Photography (Photography)

In his project Instituto de Vision (2008), Consuegra investigates how modernism gave rise to many new technological forms of vision, most notably the camera, yet also resulted in the disappearance of outmoded forms of vision. As a metaphor for this process, he looks to the afterlife of the image as evidenced in signs. When a company goes out of business or moves, their sign often lingers and slowly fades creating a ghosted image of their sojourn.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture. By re-appropriating the structure as a temple and imbuing it with a dance performance based on movements and postures found in ancient pottery and murals, the choreography takes its influence from the house’s design and the body positions on ancient Maya ceramics and buildings. A pulse, breathing, and a pre-Columbian clay flute are among the sounds on the soundtrack.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet. There is a drawing for each letter, in which the letter is repeated over and again in various directions and scales, thereby demonstrating how a symbol can be reoriented without changing its linguistic meaning. Here, the letter K is outlined and surrounded by a dense and varied field of other K s.

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.

Installation (Installation)

A residency program in the blazing hot city of Honda, Colombia, inspired artist Nicolás Consuegra to consider the difficulty in understanding the needs of a distant community. An important town during the colonial era as the main port on the Magdalena River, Honda is presently rife with poverty, unemployment, and environmental deterioration. Here he produced the work Nadie sabe de la sed con que otro bebe (No one knows the thirst with which another drinks) , a variable arrangement of cut glasses in front of a mirror so that they appear whole.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel. The video is largely silent until violent crashes and female voices overwhelm the viewer, portraying the inner voice of a woman who is brutally gang raped. Malani addresses the fatal place of women in Indian society and the geo-politics of national identity.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

On Fire by Runo Lagomarsino comprises twenty pieces of parchment, each of which has had the contours and map of Brazil burned in stages. The work’s connection to Amazon deforestation is difficult to ignore. Yet still, it also engages in broader issues about the country’s fractures, such as the 2018 fire at Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum and the ongoing erasure of its past.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities. A newspaper is both reproduced and modified to call attention to the newspaper as a means of information transmission. This also emphasizes the effect of various seemingly unimportant support mechanisms: the role of visual layout and images.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The work “Les Fleurs d’intérieur” (which gives its name to the exhibiton presented at Kadist Art Foundation from May 30 to July 13, 2009) is a brass plate engraved with the inventory list of the works included in the show. From this moment, Dahn Vo will use this brass plates as a systematic element for all his exhibitions.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Consuegra’s Colombia is a mirror made in the shape of the artist’s home country—a silhouette that has an important resonance for the artist. Consuegra’s mirrored Colombia is similar to an earlier version, made to be show opposite a mirror of the United States. Whether reflecting his two homes within one another (Consuegra studied in the US and has made several works about this experience of living in exile from his homeland), or simply reflecting its surroundings, Colombia is a simple yet evocative work about the identity of a nation, and the things that we project—really and metaphorically—onto its form.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video. It features a single shot of a vintage postcard depicting the Columbus Monument and the port of Barcelona, both of which are linked to colonial histories and historical trajectories. The sea is an unnaturally bright blue.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Meireles, whose work often involves sound, refers to Sal Sem Carne (Salt Without Meat) as a “sound sculpture.” The printed images and sounds recorded on this vinyl record and it’s lithographed sleeve describe the massacre of the Krahó people of Brazil. The piece draws on Meireles’s first-hand contact with many indigenous groups through his father’s work with the Indian Protection Service. The recordings on the LP contain narrative accounts of massacres of native peoples, as well as indigenous music and rituals.