Sculpture (Sculpture)

Hueso de culebra (Snake Bone) arises from the stories that the artist’s grandmother used to tell him as a child about her father’s medical and spiritual practices in the southern part of Costa Rica, close to the border with Panama. One of them revolved around a plant that had various uses, from healing poisonous snake bites to predicting the future. She said, for example, that if one came across this plant during a period of drought, it could mean trouble was coming.

Installation (Installation)

Juan III (Pescadores En Una Isla) is a series of embroideries made with fake pre-Columbian fabrics produced by the Gonzales family, a three-generation family of pre-Columbian textile “forgers” based in Lima, Peru. The members of this family (grandfather, father, and son) all bear the name of Juan and make replicas by hand using traditional methods nearly indistinguishable from the pieces made thousands of years ago. A forgery pretends to be something it is not, but the Gonzalez family’s textiles openly intend to recreate those discovered in the 1920s at a necropolis in Peru.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

davi de jesus do nascimento’s earthy paintings, from the series sorvedouro , recall his memories as an essentially organic matter. Watercolor painting carries water as its foundational element and was the first technique that the artist applied to base his painting research on the river. He used to dip the brush on the prow of the boats: “I realized that the water is in deep dialogue with the flows of the river that I descend”.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Laís Amaral abstract paintings dialogue with the feminine power. Just like the flow of a river, Laís produces her paintings as a flux that emerges from within, an inner force that relates to all the women in her life, family, and ones who know the medicinal powers of nature; who are part of this feminine force latent in the earth. In order to discover elements about herself, Laís Amaral understands painting as a gesture of leakage.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot a few months before the USA and Cuba restored diplomatic relations in 2015, The New Man and My Father looks into the quiet aftermath of one family’s individual experience of the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). The film brings to the fore a socio-political system made for a country whose successes and failures fell upon the individual men and women who experienced it. In the film, Melis interviews his father about the Cuban Revolution, as well as the more recent re-introduction of capitalism to the island after 60 years of the US-imposed embargo.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Fig. 33. 9 Your Love is a King by Yeni Mao is a sculpture made of blackened steel, brass, glazed ceramic, and leather.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s documentary Four Hundred Unquiet Graves is a powerful and vulnerable visual essay about the descendants of those who were disappeared during the Spanish Civil War from 1936–1939. The film reveals the spectrum of violence that surrounds the war, namely the impact of thousands of forced disappearances on different generations. Surviving family members are haunted not only by the absence of their grandparents, but also by the overwhelming grief that lives in their parents.

Photography (Photography)

Winfield St by Sadie Barnette depicts a seldom documented scene of men and boys in an intimate domestic setting. In the large format photograph three young boys and a man sit at a dining room table, eating a meal together. One boy is mid-bite, while another looks directly at the camera, obscuring the face of the adult.

Installation (Installation)

Dad is Byron is an audio work produced in collaboration between Diamond Stingily and her father, the house musician Byron Stingily. Viewers are invited to pick up a wall-mounted telephone that has been retrofitted to play a recording of a conversation between Stingily and her father. Although initially the artist planned to focus on her father’s recollections of the violence during his childhood in Chicago in the 1960s and how music helped him cope, the conversation has a natural and intimate meandering.

Photography (Photography)

One of Ilana Bar’s best-known works is the series Transparências de lar (Home Transparencies) in which, for four years, the artist photographed her family’s rural home in Atibaia where her father lives with his two brothers and Ilana’s own brother, all three with Down Syndrome. Transparências de lar is the record of a serene, though certainly not a perfect, place. In this place Down Syndrome is not considered an alienable difference in the way that it is in Western culture, it is not problematic or a cause for social exclusion.

Photography (Photography)

This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013. In the series, the artist persistently dissects, examines and describes his experiences and memories of his family and life in Tunis, Tunisia. As underlined by poet Arafat Sadallah, the artist draws eyes and gazes of unachieved portraits, hands and arms of a skeleton—figures disappear but they witness and testify.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013. In the series, the artist persistently dissects, examines and describes his experiences and memories of his family and life in Tunis, Tunisia. As underlined by poet Arafat Sadallah, the artist draws eyes and gazes of unachieved portraits, hands and arms of a skeleton—figures disappear but they witness and testify.

Photography (Photography)

Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam. After World War II, many Japanese soldiers who fought in Vietnam stayed in the country. They married Vietnamese women, had children, and lived in the country until Japan recalled them home.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her film Retiro (2019), Natalia Lassalle-Morillo considers how women pass down memories to their kin as they age. A film within a film, the three-channel portrait combines the scripted film she and her mother made together, behind-the-scenes shots of that film’s production, and interviews with her mother on gendered familial expectations and aging in Puerto Rico. Lassalle-Morillo’s meta approach to story-telling unpacks her relationship to her mother, demonstrating how maternal trauma, history, and myth are made and inherited through disjointed narratives.

Photography (Photography)

In the Family Portrait series, Akiq AW documents reliefs and statues in Jogja, Indonesia that present an image of the ideological nuclear family. Following Indonesia’s communal and political conflicts, and its economic collapse and social breakdown of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, the second Indonesian President Suharto established the “New Order” regime. During this period, there were efforts to control the national birth rate through a programme called Keluarga Berencana (Family Planning).

Photography (Photography)

This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Trinity , Wang Mowen uses video to tell the story of a young woman who wants to know the whereabouts of a person born sixty years ago. She visits three fortune tellers and provides the person’s birth date. Each psychic deliberates and comes to the correct conclusion that the woman in question is the seeker’s mother.

Photography (Photography)

Vision (Bump’n’Curl) by Dannielle Bowman is from a series of photographs titled What Had Happened . The series blends a major historical event with small, personal images. The photographs retain fragments of the artist’s own heritage and investigate the concept of home, while gaining inspiration from the Great Migration, a movement in which African Americans from the South (including Bowman’s grandparents) moved to the North, and also the American West from 1916-1970.

Photography (Photography)

This selection of untitled photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Joanna Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

25 by Vuth Lyno addresses the legacy of the UN’s 1992-93 peacekeeping operation in Cambodia (UNTAC). This operation steered the country’s transition out of three decades of war and destruction—civil war, the Khmer Rouge era (1975-79), and the factional conflicts of the 1980s—towards a new, ‘democratic’ future. It was the most ambitious and successful UN peacekeeping mission of its time.

Photography (Photography)

La Chambre Marocaine series is a means to reconnect personally to his connection to family history and objectively assess the process of reconnection. By creating this work in the Villa Medici in Rome, the neutral space—neither France nor Morocco—allowed the artist to distance himself with his history in the examination process. The series looks at Morocco through the eyes of his children and object belonging to his grandmother: a scarf, a cushion and a book in Arabic.

Painting (Painting)

R. H. Quaytman’s family on her father’s side is of Jewish heritage from Poland. In the summer of 2016, Quaytman traveled to Poland to research an upcoming retrospective exhibition taking place in Warsaw and ?ódz, the town from which her great-grandfather emigrated to the United States. Tracing her grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s origins, Phocis Pole is from a series of paintings that explores her paternal lineage.

Photography (Photography)

This selection of photographs taken between 2014 and 2019 focus on Piotrowska’s long-term preoccupation with issues of domesticity and containment. The images depict young isolated women in domestic environments, holding various unnatural postures: we see a hand raised to a face, as if in a trance; limbs precariously balanced or ambiguously entangled, contorted against an unseen adversary. It is unclear whether gestures are benign or threatening, whether these women are menacing or being menaced.

In this film is the story of two neighboring yet philosophically opposing nations: Russia and Norway. Taken through a love-story of the main character Tanja and her newfound Norwegian husband, the film challenges cultural and social norms of both places through the format of a musical. Dealing with issues of individual in society, family and moral values, Chto Delat entices the audience to consider the nuances of these two contexts.

Photography (Photography)

“While taking the picture it was challenging to make the boys sit properly without moving. Sometimes a member of the family whould hide behind, holding the child.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Photography (Photography)

On January 7th, 2020, artist D’Angelo Lovell Williams was diagnosed with HIV. Only a handful of chosen family members knew up until the public announcement that coincided with the release of this body of work. According to the artist, “discovery” is key to this group of large photographs.

Painting (Painting)

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity. This small painting, titled Mom , is a concise, eloquent visual statement. Many of her paintings incorporate found imagery, family photos, and everyday objects.

Installation (Installation)

Good life (2007) is an installation displaying letters, documents, photographs and objects from a man named Joseph Carrier, and appropriated by artist Danh Vo. The installation features a series of small square vitrines, inset, dark and precisely spot-lit. Inside these are framed photographs, mostly black and white, of young Asian men, taken, as the titles on the neat brass name plates tell us, in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Photography (Photography)

Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated. Shot from directly above, they are lavish views of very private spaces. The artist plays to her viewers’ voyeuristic impulses, inviting us to look, but then denying us the opportunity to study the figures to whom the sheets belong, so that the rumpled covers become like anthropomorphic stand-ins inviting empathic projection.