Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria. Having grown up in the urban environment of Lagos, Abraham Oghobase was struck by the tin-mining deposits and the man-made ponds and lakes that form a dominant part of the landscape in the city of Jos and its surroundings. While visually striking, the landscape also holds a complex history, excavated by the artist, who researched the prevalent mining of tin deposits that dates back to 1904 during the British colonial mineral exploration in the Northern Protectorate.

Installation (Installation)

The Absolute Restoration of All Things is a collaboration by artist Miguel Fernández de Castro and anthropologist Natalia Mendoza. For this project, Fernández de Castro and Mendoza researched the 2014 court case that shut down Penmont Mining’s operations in the middle of the Sonoran desert. The lawsuit was brought to court by the “ejidatarios” (communal land holders) of El Bajío, Sonora, who claimed that their territory was illegally occupied and exploited, causing an irrevocable environmental impact on their land.

Photography (Photography)

In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region. As the Yanomami do not have first names, it was necessary to give them numbers to indicate that they had already been vaccinated and identify each one for their medical records. From this series of events, Claudia Andujar’s Marcados series was born: what was supposed to be a mere photographic record, for organizational purposes, ended up raising a big question about the “labels” given to people in the construction of societies.

Photography (Photography)

In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region. As the Yanomami do not have first names, it was necessary to give them numbers to indicate that they had already been vaccinated and identify each one for their medical records. From this series of events, Claudia Andujar’s Marcados series was born: what was supposed to be a mere photographic record, for organizational purposes, ended up raising a big question about the “labels” given to people in the construction of societies.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria. Having grown up in the urban environment of Lagos, Abraham Oghobase was struck by the tin-mining deposits and the man-made ponds and lakes that form a dominant part of the landscape in the city of Jos and its surroundings. While visually striking, the landscape also holds a complex history, excavated by the artist, who researched the prevalent mining of tin deposits that dates back to 1904 during the British colonial mineral exploration in the Northern Protectorate.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana. The forests were felled and immigrants from northern Bihar and South India were brought to exploit the mineral resources. The Indigenous people were then dispersed to live nomadically, engaging themselves as seasonal workers in farms and industries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Rubber Man continues exploring issues related to land use, also noticeable in his Untitled series (2011). More specifically, Rubber Man addresses the French colonial legacy of land use for the exploitation of rubber –today exploited by multiple forces such as individuals, governments, multinationals and international banks– and its effects on Cambodia’s indigenous forests and culture today. The video takes place in Ratanakiri, an area in northeastern Cambodia increasingly known in local and international news for land grabs and protests, and where the artist frequently traveled to over two years.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Mesoamericana (Economic activities) is part of a larger project titled Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, which includes a video as well as series of hand drawn maps -based on historical cartography- that examine the effects of foreign power in Mexico today. Mesoamerica was home to a rich civilization that emerged around 10,000 years BC and out of which grew the rich Maya, Aztec and Zapotec cultures, among many others. These cultures were destroyed by the Spanish, who arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

SUPERFLEX makes a distinction between two types of projects with different temporalities: works that occur during an exhibition and other that evolved over several years. Thus, since 1997, they are working on a biogas system (SUPERGAS), first installed in Kenya, then Thailand and today in Mexico, perfecting at each stage the means of production, utilization and commercialization of this system. GUARANA POWER is one of these sustainable projects that create a real economy.

Photography (Photography)

This series of photographs is inspired by the artist’s travels to Jos, Nigeria. Having grown up in the urban environment of Lagos, Abraham Oghobase was struck by the tin-mining deposits and the man-made ponds and lakes that form a dominant part of the landscape in the city of Jos and its surroundings. While visually striking, the landscape also holds a complex history, excavated by the artist, who researched the prevalent mining of tin deposits that dates back to 1904 during the British colonial mineral exploration in the Northern Protectorate.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Resiliencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience by Naomi Ricón Gallardo is a fabulation in which four characters find themselves in temporalities that overlap Mesoamerican narratives about the creation of the world with the contemporary time of accumulation by dispossession. Together, they summon the powers of fire and joy so that the opossum conjures its ability to play dead and resuscitate in extractivist areas. The work reanimates Mesoamerican fables about time and territory where the four characters—Hill, Opossum, 9 Reed (Mixtec cave deity), and Agave/Mayahuel (Moon and Pulque Goddess)—create a space for conceptual intervention through performative action and popular music.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

A rich and isolated region, El Catatumbo is located near the border with Venezuela. Different groups fight over its gold and oil, while narcotic plantations have exploited the region over the years, provoking massacres, displacement, and migrations amongst its native populations. Nohemí Pérez’s skillful and eloquent watercolors, titled Apuntes para panorama Catatumbo , testifies to this aspect of Colombia’s history that has been veiled by other equally pressing political issues.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Music While We Work (2011) is the first part/work of a long-term research project started in 2010. The project revolves around and beyond the history of sugar in the small town Huwei in central Taiwan (the artist’s hometown). The town was nicknamed as the “Capital of Sugar” during the Japanese colonial ruling (1895-1945) of Taiwan.

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.

Photography (Photography)

YUMA o la tierra de los amigos (YUMA, or the Land of Friends) by Carolina Caycedo is a large mural containing a series of satellite photographs mounted on acrylic. The mural contrasts and mixes multiple layers of these satellite images capturing the progressive devastation of the El Quimbo dam on the Yuma river (Magdalena), in the Department of Huila. The project was originally produced for the 8th Berlin Biennale, and developed out of the artist’s research into waterways, their political and cultural impact, and their historical development.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dislocation Blues by Sky Hopinka is a portrait of the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in South Dakota. Working against grand narratives and myth-making, Hopinka attempts to provide a clear look towards the participants of the protest movement and the protectors of the water – their testimonies, reflections, and histories. In the film, Cleo Keahna tells about the everyday life of the camp and its difficulties and Terry Running Wild shares his dreams for the future.

Painting (Painting)

Calling attention to campaigns for land rights, survival, and sovereignty, Prabhakar Pachpute’s recent works consider how farmers in India use their bodies in performative ways during acts of protest. The oil painting Inclined uncertainties depicts a grotto-like city atop a boat carried by headless human bodies. The waterless boat navigates through a desolate landscape, propelled forward by the faceless humans, who appear to be holding the cumbersome structure together.

Painting (Painting)

Adjamé, Charbon reflects on both global environmental discourses and domestic impacts of the use and trade of coal. Adjamé is one of ten urban communes of the city of Abidjan, the economic capital and city with the largest French-speaking populous in the Côte d’Ivoire. Employing vibrant colors to contrast the plastic jerrycans, children toys and clothing strewn randomly throughout the shanty settlement with the darkness of coal is a challenging articulation of the image of progress and its environmental consequences today.

Installation (Installation)

o que diriam as pedras a marte? [What would the stones say to Mars?] is a sculptural work consisting of two parts by arquivo mangue.

Installation (Installation)

Corey McCorkle’s 2016 installation Pendulum is developed around the Cavendish family and their role in importing bananas to Europe. Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. In 1834, Cavendish received a shipment of bananas from Mauritius, and developed these bananas in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House with his gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, and were later given to missionary John Williams to take to Samoa.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Paloma Contreras Lomas has frequently used animals as metaphors in her work. This work’s title, Cimarrón , is the Spanish word for an untamed animal, the wild vegetation that grows in the open, or a runaway slave. Cimarrón is part of a larger series in which the artist turned scaled-up Mexican hats into meticulously hallucinatory landscapes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers. Danielle Dean’s work True Red examines how a large corporation co-opted a historical fiction (the vampire), in addition to the traditional red and black colors of radical politics and the avant-garde. The animated video considers how capitalism can gentrify notions of radicality and the mutable nature of advertising.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Argentum is part of Li Li Xiaofei’s Assembly Line series. The film was shot in Dongchuan, a small town 180 km from Kunming. Ten years ago, in order to attract foreign investment, Dongchuan officially became a district of Kunming, thus giving it access to preferential policies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les Chenilles by Michelle and Noël Keserwany is a sensual film that translates the source of women’s oppression into the means for their liberation. In this narrative film, protagonists Asma and Sarah meet while working as waitresses in France. They both come from the Levant and, each in their own way, carry burdens of the past and the consequences of colonialism.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

silentstar, delicacy by Duane Linklater is a replica of a baby pink hoodie that the artist wore as a teenager, embellished with hand-painted elements and band patches. From associations with punk and hip-hop to skater culture, the hoodie has a history of being adopted by youth-driven communities once relegated to the fringes, and being embraced by mainstream fashion as a practical article of clothing, which Linklater’s work complicates even further. The reproduction is made with dye extracted from cochineal insects.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Las Bambas by Elena Tejada-Herrera takes the name of a copper mine in the Andean department of Apurímac, Peru. The operations of this mining project were resisted by the local peasant communities, whose protests forced it to paralyze its operations. As of 2023, this is the most serious unresolved social conflict in the country.

Textile (Textile)

Yuta Nagi Panaad (Promised Land) by Cian Dayrit addresses the impacts of the globalized economy and its powerful ideology on the spaces of everyday life. This tapestry work is a map that aims to visualize the expanding borders of mineral extraction, agri-business plantations, and their effects on the communities and the ecology of Mindanao, Philippines. Mindanao has a history of colonialism, exploitation and displacement of its people.

Painting (Painting)

Wonocolo by Maryanto is part of a body of research and work that has been investigating the mining realities of Indonesia and Nigeria since 2015. This acrylic painting refers to ‘Texas’ Wonocolo in Bojonegoro, a traditional oil mine in East Java. Initially built by the Dutch and abandoned during Japanese occupation, it was revived under Indonesia’s independence (1949) and is now a controversial issue between local sovereign right and environmental concern.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes. It is a study of the realities and consequences of exploited labor that simultaneously aims to record the living history of labor.

Installation (Installation)

In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry. When his rubber trees died from disease and his primarily indigenous workforce revolted, his enterprise went busts within a few short years. Ford never faulted his own planning, but instead blamed the “inhospitable” Brazilian landscape.