Sculpture (Sculpture)

Hueso de culebra (Snake Bone) arises from the stories that the artist’s grandmother used to tell him as a child about her father’s medical and spiritual practices in the southern part of Costa Rica, close to the border with Panama. One of them revolved around a plant that had various uses, from healing poisonous snake bites to predicting the future. She said, for example, that if one came across this plant during a period of drought, it could mean trouble was coming.

Painting (Painting)

The Lion’s Hunt by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is a large format painting that recalls Delacroix’s paintings and tapestries from the 19th century, where the painterly surface became a garden invaded by wild beasts. In Lutz-Kinoy’s painting, two ferocious lions appear to be preying on several horses. Accentuated by luminous browns and yellows, the lions evoke imperialist fantasies.

Painting (Painting)

Strongly influenced by history and memory, Goddy Leye’s paintings are based primarily on stories and mythologies. Containing ideas, emotions, and sensibilities, signs and symbols occupy an important place in Leye’s work, though he has to retrieve them from an interrupted history. The painting Animal was made in reference to an important precolonial kingdom, Bamun.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur. The monstrous result of Queen Pasiphae’s infatuation with a bull, the Minotaur lived in a huge maze known as the Labyrinth where he would devour sacrificial offerings of youths and maidens. Traditionally, the story centers on Theseus and his heroic (and successful) quest to conquer the Minotaur, subsequently freeing the people of Athens from their obligations.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Antique Gem is a collage by Jess comprised of eight fantastical scenes featuring the Cupid as its central protagonist. The title of the work and the oval shape of these scenes, refer to ancient engraved gems, a form of fine art dating back thousands of years B. C. Underneath each of the scenes we can also see lines from a poem, which the artist cut out of the book Gems: Selected from the Antique — a 1804 publication by British painter and illustrator Richard Dagley that is considered an important document for the study of engraved gems and a historical artifact itself. The original poem, as Dagley explains in the publication, is an ancient Greek epigram by Aulus Licinius Archias found engraved in a sardonyx (a variety of rock-forming mineral) gem depicting the figure of Cupid curbing a lion.

Photography (Photography)

Lieko Shiga’s photographs appear like dreamscapes. They gain much of their visual power from the unusual interplay between light and color, and the way in which her motifs often seem to defy physical laws such as gravity. She often photographs nocturnal landscapes that are both enchanted and haunted, invoking an emotionally and psychologically complex, contemporary inner landscape, as well as the ancient relations between mysticism, spirituality, and folklore, specifically invoking Japanese traditions and beliefs, while at the same time transforming them.

Photography (Photography)

Lieko Shiga’s photographs appear like dreamscapes. They gain much of their visual power from the unusual interplay between light and color, and the way in which her motifs often seem to defy physical laws such as gravity. She often photographs nocturnal landscapes that are both enchanted and haunted, invoking an emotionally and psychologically complex, contemporary inner landscape, as well as the ancient relations between mysticism, spirituality, and folklore, specifically invoking Japanese traditions and beliefs, while at the same time transforming them.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Greek mythology, Arachne was a talented mortal weaver who challenged Athena, goddess of wisdom and crafts, to a weaving contest; this hubris resulted in her being transformed into a spider. EE-0 is the first episode of the Europa Enterprise project which looks into new, feminist readings of established Eurocentric myths and reconsiders the meaning of cultural heritage and the production of artifacts for the future. In EE-0 , the Greek myth of Arachne is re-contextualized through a poetic script, taking an imaginative leap from antiquity into science fiction.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.

Painting (Painting)

His untitled paintings express his concern regarding perception in abstract form. Made with bleached denim, stock images of flames and gold leaf, these works embody “human cultures as ghosts.” The gold serves as a reminder of religious paintings, and the denim as emblematic of Western capitalist waste. When describing his paintings, the artist states, “The idea of what Painting is or could be became somehow akin to the image of the earth, as seen from above, from the viewpoint of a drone or a spirit.

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.

Painting (Painting)

Sahana Ramakrishnan’s work blends cultural influences, spanning a range of visual mythologies, she weaves together a tapestry of pop cultural references that are upended by the artist’s exploration of identity, sexuality and gender perspectives. Narrative journeys are central to myth, and Ramakrishnan’s own journey through culture, mythology and sexuality is echoed in the physical matter she uses to create her work. The artist embarks on Odyssean quests for her materials.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Transaction/Evacuation is a collaborative painting by Khadim Ali and Sher Ali, and is part of a larger collaborative body of works by the artists, which share the same title. Like Khadim Ali, Sher Ali is also part of the Hazara people, and experienced massive personal and social trauma early in life, losing his parents at the age of ten and witnessing the devastation of the Afghan Civil War in his native Kabul. The horned figure in the foreground represents Rustam, a legendary hero in Iranian mythology and central character in the Shahnameh, who depicted here by the artists as a potbellied demon, stripped away of its heroism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Resiliencia Tlacuache / Opossum Resilience by Naomi Ricón Gallardo is a fabulation in which four characters find themselves in temporalities that overlap Mesoamerican narratives about the creation of the world with the contemporary time of accumulation by dispossession. Together, they summon the powers of fire and joy so that the opossum conjures its ability to play dead and resuscitate in extractivist areas. The work reanimates Mesoamerican fables about time and territory where the four characters—Hill, Opossum, 9 Reed (Mixtec cave deity), and Agave/Mayahuel (Moon and Pulque Goddess)—create a space for conceptual intervention through performative action and popular music.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Marshal Tie Jia (Turtle Island) explores the history of a tiny island off of the coast of Matsu in the Taiwan Strait that has been instrumental in the geopolitical relationships between China, Taiwan, and Japan. The Chinese frog deity, Marshal Tie Jia, is now exiled to the island where he is still revered by the Taiwanese people. The installation includes documentation of the artist’s correspondence with the frog deity placed upon an altar, while the video explores both Marshal’s birthplace in China and his current home on Turtle Island.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In keeping with her mythological proclivity, Minotaur (2009) casts a new light on an old narrative. The film takes the ancient Greek story of the half-man, half-bull as its title subject, but at its core, Minotaur is an homage to pioneering modern dancer and choreographer, Anna Halprin. Along with Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer, Halprin’s fearless and lifelong dance practice paved the way for the evolution of modern and contemporary dance as we understand it today.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance. Dilapidated and empty, the ghostly presence of the car park comes to life. Beer composed the piece to resonate with this architecture, finding the frequencies that would bring the building to life, acting as a sound box and in effect another voice.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silhouette in the Graveyard is part of a suite of animated videos by Chitra Ganesh titled The Scorpion Gesture . All five videos incorporate figures and themes from Buddhist mythology and dialogue directly with artworks from the Rubin Museum, for which the videos were originally produced.? The central figure of Silhouette in the Graveyard is Maitreya, the Future Buddha, whose arrival on Earth was prophesied to usher in a new age.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva traveled to Japan for a month to make a series of short 16mm films, often shot in slow-motion. This film, shown in continuous loop, has a run-time of just under 3 minutes, and is presented without sound. It captures a traditional Shisa (combination of a dog and lion from Okinawan mythology) animated by an invisible person.

Installation (Installation)

wombmate! 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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Within the narrative of Sahej Rahal’s The rocks we will find, beings perform absurd acts in derelict corners of the city, emerging into the everyday as if from the cracks of our civilization, transforming them into liminal sites of ritual, and challenging ways in which we experience time and space. The temporal acts and their residue become primary motifs in his practice. The characters that inhabit these performances bare indices to different cultures, mythologies and pop culture.

Painting (Painting)

The work Timur Merah Project 2, the harbour of restless spirit is stretched out on a full cow’s hide, replicates the Kamasan Balinese painterly language that Citra Sasmita has developed in her recent works. It represents female figures, flames, and various natural elements, permutating whimsically in a narrative of pansexual energy. While rooted in mythological thinking, with specifically Hindu and Balinese references, the scenes are equally part of a contemporary process of imagining a secular and empowered mythology for a post-patriarchal future.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Miljohn Ruperto’s research-based multidisciplinary practice often deals with possession, re-enactment, mythology and archives. These conceptual throughlines also underpin Ruperto and Minnesota-based director Rini Yun Keagy’s eerie experimental documentary Ordinal (SW/NE) , which collapses mythology, scientific research, Californian agricultural history, American literature, and speculative fiction into a poetic and timely examination of possession, infection, and individual agency in an age of wanton industrial agriculture and alienation. Ordinal (SW/NE) tells the tale of a young Black man named Josiah as he navigates the banalities of daily life while potentially being possessed by a malignant supernatural force or stricken by valley fever, a little-known yet gruesome and sometimes lethal real-life respiratory illness which disproportionately affects farm and field workers, particularly Filipinos and African-Americans.

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The Wooden People is a 360º virtual reality film series comprising seven episodes. It is written and directed by artist Nao Bustamante and its cast includes notable Los Angeles-based artists Gabriela Ruiz, rafa esparza, San Cha, Markus Kuiland-Nazario, Ron Athey, and Dorian Wood. The work also features a musical and sound score by Nick Hallett and costumes by OLIMA.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La cabeza mató a todos or “The Head that Killed Everyone”, is a mixing of indigenous mythologies with present-day characters, geographies, and culture in Puerto Rico. The title refers to how a shooting star was (in local mythology) interpreted as a head without a body, crossing the sky, signaling the arrival of chaos and destruction. The actor in the video, Michelle Nonó, is in touch with native plants—she’s a medicinal botanist but also a cultural activist.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Taking its title from the eponymous mythological creature—famously featured as sea nymphs in Homer’s Odyssey. Sirens exist in literature across many cultures including Ancient Greece and India, described as part bird and part woman, or like a mermaid. They were said to charm men by their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to pieces.

Photography (Photography)

For his series of digital collages Excerpt (Sealed)… Rhodes appropriated multiple images from mass media and then sprayed an X on top of their glass and frame. This visual seal refers to the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 in which rescue workers spray painted the doors of the houses they searched giving the date, the team and the number of bodies found. Excerpt (Sealed) (Brown) is a multilayered collage with contradictory imagery—from New Orleans debris to the American eagle and a theater curtain.

Photography (Photography)

Composed of four images, the series Sleeping Elephant in the Axis of Yogyakarta (2011) explores the artist’s observation of how Javanese mythology and cosmology have marked the geography of Yogyakarta, the cultural centre of Indonesia. Through photomontage digital operation, an identical elephant is superimposed in front of iconic landmark of the city: Parangtritis Beach, Sultan Square, the City Monument and Mount Merapi. These four locations are spiritual symbols and the subject of cosmological beliefs in Indonesia and the imagery of elephant has long been considered as a cultural and religious icon.