Textile (Textile)

The title of this work by Egle Jauncems, The Paler King I , is taken from an unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace called The Pale King, published posthumously in 2015. Jauncems notes that the book is fragmented, following unrelated characters struggling with ennui and depression, navigating the pressures of modern reality. In her art practice, Jauncems has been interested in the lives of powerful and influential men for many years.

Photography (Photography)

Mooi indie (which translates to “Beautiful Indies”) is a term used to depict the beauty of nature in the East Indies during the period of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia. The term is usually used to describe a painting, romanticising the alluring tropics through the lens of European imperialism. Later in the 1950s, the prominent Indonesian painter S. Sudjojono, who is known as one of the founding fathers of Indonesian Modern Art, publicly rejected the Mooi Indie genre as Indonesian art.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Installation (Installation)

O (for various skies) by Jesse Chun is a two-channel video sculpture that decentralizes American colonial narratives about the moon through “unlanguaging”—a methodology that the artist has conceptualized for unfixing language. The project disrupts bureaucratic documents pertaining to the United States government’s lunar colonization and militarization, such as The Lunex Project of 1958 and Project Horizon of 1959, through methods of visual, semiotic, and sonic (mis)translation and abstraction. Chun redacts the found texts, transforming them into concrete poetry, while interweaving lesser known Korean folklore about the moon, such as the precolonial Korean women’s moon dance ( ganggangsullae ) and shamanistic ritual dance for ushering the departed into another world ( gildakeum ).

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

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)

Um Al Dhabaab (Mother of Fog) by Farah Al Qasimi addresses the myth of Al Qasimi tribe-instigated piracy in the Gulf, perpetuated by the British Empire and upheld by contemporary western academia. This narrative is contested through a fictional retelling of the 1819 siege of Al Dhayah fort and the subsequent Pax Britannica treaty that solidified Britain’s military presence in the Trucial States. Relayed across various locations and times in Ras Al Khaimah through the perspectives of an ancient jinn, the ghost of an Al Qasimi pirate, two RAK-based sisters, a Jack Sparrow impersonator and ship captain, and an 1819 British naval officer, the film challenges Western-centric historiographies of the Gulf and the lingering imperialist interests at play across Asia’s modern-day trade hubs.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Studies of Chinese New Villages II Gan Chin Lee’s realism appears in the format of a fieldwork notebook; capturing present-day surroundings while unpacking their historical memory. The watercolor images on each note paper document the artist’s visits to various Chinese ‘New Villages’ in Malaysia. The studies, some in color and others in grey-scale, from this series include architectural ruins, portraits of people and animals, and groups of people in protest.

Installation (Installation)

Tom Nicholson’s Comparative Monument (Palestine) engages a peculiar Australian monumental tradition: war monuments that bear the name “Palestine”. Countless of these monuments were built immediately after World War 1 to commemorate the presence of Australian troops in Palestine. The Australian troops had entered Palestine in 1917 after fighting the Turks threatening the Suez Canal with the British, when the main focus was on the European fronts rather than on the Middle East campaign.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For her work in Sharjah Biennial 14, Alia Farid traveled from the United Arab Emirates to Iran across the Strait of Hormuz to film the longest day of the summer. On Qeshm Island, where her film is set, the summer solstice is referred to as Nowruz Al Sayadeen (Farsi for “fishermen’s new year”). The work foregrounds a number of local residents whose performances draw attention to their material surroundings and natural environment–– from a brightly decorated domestic interior to an expansive sea view overlooking the Arabian Gulf.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

This screen-print by Dread Scott titled Imagine a World Without America shows a map without the landmass that is the USA, as if the continents have drifted, or as if it never existed in the first place. Artist Dread Scott’s work is founded upon challenging “American patriotism as a unifying value,” and as such he claims that it is necessary to “burn the US Constitution (an outmoded impediment to freedom), and position the police as successors to lynch mob terror.” Perhaps one must imagine a structurally different world to produce new and freer modes of thought. While not explicitly related to Afro-Futurism, one of the key sub-genres of science-fiction and related thought is speculative revisionism; asking ‘how would the world be different if X never happened?” This modest work is a call to our daily imaginary, an invitation to zoom out to the scale of the global human condition, and implicitly America’s role in trade, war, cultural exchange, and the spread of western values.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings is a two-channel short film by Bo Wang and his frequent collaborator Pan Lu. It takes the history of the British colonial search for tropical plants as a starting point, revealing how early colonial rule and ideologies shaped Hong Kong through the Western gaze. Through the process of transporting and collecting plants, Joseph Banks, who was the botanist and naturalist of the first British diplomatic mission to China (also known as The Macartney Embassy) and advised King George III on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London with the most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world.

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)

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)

dawn chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta is a work produced in Sofía Córdova native Puerto Rico and was largely shaped by the financial crisis, the islands’ histories under colonial rule and most recently, the climate-change related natural disasters which have affected the island. The latest of which, hurricane Maria, and the subsequent political mishandling of the situation, gave the project its ending. Prior to the hurricane, this work also engaged in conversation with blackness and anti-blackness in the Caribbean, syncretic religion and dance music as modes of survival and liberation, and fantasy and science-fictional strategies as means to break out of our current arc of history.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Executed on Sunday 17 August 2013, “Zonnebloem renamed” is a site-specific performative video film marking the centenary of the 1913 Natives Land Act in South Africa. The short film forms part of the artist’s ongoing collaboration with District Six residents titled WITNESS. Commencing in 2011, WITNESS negotiates the forced removals and land compensation in District Six and across South Africa.

Installation (Installation)

The Chair (2012) foregrounds media-based tensions between analog and digital imaging technologies as a means of challenging the continued circulation of visual ephemera from India’s colonial past. A mix of found photographs and staged studio portraits deliberately made to look older, The Chair features multiple portraits of figures dressed in period costumes that reference the ornate fashions popular during Great Britain’s imperial rule of India. A hybrid frame wraps around this assemblage, a composite of variously ornate and simple wood finishes culled from disused and forgotten pictures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Paloma Contreras Lomas has frequently used animals as metaphors in her work. This work’s title, Cimarrón , is the Spanish word for an untamed animal, the wild vegetation that grows in the open, or a runaway slave. Cimarrón is part of a larger series in which the artist turned scaled-up Mexican hats into meticulously hallucinatory landscapes.

Photography (Photography)

The photographic series Tonatiuh (The Son of the Sun) by Juan Brenner is an in-depth visual study of current Guatemalan society from the perspective of miscegenation and the incalculable consequences of the Spanish conquest. Establishing Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado as a central figure, not only in the conquest of Guatemala, but also in the formation of a complex, segregated society, Brenner proposes a series of images that re-establish the lens through which to consider both a historical and contemporary Guatemala. Tonatiuh is a visual essay on the state of a country on the verge of failure and its incapacity to address its own history and learn from it.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family was contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal, then one of the four British colonies in South Africa. These indentured servants, derogatorily called ‘coolies’, were employees by title, but were effectually slaves.