Sculpture (Sculpture)

Gente Serpiente (Serpent People) is a piece made with the wheels of bikes, twisted, intertwined and painted like skins of tropical poisonous snakes. This sculpture, as well as other pieces by Mazenett and Quiroga, seeks to reveal and re-inscribe everyday and ordinary objects within a mythological tradition, to reconnect them with an origin in order to recognize their hidden life and meaning. These objects represent the life cycle and the animal, as well as cultural and geological time: long ago they were marine organisms and through the action of sand, sediment and mud, in oil, then in wheels they are transformed.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Angelica Mesiti’s piece, The Calling (2013-14) is a poignant exploration of ancient human traditions evolving and adapting to the modern world. The three-channel work focuses on traditional whistling languages and shows the communities of the village of Kuskoy in Northern Turkey, the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and the island of Evia, Greece, where such languages are all still in use. For these communities, whistling languages are in a process of transformation from their traditional use as tools for communication across vast lands into tourist attractions and cultural artifacts and are being taught to local school children.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Benefiting from its geographic proximity to Hong Kong, since the 1980s Dongguan has become the factory of the world, with toys, plastic products and clothing as the major industries in the town. During its heyday, the region produced 50% of the world’s manufactured toys, but since 2008, the toy industry has declined as the factories moved to South East Asia. Archaeology of the Present (Dongguan) No.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Adrian Balseca’s Suspensión I inverts the logic of the old colonial game, the greasy pole. Digitally filmed in the Province of Morona Santiago among the last existing community at the entrance of the Sangay National Park, a native girl climbs a balsa tree trunk from which plastic containers filled with “local” fossil fuels hang (super, extra, eco-país, gasoline, diesel, etc.). The trunk – which is lightweight quality wood, typical of the subtropical jungle of Ecuador -– has been cut down and suspended vertically and the trophies of modern progress hang from it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The project Grabador Fantasma (Phantom Recorder) consists of a communally constructed technological device in Sarayaku ancestral territory. Adrian Balseca’s site-specific composition is an “ecología del paisaje sonoro”, an artifact that collects sounds produced by different organisms, amplifying the complex historical plot of the area. From a traditional Sarayaku Peracian Dacryodes Copal wood barge with a solar cell panel system, an electric motor, a gramophone, and a recording system wireless audio, the specific characteristics of the soundscape are registered and transformed.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her 2015 work Orión is a black flag-like cloth with glow-in-the-dark symbols embroidered in the shape of the constellation. In the place of stars, Martínez has substituted the logos of international corporations and entities that use stars as their symbol; celestial navigation commanded by the logic of international corporations. Easily spotted is the smiling face of the Carl’s Jr. / Hardee’s logo, the three-pronged Mercedes-Benz emblem, Walmart’s six-pointed asterisk, and the starry cluster of the Subaru shield.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part-skyscraper, part-pyramid, part-citadel, this unfinished and ragged twelve-story building stands, incongruously, among the industrial environment of Limete. Towering above this desultory landscape and defying gravitational laws and urban zoning rules, this uncommon architectural proposition forms one of the strangest and most enigmatic landmarks of the city. A giant question mark, it begs for profound reflection on the nature of the city, the heritage of its colonial modernist architecture, the dystopian nature of its infrastructure, and the capacity for utopian urban dreams and lines of flight that it nonetheless continues to generate.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Created for the Seventh Shanghai Biennale at the Shanghai Art Museum, Zhou Tao’s 1,2,3,4 records morning staff meetings in over forty shops and companies in the immediate vicinity of the People’s Square. Regardless of occupation, the employees count off and move in step to the rhythms of their companies’ corporate songs or chants, which are meant to build team spirit and corporate loyalty. Zhou’s practice alchemizes the ordinary surroundings into a theatre where his camera is not simply a recording apparatus but an extension of existence.

Installation (Installation)

This installation combines the display of real objects with the deceptively painterly amalgamation of their content as the subject of a photograph. Here Allora & Calzadilla condemn the worldwide threat of violence caused by the high desirability of oil and water. Caught in the light, the patterning of the two liquids in the print creates attractive rainbow-like pools, a distanced comment on pollution.

Installation (Installation)

Executed in 2012, A World Undone revolves around a single, metaphorically rich substance, drawing on geological research into an ancient mineral, Zircon, unearthed in remote Western Australia. These rocks are now studied, like a time capsule, revealing intriguing clues about the state of the planet more than 4 billion years ago. Mangan procured a sample of the material and reduced it to a fine dust that he then filmed, in flux, with a high-speed video camera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Home (good infinity, bad infinity) by Lêna Bùi sheds light on the experiences of those who live along, and on, the waterways of Saigon, Vietnam and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Vietnam is a tropical country of major sand extraction; the UAE a desert country of major land reclamation. Scenes of the Saigon river being heavily eroded due to industrial machines mining sand for construction of skyscrapers are interspersed with images of concrete jungles, and aerial views of Saigon and Sharjah varying in scale and style.

Photography (Photography)

In the work We only move wehen something changes !! !, Olaf Breuning composes a portrait of posed antiglobalization protesters, each wearing clown noses, inside of a scene reminiscent of an event. Like in the work Easter Bunnies (2004) (photographs of the Moai of Easter Island with big ears and rabbit teeth supported by scaffolding) the artist introduces the outside frame into his photographic frame.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For 7 Materials , Tao Hui films seven scenes selected from the countless scenarios in his notebooks, including a group of ethnic minority girls in a spoil pit in the rain, a reporter interviewing a corpse, and a deity sailing on the river. Due to the lack of internal logical order, these one-minute video “materials” are not played in a fixed sequence but randomly. For Tao Hui, to film his diary is to adorn and embellish his memories before evoking and reviving their spirits.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Dark Clouds Of The Future” is a cinematographic video animation of the abandoned gold mine in Brazil, Serra Pelada (“Naked Mountain”). Thought to be one of the largest mines in the world, made famous by the photographs Alfredo Jaar and later by Sebastião Salgado, the hand-dug mine is now a mercury-polluted lake. During his research trip to Brazil, Pachpute met many former gold diggers who used to work at Serra Pelada, inciting his interest in the concept of the witness.

Iván Argote’s As Far As We Could Get comprises a series of video chapters made in the municipality of Palembang, Indonesia and the small town of Neiva, Colombia. The two cities are exact antipodes. The geographical usage of the term antipode – designating points diametrically opposite one another on the globe – stems from the ancient belief that the other side of the earth held a kind of netherworld, where everything was inverted, causing the men who lived there to walk backwards.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his Conceito abstrato series, however, Rodrigo Torres turns to the abstract, using the shapes, numbers, lines, and subtle colors of international currencies to create non-representational forms with lavish geometries and baroque curving forms.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM. Shy, proud and joyful, the two boys appear to be influenced by a third person – the artist and his camera. Their play of eyes creates an atmosphere reminding one of the close scrutiny and state control of the Kurdish population.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Originally commissioned for the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial, the film Estás vendo coisas (You are seeing things) depicts the subculture of Brega music, a fusion of American Hip Hop, Brazilian techno and Caribbean reggaeton that emerged in North Eastern Brazil over the last decade. Part anthropological documentary and part musical the film speaks about the realities of Brazil with its enormous social and economic tensions.

Photography (Photography)

Office Lady with a Red Umbrella restages a figure from a 1980 postcard made from a photograph from 1950’s. The retro-glamor of the 1950s style is restyled devoid of the original context of a Hong Kong street scene, where the “office lady” is walking on Queens Road of the Central district. With the “office lady” facing away from the viewer with a bare background, an introspective tone is created in Leung’s restaging while highlighting the red umbrella resonating with a red pencil skirt emblematic of the identity of the professional urban woman when Hong Kong was under British rule.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In SEA STATE 6 Charles Lim takes the viewer down the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore, a massive underground infrastructure for oil and fuel storage, built to support the commercial operations of oil traders, petrochemical ventures and manufacturing industries in the area. The first of its kind in Southeast Asia. Located at a depth of 130 meters beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong Island, the Caverns provide infrastructural support to the petrochemical industry that operates on Singapore’s Jurong Island, a cluster of islets reclaimed into one major island and connected to the mainland in the 1980s.

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.

Installation (Installation)

The work Sarta (String) by Reyes Santiago Roja is part of a larger series of works that examine the commercialization of the tobacco plant and its relationship to the meaning and use of tobacco by Native American tribes such as the Mayas, Aztecs, Incas or Tainos, which attributed spiritual qualities to tobacco such as the smoke carrying one’s thoughts and prayers to the sprits. In this work the artist studied the forms of tobacco leaves native to Latin America and recreated their shapes with commercial tobacco packaging from such global brands as Marlboro or Camel to the most popular Colombian brand Pielroja. The leaves made of the packaging material are lined up on a string as if they are hung out to dry as in traditional tobacco making processes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In SEA STATE 6 Charles Lim takes the viewer down the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore, a massive underground infrastructure for oil and fuel storage, built to support the commercial operations of oil traders, petrochemical ventures and manufacturing industries in the area. The first of its kind in Southeast Asia. Located at a depth of 130 meters beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong Island, the Caverns provide infrastructural support to the petrochemical industry that operates on Singapore’s Jurong Island, a cluster of islets reclaimed into one major island and connected to the mainland in the 1980s.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video I am protesting against myself presents a puppet in a garbage can citing numerous reasons why one should protest against it. Ciprian Muresan utilizes the comic effects typical of popular culture and the media. Progressively during the video, one appropriates the reasons for this characters discontent.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

My Shape (2018) is the final work of the exhibition “Sorry”, taking the form of a Levi’s denim jacket pattern, expanded three or four times larger than its original shape. Adorned with different pockets, visible through the transparency of the paper and different light bulbs illuminating the form, white cables link the piece to hidden plug sockets, recalling a similar piece made by the artist for the 2015 Ricard Foundation prize. The work is representative of a series of recurrent concepts in the artist’s work manipulation of scale, abstraction through monumentalization, highlighting of tangential objects integrated like sculptural elements by the artist, in a way in which others might try and hide them, as well as the melding of the intimate alongside objects of mass production and the globalization of tastes.

Photography (Photography)

Hit Man Gurung’s series I Have to Feed Myself, My Family and My Country… addresses labor migration, a phenomenon prevalent in South Asian countries like Nepal. The laborers, most of whom are young and middle-aged, come from marginalized and underprivileged backgrounds. They leave their families back in the homeland with the dream of pursuing a better life for themselves and their families.

Photography (Photography)

In 2011, Paulo Nazareth completed a unique journey of several thousand miles. Nazareth left Minas Gerais, Brazil and walked across all of Latin America to the United States to take part in an exhibition during the Miami edition of Art Basel. The series Notícias de América , described by the artist as a residency in transit, or perhaps an accidental residency, is the result of a year’s elaboration of a body of work that is the direct result of an entanglement of human affairs experienced along the way.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills. Divided into three versions, the video first shows a number of Japanese ten-thousand-yen bills being counted without in an orderly, efficient manner. In Two Million , a similar counting of one-thousand-dollar bills from Hong Kong follows.

Photography (Photography)

In 2011, Paulo Nazareth completed a unique journey of several thousand miles. Nazareth left Minas Gerais, Brazil and walked across all of Latin America to the United States to take part in an exhibition during the Miami edition of Art Basel. The series Notícias de América , described by the artist as a residency in transit, or perhaps an accidental residency, is the result of a year’s elaboration of a body of work that is the direct result of an entanglement of human affairs experienced along the way.

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.