Installation (Installation)

Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana. The forests were felled and immigrants from northern Bihar and South India were brought to exploit the mineral resources. The Indigenous people were then dispersed to live nomadically, engaging themselves as seasonal workers in farms and industries.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Blindfold Receptor (caterpillar-yellow) by Leelee Chan is inspired by the camouflaging nature of the peppered-moth caterpillar. In 1800s Europe, during the industrial revolution, light-colored moths evolved into a darker color after trees in their habitat darkened by the polluting soot. Today, due to rapid human changes to the environment, caterpillars can adapt even before they metamorphose into moths, mimicking the colour of the branches they inhabit.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Combined into a single two-channel HD video, Li Xiaofei’s Ponytail and Chongming Island II are silent portraits of the women assembly line workers at a Chinese kitchenware factory. Close-up shots of women’s heads—most notably of the rear with their hair in the similar updo fashion—and faces occupy the frame amidst a backdrop of a revolving steel conveyor. In lieu of dialogue or humming of the machinery, a ringing score of chimes and bells provides a tranquil soundtrack.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Castigos del caucho by Santiago Yahuarcani originates in the oral memory transmitted by the artist’s grandfather, who was a survivor of the Putumayo genocide where thousands of Indigenous people were annihilated and enslaved to extract rubber from the Amazon forest between 1879 and 1912. Yahuarcani’s complex narrative paintings on tree bark highlight a long history of colonial violence against the Uitoto and other Indigenous communities. They also show the destruction of the rainforest under Western models of extraction, privatization, and development.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana. The forests were felled and immigrants from northern Bihar and South India were brought to exploit the mineral resources. The Indigenous people were then dispersed to live nomadically, engaging themselves as seasonal workers in farms and industries.

Painting (Painting)

Calling attention to campaigns for land rights, survival, and sovereignty, Prabhakar Pachpute’s recent works consider how farmers in India use their bodies in performative ways during acts of protest. The oil painting Inclined uncertainties depicts a grotto-like city atop a boat carried by headless human bodies. The waterless boat navigates through a desolate landscape, propelled forward by the faceless humans, who appear to be holding the cumbersome structure together.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The mines at Potosí are both the site and subject of this work, also titled Potosí, by Antonio Vega Macotela. Historically, these mines bankrolled Spanish imperial coinage; the Spanish began excavating the site for silver in 1545 in what is now Bolivia. The mines themselves are situated at great altitude in the Andes, and are inhospitable to animal labor.

NFT (NFT)

In conjunction with his first NFT sale of White Male Dread Scott made and circulated a poster titled Whites For Sale . The indigo-colored poster advertises a “cargo” of newly arrived white slaves, from which one will be for sale. This work is adapted from a 1796 slave sale announcement poster that is now archived in the library at Columbia University, NYC.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

When Need Moves the Earth is a three-channel video that combines elements of documentary footage, archival material and abstract aerial shots to encompass a painterly yet forthright exploration of a coal mine and a water dam in Thailand. A meditation on the impact of industrialization on the natural environment, the work highlights the drastic alterations that these operations leave in its place. Som Supaparinya’s work is often a commentary on political, social, and personal issues.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Flag (Thames) 2016 depicts a small section of the Thames River—one that is adjacent to the Palace of Westminster in London—as an algorithmic representation on an LED panel. The river color is vividly represented with reflections of buildings along the riverbank, including Big Ben. At the center of the scene sits a simulated gasoline spill.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video 9000 PIECES by Euan Macdonald was filmed at a musical instrument factory in Shanghai where 90 percent of the pianos that they manufacture are exported around the world, and only 10 percent are “finished” and can be labeled “Made in the US (or) Europe.” The video captures an intricate network of mechanisms as they interact with each other, their rhythmic movements resulting in an intense choreography and a cacophony of metallic sounds dramatized by Macdonald’s editing. As the shot widens it reveals the process we see unfold: a piano being vigorously tested by a factory machine designed to determine the endurance of the instruments. Contrary to what is often relayed, the work has nothing to do with Chinese factories or fast changing global economies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Invalid Throne by Jakrawal Nilthamrong is a 35mm film that searches the protagonist Kamjorn Sankwan’s memory and connection with the land he grew up in. Using Nithamrong’s cinematic language of visual representations and soundscapes without narration, he highlights a non-human-centered view to meditate upon and reveal the sublime and unspoiled natural landscape ? as Nilthamrong states: “in the middle of nature where no man has claimed ownership”.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Carolina Caycedo’s practice conveys her very personal passion and relationship to water, as a powerful necessity and spiritual reminder. Esto No Es Agua / This Is Not Water is a portrait of the Las Damas waterfall in the town of Garzón, Huila in Southern Colombia. The video is composed of footage of the waterfall that is at times mirrored, distorted, obstructed, or kaldeiscoped in different ways.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In this two-channel video installation, Spaniards Named Her Magdalena, But Natives Called Her Yuma , Carolina Caycedo gathered footage during numerous research trips to dam sites in the Harz Mountains, Saxony, Westphalia and the Black Forest in Germany interspersed with images of the Rio Magdalena region in Colombia. Extending beyond the documentary form, the work illuminates social power structures and control mechanisms, particularly in connection with the activities of multinational corporations: images of controlled bodies of water are spliced with footage of urban crowds, visualising overlaps in the ways these various bodies are managed. The film is overlaid with the narrator’s voice whispering in Spanish and English, speaking of the artist’s personal perspective, and her own experience with a river she has known since childhood when family lived by its edge.

Painting (Painting)

From the Ending by Rocky Cajigan consists of an assemblage painting, with accompanying sculptural objects presented on the floor. The bright pink object central to the painting is based on a photograph, and the artist’s personal memory, of a Bontoc ancestral tomb, commonly located at close proximity to a family home. The painting is covered by a net material simulating a fence, creating a certain bodily distance from the viewer’s perspective.

Textile (Textile)

Incompatibles (Unitas) is made from discarded samples of the yarns that are exported from Croatia and not actually available in the local market. The textile industry in former Yugoslavia has essentially closed down under pressure from Indian and Chinese industries and as a result of the botched privatization of once state-owned factories. There is only one factory remaining in Zagreb producing these yarns.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dhuwã (term used by indentured people of Natal for ‘smoke’), is a single-channel film by Sancintya Mohini Simpson that traces back to the lived experiences of indentured labourers taken from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) to work on sugar plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family were contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal. Filmed originally in 16mm film, Dhuwã captures sugarcane plantations in North Queensland, initially in moments of stillness that are gradually disrupted by a crescendo of repetitive sounds and fast camera movements that culminate in the fields being engulfed by flames.

Painting (Painting)

In DUST 171217 Zhang Zhenyu uses fragments of dust collected across the city, and then creates dark abstract paintings, repetitively gluing the material to the canvas, applying up to 30 or 100 layers and sanding until he arrives at a smooth surface. The result is a reflective surface, an abstract object in which the viewer can see themselves staring back. The project began in 2014 and reflects a rampant process of modernization in his native China.

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.

Painting (Painting)

From the Beginning by Rocky Cajigan consists of an assemblage painting, with accompanying sculptural objects presented on the floor. The image in the painting is based on a photograph, and the artist’s personal memory, of a Bontoc ancestral tomb, commonly located at close proximity to a family home. The painting is covered by a net material simulating a fence, creating a certain bodily distance from the viewer’s perspective.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

– Thisstoryoffriedrichkurzweiliwanttotellit- myselfhowhelivedinthisroomandh – Inspired by the writings of the feral child Kaspar Hauser and told by the young Friedrich, both father and son of Ray Kurzweil, this story unfolds on the microscope images of a blade cutting through metal. Filmed at the scale of a fold of matter, this cut is the axiom on which the first season of The Unmanned rests.

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)

La Vigie (extrait 6), Paris 2004-2011

Installation (Installation)

Rossella Biscotti’s “10×10” series investigates the relationship between demographics, data processing, textile manufacturing and social structure. The work observes how demographic records have been modeled through the use of punch cards to program both early data processing machines and automated looms (jacquard). Reversing the process, Biscotti turned to the 2001–2006 census information of Brussels—where she was then based—to create a pattern on these textiles.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

-In which predicting its past it lives working and dies fighting- Fifth episode of The Unmanned , “La Mémoire de Masse” unfolds during the second Canuts revolts in Lyon in 1834. These riots now known as the ‘bloody week’ came as a reaction to the automation of work in the silk industry by the Jacquard Loom and its implementation of the punched card – first historical ‘mass storage’ system allowing the inscription and replication of complex weaving patterns. This inaugurating event in the history of workers emancipation movements of the 19th century is actually the first revolt against modern computation.

Installation (Installation)

he woke up with seeds in his lungs by Prajakta Potnis is a set of x-ray films presented through backlit light boxes of found objects constructed to evoke the body or organs that turns the host into a foreign element. The title of the work is inspired by a story the artist came across during her research, according to which a man had swallowed seeds that started to grow inside his organs. In the work, interior scapes of the body appear as radioactive rays pass through various materials.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Na China” means “In China” in Igbo language. Marie Voignier’s film NA CHINA! focuses on the African women communities who have emigrated to Guangzhou, in the southeast of China.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Salvation Mountain by Liu Yu takes California’s history of the Gold Rush as its starting point. The single-channel video combines drone footage and animations to depict desolate ghost towns and abandoned mining pits of California, leading the viewer through an out of body experience through the vast American landscape. The viewer is taken on a journey, led by the three protagonists – a pioneer, a vagabond, and the avatar of a drone–to Salvation Mountain, a man-made mountain constructed out of latex paint with Christian sayings and Bible verses, and Slab City, a migratory commune in Southern California’s desert.