Installation (Installation)

Tadmur by artist Majd Abdel Hamid is influenced by a book by Mustafa Khalifa titled The Shell: Memoirs of a Hidden Observer , which details Khalifa’s imprisonment in the Assad ‘desert prison’ Tadmur. Khalifa’s compelling testimonial is now considered to have enlightened the Syrian public to the atrocities being committed in their country by the Assad regime and catalyzed a political resurgence in Syria. The prison was destroyed by ISIS in 2015 and though the initial reaction by the Syrian public was largely positive, the complete leveling of the prison erases the brutal experiences of the prisoners, many of whom died and those that survived.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Maya Watanabe’s video installation Bullet unfolds within the context of the Peruvian justice and forensic systems. During the Peruvian internal armed conflict that occured between the subversive group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Peruvian military from 1980-2000, approximately 21,000 people, civilians, and guerilla fighters were killed. Most of the killings that were perpetrated by the military during this period of political upheaval were later deemed extrajudicial acts, and almost all of them were carried out with firearms.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her film Retiro (2019), Natalia Lassalle-Morillo considers how women pass down memories to their kin as they age. A film within a film, the three-channel portrait combines the scripted film she and her mother made together, behind-the-scenes shots of that film’s production, and interviews with her mother on gendered familial expectations and aging in Puerto Rico. Lassalle-Morillo’s meta approach to story-telling unpacks her relationship to her mother, demonstrating how maternal trauma, history, and myth are made and inherited through disjointed narratives.

Textile (Textile)

Formed from pillowcases, each of which contains an embroidered calligraphic text as well as drawings depicting dreams, Ali Eyal’s Painting Size 80 x 60 cm is part of a long-term project which records and indexes such dreams. “I rode on my cousin’s back, laughing until the heaviness of my body weighed his to the floor. At the time I was with him on their large farm that he always dreamed of visiting.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rond de Jambe by Aimée Zito Lema is a series formed by two works: a three-channel video installation and a live performance. Each component in this project approaches the same subject matter through a different medium in order to investigate politics as they are made manifest in and through the body. Using archival footage of protests of the Stopera building project in Amsterdam as a starting point, artist Aimée Zito Lema worked with dancers to translate the protest movements into a choreography.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier. Inspired by the artist’s father,a soldier in Algeria who then suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,the video depicts the delusions flowing from a mind ravaged by violence: a vision grown from the inside out. Like a mirage amidst a blank, desert expanse, specters are conjured as the inanimate comes to life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Words by Meiro Koizumi: “The video installation work In the State of Amnesia is made with Mr. Nobuhiro Tanaka, who damaged his brain when he had an accident when he was 21. Since then he has been living with a memory disorder. I asked Mr. Tanaka to memorize a testimony of a Japanese soldier who served in the war in China during WWII.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Binelde Hyrcan’s video “Cambeck” is a playful study of four boys on a beach in Angola playing in a chauffeured car made of sand. Weaved through the seemingly naïve game are themes of poverty, migration and inequality. Speaking of ‘the good life’ in the United States of America, the young boys discuss separated families as a result of migration, unemployment and education, poverty, the dream of leaving the slum for a building with walls made not of tin, and the luxury of the accessibility of transport.

Installation (Installation)

In her work, Fantasmática Latinoamericana, Jarpa works from photographs of five public funeral processions following the mysterious deaths of five Latin American presidents. Depicting the crowds and the caskets in grey tones, Jarpa’s paintings underscore the wide impact of these tragic events on the people and politics of the region. Voluspa Jarpa’s work is based upon a meticulous analysis of political, historical, and social documents from Chile and other Latin American countries, which she uses to develop a reflection on the concept of memory.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video work Volga by Aslan Goisum begins with a sweeping field caught under a misty, gray sky. In the center of the frame is a white car of the eponymous Soviet make—standard-issue for the imperial administrative class during the USSR’s ‘Period of Stagnation.’ The vehicle is the only indication of cultural geography in the video; what unfolds must be somewhere in the former USSR. In a slow crescendo of activity and tension, small groups of men, women, and children, walk up to the car and squeeze into it.

Painting (Painting)

R. H. Quaytman’s family on her father’s side is of Jewish heritage from Poland. In the summer of 2016, Quaytman traveled to Poland to research an upcoming retrospective exhibition taking place in Warsaw and ?ódz, the town from which her great-grandfather emigrated to the United States. Tracing her grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s origins, Phocis Pole is from a series of paintings that explores her paternal lineage.

Photography (Photography)

Em’kal Eyongakpa was born in Cameroon in 1981. After obtaining a postgraduate diploma in Botany and Ecology, he decided to concentrate exclusively on visual and sound art. His use of poetic, symbolic and surrealistic imagery is often sprinkled with paradoxes that challenge the obvious.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Throughout his career, Marwan Rechmaoui has maintained a drawing practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns the artist spent his evenings recording thoughts and imagery on paper, inspired by events happening around him, music, his garden, and the news. These drawings are contemporaneous in their concerns and are indexical of a destitute time and space in the aesthetics they conjure.

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.

Photography (Photography)

Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Throughout the series of sixty C-prints, Hatakeyama’s photographs depict scenes of torn landscapes and leveled homes, demolished villages and massive piles of detritus pummeled beyond recognition. The images serve as records of disaster, seemingly driven by an intense need to bear witness to collective trauma.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her masterpiece 8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America , Walker unravels just that, the story of struggle, oppression, escape and the complexities of power dynamics in the history following slave trade in America. Her use of contour and silhouette accentuate emotion with rigor, she reduces the narrative to black and white as gruesome acts of sex and violence address trauma, fear and suffering through a majestic play of shadow and light.