Installation (Installation)

Tughra is a protocol by Sharif Waked that reproduces the sixteenth century calligraphic monogram for tughra ; also known as the signature of Suleiman the Magnificent. Under Suleiman’s reign, at the beginning of the 16th century, the Ottoman empire achieved its apex both in terms of territorial extension and cultural creation. Suleiman personally instituted major judicial changes relating to society, education, taxation, and criminal law, as such he is often referred to as ‘The Lawgiver’.

Installation (Installation)

Stones and Elephants by Chia-Wei Hsu derives from the Malay literary classic The Hikayat Abdullah . The author Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, who once served as the secretary of Major General William Farquhar, chronicled his life in Malaysia and published his writings in 1849. Hsu’s video installation excerpts two chap- ters from this classic.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

All Nations are Created Special is a black and white woodcut print by the artist collective Pangrok Sulap. Emblazoned across this fantastical 10 metre long print is the Bahasa Malaysia phrase Semua Bangsa Tercipta Istimewa , which loosely translated means “All Races are Special”. Pangrok Sulap takes the translation one step further, as the title of the work declares “All Nations are Created Special”.

Installation (Installation)

Qui vivra verra, Qui mourra saura is an installation by Minia Biabiany composed of the plan of a house made out of strips of salt, and a “garden” made of ceramic pieces, hanging from the ceiling and on the floor, and non woven fabric. She uses blue and red filters to alter the hues of light coming from the outside. The work focuses on the disappearance of traditional knowledge associated with the “jardin de case” outside Guadeloupean houses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Fourth Notebook features a solo choreography by dancer Benjamin Ord. In an empty dance studio, Ord begins seated on his knees on the floor. He moves subtly with gentle strokes to the rhythm of a woman’s voice speaking short phrases in French.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Ghost 1: Drowning is not a poem but is not not a poem either by Jota Mombaça is part of a series of sculptures exploring water’s restless, elemental properties and what the artist describes as “the radicality of sinking”. For this project, Mombaça produced three sculptural linen works in collaboration with the waters of the San Francisco Bay (in Berkeley), the San Pablo Bay (in Richmond), and the Pacific Ocean (in Bolinas), wherein the artist submerged linen in these local waters for three to seven weeks, then dried, and installed the materials on metal armatures. Mombaça’s subsequent video waterwill (2023) is composed of various footage from the sinking, floating, and unsinking of these sculptures and those from previous connected performances.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Pau-Brasil is a sculpture by Thiago Honório that references Oswald de Andrade’s 1925 classic of Brazilian modernist literature of the same title. De Andrade’s work demands the resuscitation of “Brazilian” language and culture, advocating for the cultivation of invention and an illogical, “agile and candid” attitude. In response, Honorio’s work takes the physical form of a laquered stalk of the pau brasil tree, from which de Andrade’s work drew its title, piercing the physical form of the book itself.

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 ).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Three men with their backs to each other, dressed similarly in dark colors, stare straight at the camera. They individually deliver sacred lines from the Torah, New Testament, and Qur’an in their representative languages: Old Hebrew, Greek, and Old Arabic. As the camera slowly rotates around the trio, the men begin to perform traditional manifestations of each religious cult: Torah Cantillations, Gregorian Chants, and tilawat of Al-Qur’an.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

With Inner Child , Bady Dalloul continues his ongoing reflection on migration and belonging, putting in balance levantine and Japanese histories. The most recent in a series of works gathering images and sounds from the different countries the artist lived or worked in, this video is part of a multi-channel sound installation that aims to transport us into a meditative state. To do so, the artist worked with Mami Nakanishi, a trained hypnotherapist, to write a script that could reflect an internal and multilinguistic dialogue that alternates between Arabic, English, French, and Japanese.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Originally a multi-channel video installation with sculptures and sound, this iteration of The Workshop by Gilad Ratman is a three-channel distillation of the expansive project that follows a group’s underground pilgrimage from Mt. Carmel in Israel to Venice, emerging underneath the Israeli pavilion in the Venetian Giardini. Upon their arrival, the motley group of 30 non-actor participants then sculpt self-portrait busts of themselves, with microphones embedded and protruding from the sculptures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Composed of five episodes, Brine Lake (A New Body) by Shen Xin is set in a fictional factory where iodine is produced as a byproduct of natural gas sourced from deep sea brine lakes. Korean, Japanese, and Russian are spoken in multiple episodes. The protagonists have multiple encounters and conversations with two unseen employees of the factory whose visions are overtaken by the camera.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Palabrarma (obreros palabreando) by Cecilia Vicuña is a series of works in which the artist blends poetry, political commentary and graphic design. The title itself is a portmanteau that unites the words palabra (word) and arma (weapon) that speaks literally of the power of words through their poetic potential. A poet herself, Vicuña developed a long series of palabrarmas on diverse media that were often used as slogans in political demonstrations.

Textile (Textile)

Cosmic Tautology I and II are two textile pieces representative of Santiago Borja’s practice and long-standing interest in disrupting universalist assumptions of minimalism by connecting them with other, non-Western or esoteric references. They were hand-woven in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, and are composed of nine squares, the middle one left unwoven. Their composition is based on Red Square, White Letters (1962) by Sol Lewit, but they also take cues from works like Black Series II by Frank Stella.

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.

Installation (Installation)

Lyrics: Edition

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies.

Painting (Painting)

ChinaCapital: Dream, Hot Land, Interstellar Colonization by Pu Yingwei addresses a complicated phenomena of intertwined influences from different political powers, capital forces, and ideologies in the reality of China. The background of this painting is taken from an image of a Russian stamp featuring a space odyssey during the Cold War with the US. The composition juxtaposes colors from the Chinese national flag (red and yellow) and the US national flag (blue and red), echoing the current “cold war” between China and the U. S. Usually found surrounding a big star on the Chinese national flag, the 4 stars are here rearranged into a single line, symbolizing the artist’s wish for a decentralised and equal society.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s work brings together spoken and written language, photography, vintage television and computer animation to pay homage to African-American popular culture. Figuration (B) is a mediatic dumpster dive through the not-yet-historical past, its fantasia of purloined images flowing to an interruptive, channel-surfing logic. A stream of TV clips, commercials, news segments, video memes, and movie scenes—at times run backwards, doubled, or layered over other clips—incorporate archival and pop cultural sources layered with a soundtrack constructed of found and made sources to make something akin to a video mixtape.

Installation (Installation)

home, a temporary place by Mithu Sen is part of a project called AºVOID. In this fragmented mental map, the landscape is fleeting, embossed, and ethereal; there are moments of recognition and also a near-violent sudden emptying of memory. Bodies are skeletal, nature is in entropy, context is removed.

Installation (Installation)

You have given the world your songs by Francisca Benítez is a poem in American Sign Language (ASL). It employs ten handshapes arranged in a numbering sequence from 1 to 10. This visual rhyme sequence is standard in Deaf poetry, as is the Tenth in Latin American popular oral/written poetry traditions.

Painting (Painting)

“When Pope. L shakes his head he makes drawings that keep him from laugh-­crying to death,” writes Helen Molesworth about William Pope. L’s Skin Set Drawings .

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The stained glass windows of Chloé Quenum’s Les Allégories evoke the sacred and describe the movement of a rooster in the form of patterns extracted from a wax fabric found in Benin. The in situ motif becomes a motive of situation to materialize a certain idea of the movement. Her work is a form of thought about written language transformed into a sculpted piece.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Four knives appearing as if thrown at the wall to alleviate frustration and boredom, form rhythmic shadows and markings of time above a translated phrase boldly printed in simplified Chinese and English. While the English reads “But Now I Manufacture Hate, Every Single Day,” the Chinese, resultant from Google Translate in 2011, reads awkwardly to something meaning “now I manufacture black special.” The term “black special” is derived from a transliteration of the word “hate” into the sound “heite”, where the corresponding written characters literally denote “black special”. The rigidity of the machine translation also preserved the syntax of English, forcing the Chinese to crudely abide by English grammar.

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)

To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground. Comprised of curt lines such as “forever” “failure” “to live,” the Korean forms non-sequiturs and double entendres to the English script following a line of questioning between a detective and a victim telling a meandering story surrounding a bullet being in a wrist, going to hospital, traveling to Japan, and the discovery of a love triangle. This narrative of a potentially grave situation is told in a nonchalant manner.

Performance (Performance)

Variation & Improvisation for ‘In Harmonia Progressio’ by Duto Hardono is part of a series of work that focuses on sound loops as a fundamental element of his performance – a metaphor that Hardono employs as he examines the human condition, such as time and temporal spatiality. Unlike other works, where he generates sound using analog cassette tapes, this performance uses the human voice. Participants are instructed to vocalize ‘In’, ‘Harmonia’, and ‘Progressio’ – words that make up a Latin phrase which means “progress inside harmony”.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Kosmic Music is a musical score comprised of two parts: a single mixed media drawing titled Colors and Satellites, and a pair of mixed media drawings titled Koral Reef . Conceived of together as a single musical score, the three drawings exemplify a specific stage in the evolution of Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation Language, which he has been developing since 1967. Although at first glance the works in Kosmic Music might appear abstract compositions drawn on paper, as with other scores produced by Smith, suggestions of musical structures are revealed upon closer inspection: an entanglement of musical sheets and bright geometric forms.