Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

Mutant Garden Autobreeder by Harm van den Dorpel is a generative animated artwork based on evolutionary programming that never appears the same twice. The work is based on an existing algorithm called Cartesian Genetic Programming, invented by Julian F. Miller and Peter Thomson in 1997, the system itself having been finely tuned by van den Dorpel to produce a very particular quality of qualia. The software has been carefully constructed to produce a stream of new and unpredictable mutations that build and react to each previous generation of image.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Black Ocean by Liu Yujia portrays a desert landscape in a state of both destruction and construction, revealing the desert’s simultaneous fragility and indestructibility. The structure of the storytelling of this film was inspired by Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities (1972). Several chapters from the book are interwoven in the film incorporating the discussions of cities and landscapes narrated by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in the novel.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The installation Infinity and Infinity Plus One by Cao Shu is a modern fable of destruction, collective consciousness, and future memory told through the lens of a seaside hotel erected in the 1990s on an island in China. Combining 3D-rendered images and shot footage, the work travels through a seemingly-unlimited number of rooms, infinite corridors, and breathtaking viewpoints on site. Meanwhile, an official voiceover tells an absurd story about philosophy and mathematics in the form of a monologue.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Painting (Painting)

In DUST 171217 Zhang Zhenyu uses fragments of dust collected across the city, and then creates dark abstract paintings, repetitively gluing the material to the canvas, applying up to 30 or 100 layers and sanding until he arrives at a smooth surface. The result is a reflective surface, an abstract object in which the viewer can see themselves staring back. The project began in 2014 and reflects a rampant process of modernization in his native China.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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. In this work, the computer sits on a covered piano keyboard, and the reflection of the artist is sometimes visible on the black surface. Cardón Cardinal is a collage of references that revolve around the removal and displacement of a 46 foot tall Pachycereus pringlei , a type of giant cactus also known as a cardón , from Baja California, Mexico to Seville, Spain.

dbqp is a photographic series in which the artist handles an enlargement of the plate with three cutout windows which was used for L’Archipel (The Archipelago) in collaboration with Pierre Leguillon. The previous work took the form of four photographs presenting a page illustrated with three images. By studying these with more attention, it is possible to figure out that these objects were placed behind the pierced card with three openings.

Photography (Photography)

New Landmark No. 1 is part of the series New Landmark . In this series, Tsang reversed the direction of his camera lens, and capture images of skyscrapers from an upshot angle.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Luiz Roque’s short film Zero we follow a dog moving alone onboard an aircraft that flies over a vast desert. The dog seems tranquil as if keeping up with its daily routine in an environment in which the human presence is completely absent. The disturbing image of the animal left adrift — perhaps the only remaining living being in existence — is interspersed with the shiny mirrored surface of high-tech skyscrapers emerging out of the sand, in what might have once been an oasis.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

When Need Moves the Earth is a three-channel video that combines elements of documentary footage, archival material and abstract aerial shots to encompass a painterly yet forthright exploration of a coal mine and a water dam in Thailand. A meditation on the impact of industrialization on the natural environment, the work highlights the drastic alterations that these operations leave in its place. Som Supaparinya’s work is often a commentary on political, social, and personal issues.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Originally commissioned for documenta 14, Khvay Samnang’s two-channel video work Preah Kunlong (The way of the spirit) takes land politics, resource extraction and Indigenous Cambodian resistance as its primary concern. Created in collaboration with the classically-trained dancer and choreographer Nget Rady — who is also the performer in the video — Preah Kunlong powerfully utilizes a lexicon of gestures and movement to point toward the need for embodied forms of knowledge and understanding amidst the mechanistic frameworks of rapacious development, which are threatening not just forests and Indigenous communities in Southeast Asia, but also worldwide. More specifically, Preah Kunlong offers a proposal for the language of the body to exercise what political ecologist Nancy Lee Peluso has called “counter-mapping”, a form of “critical cartography” that has been practiced by Indigenous forest communities in Southeast Asia to strengthen claims on their traditional territories and resources by defying hegemonic mapmaking methods, which have long abetted strategies of colonial rule and resource extraction.

Painting (Painting)

5901 NW 2nd Ave., Miami, FL 33127 (Botanica) is a series of paintings that artist Eddie Arroyo created over an extended period of time, depicting the same site as it appeared from 2016 to 2018. Like the series shown at the Whitney, their focus is a building complex that until recently housed a Voodoo Botanica and Variety Shop, another iconic set of businesses on NE 2nd Avenue in Little Haiti that housed practitioners of voodoo proffering candles, potions, and incense. It was one of many businesses in the area bearing paintings by Serge Toussaint, a local artist and professional sign painter known for his portrayals of Little Haiti.

Photography (Photography)

For the photographic series Rumpty Trumpty , in 1997, Allan deSouza photographed the Trump Taj Casino in Atlantic City, NJ, reprinting the images again in 2017, from digital scans of the negatives. These negatives bear the traces of extensive damage wrought over time. These dust damaged and scratched prints appear as aged and out of date as the orientalist fantasy that they depict.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For over five months, Zhou situated himself in an underdeveloped village surrounded by the high skyscrapers of Guangzhou to produce South Stone . Interweaving footage of a village’s landscape, residents, and animals with his seemingly absurd interventions with the place, South Stone indicates the equally incoherent social reality. Fluctuating between documentary and fiction, the film catalyzes alternative connections in time, and the emergence of imaginative spaces.

Textile (Textile)

The title for this body of work, Poco se gana hilando, pero menos mirando , is based on a Spanish saying that underestimates feminized crafts or tasks, implying that it is better for a woman to be doing ‘something’, no matter how useless it is, instead of just doing nothing. This series of works by Claudia Gutiérrez Marfull features embroideries that represent the peripheral and marginalized landscapes of Puente Alto commune in Santiago, the city’s biggest district and its most southern outskirts. In 2015, when this work was produced, there was not a single health service provider, police station, pharmacy, daycare or school in the whole area of Puente Alto.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The lecture performance, Screen Green takes the telecast of a speech made by the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, during which he was pictured against a homogenous green backdrop commonly used for visual effects or post-production in film, as a point of departure. Taking the lush, botanical landscape of Singapore, administered through a series of governmental gardening efforts, Ho offers a speculative narrative through the metaphor of a space of future possibilities that are simultaneously a method to limit and modulate its citizens.

Installation (Installation)

Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube. The work refers to the positive occupations of space and the absence of form and structure, to the relationship between the visible and the invisible, to memory, and to the relationship we have to images and to our history. The work refers to childhood, biography and learning to question how meaning is made and how history is remembered and performed.

Painting (Painting)

Pavimento exterior Banco Safra (Rooftop Banco Safra)

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work consists of a work inside a work. The spectator is presented with a commissioned documentary on a flat-screen Tv on the subject of the production of the making of an artwork that doesn’t exist entitled The magic and the meaning (2008). The imaginary film, The magic and the meaning , is described only within the documentary, which follows parts of the making of the film, extracts from interviews with the writer and film maker Dan Fox and the artist and maker of the work Ryan Gander; as well as showing short slow-motion sections of the film that does not exist.

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.