Arpedia

Palo Enceba’o is a project by José Castrellón composed of three photographs, two drawings on metal, and a video work that creates a visual and cultural analogy between the events of January 9th, 1964 in Panama City and the game of palo encebado carried out in certain parts of Panama to celebrate the (US-backed) independence from Colombia. In the game, young men climb a wood post smeared with animal wax to collect a Panamanian flag in return for a bounty. During what is now remembered as Martyrs’ Day, Panamanian students trespassed the fence that separated the American-governed strip of land along the Panama Canal and Panama City to fly a flag and symbolically claim sovereignty over the area that had been turned over to the United States by the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty in 1903.

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Ukraine-Russia / Volleyball

Victor & Sergiy Kochetov

Ukraine-Russia / Volleyball by Viktor and Sergiy Kochetov features a concrete monument of women volleyball players before the railway station in the village of Vodyanoye, Kharkiv region. It’s a typical Soviet sculptural composition, thousands of which were casted in the USSR during this period. Many can still be found all over post-Soviet territories, leading to regular debates on the destiny of this visual heritage in Ukraine.

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Bunnatine Greenhouse (Silver, Plinth 4), Monuments of the Disclosed

Ahmet Ögüt

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

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Strip Color

Elsa Werth

In the video Color Strip by Elsa Werth two-dimensional versions of all the national flags of the world (197 in all) are compiled into a long horizontal strip. The video is presented on a large flat-screen, approximating the size and dimensions of a national flag. As each flag slides across the screen, connections between the colors, signs, and forms of different countries and parts of the world create unexpected associations.

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Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows

Victor & Sergiy Kochetov

According to Viktor Kochetov, Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows is the first hand-colored print he ever made. Although this might well be a part of the artist’s mythology, this image perfectly demonstrates the methodology the Kochetovs used in their work. The snapshot itself was created during a journalistic assignment to document the meeting between a WWII veteran and school children in the Kharkiv region.

Selected Scripture is a series of silkscreen prints that Hong Hao has been working on since the 1980s. The series includes 37 prints to date, each of which resemble the pages of an ancient cartography book. In this series, the artist reflects on the authoritative influence of ancient books that shape dominant understandings of the world.

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Page 2123, The New World Physical Map

Hong Hao

Selected Scripture is a series of silkscreen prints that Hong Hao has been working on since the 1980s. The series includes 37 prints to date, each of which resemble pages of an ancient open cartography book. In this series, the artist reflects on the authoritative influence of ancient books that shape dominant understandings of the world.

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Marlene Garcia-Esperat (Silver, Plinth 5), Monuments of the Disclosed

Ahmet Ögüt

NFT (NFT)

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Tughra

Sharif Waked

Installation (Installation)

Tughra is a protocol by Sharif Waked that reproduces the sixteenth century calligraphic monogram for tughra ; also known as the signature of Suleiman the Magnificent. Under Suleiman’s reign, at the beginning of the 16th century, the Ottoman empire achieved its apex both in terms of territorial extension and cultural creation. Suleiman personally instituted major judicial changes relating to society, education, taxation, and criminal law, as such he is often referred to as ‘The Lawgiver’.

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Aaron Swartz (Bronze, Plinth 6), Monuments of the Disclosed

Ahmet Ögüt

NFT (NFT)

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Extra Curriculum Political Science Class 7/1972

Võ An Khánh

In Extra Curriculum Political Science Class 7/1972 , a group of women walk bare-foot and single file towards Dat Mui Mangrove in Ca Mau Province to attend ‘political science class’. These women wear headdress to protect their identities because they are spies placed strategically in the South by the Viet Cong. These classes of the ‘National Liberation Front for Southern Vietnam’ took place in the mangrove swamp in makeshift wooden huts where they would learn more of the political points of view of their forces and the changes in military situations across the country.

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Meanwhile

Karan Shrestha

After the decade-long conflict (1996-2006) that ended with Nepal becoming a Federal Democratic Republic, political unrest and weak governance continued to mark the country’s future as daily life repeatedly witnessed ruptures. From accessing essentials to employment, education, compensation, legal justice, health facilities, and human rights, the people of Nepal have been forced to wait. Meanwhile by Karan Shrestha records moments of impasse as the post-conflict period dragged on.

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They burn our village

Aung Ko

Painting (Painting)

They burn our village by Aung Ko is part of the artist’s daily visual diary as an attempt to process and note what has been happening in Myanmar while he is being exiled, following the military takeover of the government in February 2021. Almost two years ago, Myanmar’s military ousted the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi and seized power in a coup. Since then, the country has descended into turmoil.

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Divided, Occupy HK 2014 series

Xyza Cruz Bacani

Occupy HK 2014 is a series of 18 photographs that Xyza Cruz Bacani’s shot at the height of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. At the time, the Umbrella Movement was considered the largest social unrest defending the democratic aspirations of Hong Kongers, who flooded the streets to demand universal suffrage. The protestors even managed to block Hong Kong’s main highway for months, freezing Asia’s financial centre.

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Ground Plan

Louisa Bufardeci

Installation (Installation)

Ground Plan by Louisa Bufardeci is a large-scale, digitally-printed, architecturally rendered, wall drawing that pictures the permitted global flow of the world’s population. Utilizing data from UNESCO, the national census, opinion polls, and the CIA World Factbook, Bufardeci presents each country as a room in a labyrinthine building. Each room is composed of sometimes incomplete walls, with open or closed doorways, in reflection of their border immigration policies; each room is scaled according to its population density.

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Tsumeb Fragments

Otobong Nkanga

Installation (Installation)

Tsumeb Fragments was produced for the exhibition at Kadist, “Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine” in 2015. In Spring 2015, Nkanga travelled to Namibia, making her way along an almost entirely defunct railway line from Swakopmund to Tsumeb. The artist was intent on reaching The Green Hill in Tsumeb, an area renowned for its minerals, crystals and copper deposits.

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Spirit Writing

Chia-Wei Hsu

The final work in the Marshal Tie Jia series (of which Turtle Island is in the KADIST collection), Spirit Writing features the Marshal in conversation with Chia-Wei Hsu, by way of a ritual involving the Marshal’s divination chair. Marshal Tie Jia is a frog god, who was born in a pond in Jiangxi, China, before fleeing to Matsu Island off the coast of Taiwan during the Cultural Revolution after his temple was destroyed. Spirit Writing attempts to reconstruct the original temple using 3D modeling software, operated in real time as Hsu asks the Marshal questions, receiving answers through a divination ritual in which the chair is swung violently around by his acolytes.

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Controlled Incidents #1

Nikita Kadan

Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010. Numerous passive demonstrations against the government have led to numerous police repression of the protestors. The demonstration ‘Euromaïdan’ in 2013 is a perfect example.

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WA'AD

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

The absurd condition of human survival under environmental degradation and geonational balkanization is taken as a starting point for WA’AD by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The work’s premise is a confessional narrative emerging from a Palestinian astronaut on a desperate international flight mission to colonize Mars. That there is also an Israeli astronaut on the same mission plays into the complexities of the landed history of ethnic antagonism between Israel and Palestine, which has stretched on for centuries.

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Volga

Aslan Goisum

The video work Volga by Aslan Goisum begins with a sweeping field caught under a misty, gray sky. In the center of the frame is a white car of the eponymous Soviet make—standard-issue for the imperial administrative class during the USSR’s ‘Period of Stagnation.’ The vehicle is the only indication of cultural geography in the video; what unfolds must be somewhere in the former USSR. In a slow crescendo of activity and tension, small groups of men, women, and children, walk up to the car and squeeze into it.

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Grain par Grain…

Julien Creuzet

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Full title of the work: Grain par Grain, sur le parterre humide et fissuré. Érosion sévère, graine, ma cote. Où est la manne, semence de l’antiquité.

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Mud Man

Chikako Yamashiro

The film installation Mud Man by Chikako Yamashiro is set on Okinawa and South Korea’s Jeju Islands, two locations at the center of local controversies surrounding the presence of the United States military. Japanese and Korean languages are mixed (a combination of unclear Japanese — Uchinaaguchi , fragments and mumbles in Korean and onomatopoeic sound effects to complement the narration), and the landscape of the two islands (Okinawa and Jeju Island) juxtaposed. The film tells the story of a community visited by bird droppings that resemble clumps of mud falling from the sky.

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Mesoamericana (new grand civilizations), Economic activities

Edgardo Aragón

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.

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First Tear Gas, Occupy HK 2014 series

Xyza Cruz Bacani

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Student Bodies

Ho Rui An

Embracing the conflicting negative and positive affect of the horror genre, Ho Rui An’s film Student Bodies is a self-described work of “pedagogical horror,” that organizes social, political, and economic events in Asia around the motif of the student body. Bound together by a suspenseful, eerie soundtrack, the film temporally cycles through its separate, though thematically interrelated, phenomena and events centering Asian students. Using the student body motif as a human signifier of varied connotations, the film follows phenomenon ranging from the Ch?sh?

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I can’t believe we are still protesting

Wong Wai Yin

Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages. The artist used found images from the internet, including a viral photo of an elderly woman who took part in the 2016 “Black Monday” strike against a proposed anti-abortion law in Poland, and another image taken the same year of a group of protestors in the United Kingdom, rallying for the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing parallels with Hank Willis Thomas’s I Am a Man (2013) painting in the KADIST Collection, Wong employs the visual language and terminology of mass media, specifically borrowing images from protests on civil rights issues.

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A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s clothes drying rack

Kwan Sheung Chi

A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The artist asked his parents to perform a flags-raising-lowering ceremony on their home’s cloths drying rack, with the HKSAR regional flag, and the flags of PRC and The UK. Artist Lee Kit hand-painted the HKSAR regional flag following the detail instructions in “The State’s Standards of The People’s Republic of China, GB16689-1996”, issued by The State Authority of Technical Monitoring.

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On Fire

Runo Lagomarsino