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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Noémie Goudal’s short film, Below the Deep South , is based on the work of palaeoclimatologist James Bendle who, while drilling in Antarctica, discovered coal beneath the ice. Bendle’s theory is that the coal is an indication that Antarctica was once a lush, green forested environment with insects and animals. It only arrived in its present position due to the shifting of tectonic plates.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Interested in role-play and videogames, Ana María Millán developed workshops with different communities in order to create characters and scenarios for her animations, often in collaboration with a choreographer. Elevación evokes various narratives inspired by the comicstrip Marquetalia, Raíces de la Resistencia (Marquetalia, Roots of the Resistance) (2011). This comic strip is a memoir of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerillas written by Jesús Santrich, one of its leaders who, after the 2016 Peace Agreement, rejoined dissident members of the organization in a clandestine guerrilla splinter group in 2019.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Hole’s Journey by Ghita Skali follows a complex political satire involving a worn-out floor, a political activist, and the Ouled Sbita tribe of Morocco. For 23 years, the director’s chair at an international art institute in the Netherland’s scratched the wooden floor below it. For Skali’s project, a 102 cm x 120 cm section of this scratched floor was cut out and mailed to an expropriated region in Morocco.

Photography (Photography)

Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s is from the series “As We Walked on Water” (2010-2012), which looks into Singapore’s history around the phenomenon of land reclamation. After exhausting the country’s own soil from its tiny hills and ridges, the government had to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue its reclamation efforts. At the early stages of a land reclamation project, the imported sand would sit idle for some time, forming an artificial desert-like landscape.