Sculpture (Sculpture)

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.

Painting (Painting)

Since Manuel Solano became blind, they developed a technique that relies on audio descriptions that allow for an assistant to place pins and threads on a grid that guides the artist’s hands through the surface. In Los Abuelos , the artist works with a canvas the size of their body, allowing intense interaction with the wet paint. This kind of tactility creates a complex entanglement of color masses alternating sharp and blurred details, giving the image an erratic and affective atmosphere just as our fond memories often appear to us.

Painting (Painting)

This untitled painting by Tirdad Hasemi presents a space that can be thought of as both a prison cell and a house. Paradoxically, in both cases the color and the importance of the walls give a feeling of confinement. Escaping from prison in Iran and finding the walls of a home in Europe has been a complex and conflicting experience for Hashemi.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

Painting (Painting)

The Shedding by Anju Dodiya is part of a series of mattress paintings the artist creates using fabric stretched on padded and shaped boards. The imagery relates to other paintings in this body work that expresses the visceral and vulnerable side of creativity. The posture of the protagonist—a part-human, part-carapaced animal—is opening herself outwardly.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Blue Poisoning series , reveals the outcome of artist Tirdad Hashemi’s weary and depressed days in the winter of 2022, following their second migration from Paris to Berlin. The color blue expresses the feelings of sadness and loneliness felt by the artist in the frozen Berlin cold. In the drawing, lonely and tormented bodies seem to struggle to live; despite their suffering, they still hope.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

No Lye by Danielle Dean documents a group of five women, including Dean herself, confined to a small, cramped bathroom, communicating only by using slogans culled from beauty advertisements (“beauty is skin deep”, “naturalise, it’s in our nature to be strong and balanced”) and quotes from political speeches (“we must protect our borders”, “we are fighting for our way of life and our ability to fight for freedom”). The result is a fragmented conversation that defies legibility. As sounds of a possible conflict rise from outside, the characters work together producing what looks like explosives from soap, towels, and an unmarked blue liquid.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The chapter Ayousha , of Judith Barry’s Cairo Stories , is a portrait-like work that consists of one plasma screen and one framed photograph. The project developed out of oral archives made from 215 interviews, which Barry conducted with women of varying social and economic classes in Cairo between 2003 and 2011. Her research started at the beginning of the Iraq War and concluded just after the Arab Spring.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eschewing their current musicological function, 4 mourners on a mantel presents photo-realistic depictions of said figures on top of a hypothetical collector’s fireplace. Herein, these funerary objects are displaced as curios which stare back at the viewer in signs of grief and confusion.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La libertad is a “greca” film, a meander film, with no beginning nor end, weaving together fragments of daily life at the Navarro´s, counting threads and time, wondering and wandering around words as emancipation, labor, and freedom (la libertad), the word that most appeared in our conversations. The “greca”, the meander, is the main symbol weaved in the textiles made by the Navarro sisters, from Santo Tomás Jalieza, México. A geometrical form of an endless braid of diamonds, the “greca” represents corn, an entity worshiped by the pre-hispanic civilisations of Mesoamerica.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Raybrook by Jesse Krimes takes its name from The Federal Correctional Institution, Ray Brook (FCI Ray Brook), a medium-security United States federal prison for male inmates located in Essex County, NY. In addition to its indexical title, this quilt-work tapestry is made from personal clothing and other like articles the artist was given by currently, and formerly incarcerated persons. It is part of a larger series of works called the Elegy Quilts , which illustrate domestic scenes inspired by conversations the artist has had with the individuals these fabrics were acquired from.

Installation (Installation)

In the 1980’s, while browsing Parisian fleamarkets, Barbara Bloom stumbled into an anonymous watercolor (dating to around 1960) in one of Paris’ fleamarkets, probably a study made by an interior designer for a bedroom. The artist found the image to be typically Parisian. The watercolor, framed under a mat made of cardboard, had color tests on its margin, elements that Bloom discovered when she raised it.

Photography (Photography)

The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi . These staged photographs were shot against the backdrop of the city’s empty streets at sundown during the holy month of Ramadan. During this time, Muslims fast and retreat indoors, leaving the city eerily empty.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Canton Novelty by Fang Lu captures the adventure of a group of three girls, Ruohan, Lily and Zoe on a summer vacation in Guangzhou, China. Throughout the course of the trip, they film themselves with their cell phones singing in a karaoke room, shopping at a hardware store, sitting at a park, hanging out in a hotel room and exploring a neighborhood looking at vacant apartment ads. Although their days may seem uneventful, the girls seemingly discover the ability to perform impossible “miracles,” including cooking a full pot of rice from three grains, summoning objects to appear and disappear, and turning off street lamps on command.