculative narrative about the connection between technology and geology (for example ‘conflict minerals’ used in smartphones). Inspired by the way natural forces shape rocks, landscape, and planets over time, Sentimentite ’s evolving forms are shaped by dynamic social and political ruptures in the 21st century.

Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910)
© » KADIST

Walead Beshty

Photography (Photography)

Black Curl (CMY/Five Magnet: Irvine, California, March 25, 2010, Fujicolor Cyrstal Archive Super Type C, EM No 165-021, 05910) is a visually compelling photogram. Bold shapes, and the breaks between them, create a rhythm and compose an engaging abstract image. At the same time, the work deals with the conditions of the photograph’s manufacture.

Office Work
© » KADIST

Walead Beshty

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole. Despite its dismantled form, the screen still functions, a simple, mountain-range desktop background clearly visible with no distortion. As with much of Beshty’s work, Office Work thematizes its own construction, in this case, through a clearly deconstructive action that preserves the technological ontology present through the monitor.

Canned Laughter
© » KADIST

Yoshua Okón

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city. Okón focuse d on Ciudad Juárez as a site for many ‘ maquiladoras ’ ( factories) and on its role within the global context. A mixed media and video installation , the work takes the form of a fictitious factory that produces canned laughter for sitcoms.

“Brave Beauties” series - Dimpho Tsotetsi, Parktown
© » KADIST

Zanele Muholi

Photography (Photography)

As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.

“Brave Beauties” series - Eva Mofokeng I, Parktown, Johannesburg
© » KADIST

Zanele Muholi

Photography (Photography)

As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.

The Tower of Babel: Independence of the country
© » KADIST

Du Zhenjun

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists
© » KADIST

Andrea Bowers

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights. The protesters and their supporters carried signs and wore t-shirts whose messages are highlighted in the drawings. However, in them, Bowers isolates the images of the protesters from the multitude that surrounds them in the original photographs, and, therefore amplifies their messages.

“Brave Beauties” series - Somizy Sincwala, Parktown
© » KADIST

Zanele Muholi

Photography (Photography)

As a visual activist for the rights of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LBGTQI), Muholi’s photographs radically transgress the conventional perception of lesbian and transgender communities in South Africa. Members of the LBGTQI community who suffer from continuous attacks — “corrective” and “curative rapes”, physical and psychological assaults, and hate crimes — Muholi works from her own community to create strong and positive images of empowered individuals. As visual statements, her photographs seek to dignify the members of an often hidden, voiceless and marginalized community.

!Women Art Revolution
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W. A. R.) draws from hundreds of hours of intimate interviews with her contemporaries—visionary artists, historians, curators and critics—who recount their fight to break down the barriers facing women both in the art world and society at large. The film features an original score by Carrie Brownstein, formerly of the band Sleater-Kinney.

Condition Report
© » KADIST

Glenn Ligon

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints. Though simple, each contains a nested stack of historical and self-referential quotations. Both black-and-white prints depict a version of Ligon’s 1988 painting, Untitled (I Am A Man) , which declares the words of the parenthetical in blocky black letters.

Tania Libre
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.

Useless Wonder
© » KADIST

Carlos Amorales

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006). The video is based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . The painting, derived from an image from a different, preexisting work, represents the artist’s continued interest in realizing particular subject matter in alternative forms, thereby imbuing it with new meanings and interpretations.

Untitled (San Francisco)
© » KADIST

Edward Kienholz

Installation (Installation)

Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name. Assembled from the remnants and found objects from a hotel room, including a collage, shelf and small lamp, this playful piece—a satirical shrine of sorts—echoes the decidedly un-modern spirit of San Francisco’s bohemian culture. Kienholz’s works, with their critical and anti-establishment content, are often linked to the 1960s Funk Art movement in the Bay Area.

Higher Horse
© » KADIST

Kate Gilmore

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red. Two muscular men with sledgehammers simultaneously pummel the blocks where Gilmore attempts to stand. Although we can only see the artist from the waist down, her body language reveals apprehension: her hands, tense, press against the wall in an attempt to maintain balance while the men come dangerously close to smashing her bare legs.

The Tower of Babel: Destruction
© » KADIST

Du Zhenjun

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Hank Willis Thomas

Catherine Opie

Carlos Amorales

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Agnieszka Kurant

Walead Beshty

Zanele Muholi

Ian Wallace

Du Zhenjun

Fang Lu

Fang Lu uses intimacy as a place for self-expression in her videos and draws out mundane moments from everyday life as a strategy to heighten one’s awareness of existence from the rest of the world...

An-My LE

Andrea Bowers

Petra Cortright

Pascal Shirley

Pascal Shirley’s photographs portray a California of beaches, music festivals, families, and hipsters wandering through the hills...

Nalini Malani

Edward Kienholz

Diego Rivera

Kate Gilmore

Harrell Fletcher

Glenn Ligon

Doug Aitken

Piero Golia

Gimhongsok

Cildo Meireles

Qing Zhang

Cinthia Marcelle

Eko Nugroho

Zanele Muholi
© » ANOTHER

this quarter (02/12/2024)

Zanele Muholi’s Potent Portrait of South Africa’s Queer Community | AnOther As their new exhibition opens in San Francisco, Zanele Muholi talks about their powerful photos of queer survivors of hate crimes, couples in everyday moments, and self-portraits referencing history February 02, 2024 Text Emily Steer Zanele Muholi creates potent portraits...

An-My LE
© » APERTURE

about 4 months ago (12/01/2023)

For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....

Catherine Opie
© » ROYAL ACADEMY

about 6 months ago (10/05/2023)

Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists | Blog | Royal Academy of Arts Catherine Opie in the RA Collection Gallery Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Read more Become a Friend Video: Catherine Opie on photographing leading British artists Published 8 September 2023 Catherine Opie discusses her portraits of David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing, Isaac Julien and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, featured in our free display in the Collection Gallery...