Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

“To me, art equals responsibility”. That is probably why Alain Séchas creates works according to the human scale, immediately evoking the human body. But rather than using the human figure, he chose that of the cat: a round-eyed feline which never smiles.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Planets, Chapter 32 (2017) is a short video that depicts the world at a time of great anxiety. However, it is done with a sharp sense of humor. It starts with a voice explaining that Africa will be partially inundated in the coming year, ending with the impossible relationship between the artist and a chatbot (primitive form of artificial intelligence).

Installation (Installation)

In the hologram “Mano con hojas” (”Hand with Leaves”, 2013), nature is portrayed simultaneously as an interconnected system of processes and the essence of the universe. A change in the understanding of nature challenges the understanding of our own natures. The visual metaphor of the human hand enmeshed and inextricably entangled with leaves suggests that humans cannot be divorced from nature, and moreover that they are always engaging with the problematic of overtaking nature or being overtaken by it.

Installation (Installation)

In late 2017, Kiswanson stared working with Vadim, an eleven-year-old Romanian-French boy who he met during castings for a performance. Captivated by what he describes as a “hybrid voice, one that belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once”, he began working with Vadim on a regular basis. Over the course of four months, Kiswanson interviewed Vadim on a multitude of subjects concerning the human condition: from his beliefs on death, his thoughts on growing up and becoming an adult, what it feels like to breathe, talk, move and above all, what it means to be born between several cultures and languages.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– In which an intelligence going back to its place of origin discovers the agony of gods on which it thrives – Seventh and last episode of The Unmanned , “a flood” is set in 1542 as the first conquistadors enter the land later to be known as the Silicon Valley. Mining the colonial past of the region, and entirely generated and edited with an autonomous artificial intelligence system, this film for and by machines only features the return of an intelligence to its place of origin and the death of the animal gods who used to live in it. Closing the series onto itself with a machine trained solely on its first episode (“2045 – The Death of Ray Kurzweil”), it shows the wandering of an inhuman vision trying to revive meaning by recognizing itself on the god’s corpses.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination. Displayed with the cardboard boxes (and their shipping labels, which chart the journey in a different way) that contain them during the journey, these damaged forms draw from minimalist sculpture, and conceptual artworks that focused on distance, travel, and virtual connections.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

If Only God Had Invented Coca Cola Sooner! Or, The Death of My Pet Monkey

Painting (Painting)

Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage. Both through its title and formally—through how the shapes in the composition resemble a mountain or natural formation—the piece relays us to a mineral quarry or a deep mining pit where materials are extracted. Interspersed among the block-like figures and rocky textures, we also see several human silhouettes, either cut-out, or as if they were whited out by a shining light, or lost in the shadows.