Painting (Painting)

Vivian Suter paints her canvases and then allows them to come in contact with natural elements. For thirty years she has lived in isolation in the Guatemalan jungle, accumulating canvases, sometimes leaving them out for long periods of time. As a result, Suter does not title or date her paintings.

Photography (Photography)

Zhou Tao spent almost two years in 2017 and 2018 in an eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains in China exploring the activities of humans and other species in that particular topography between the mountain, the land and the desert. From the discovery of ancient desert villages to the billions of black chickens that will be raised under the snow-covered Kunlun Mountains, the resulting film and the photographs capture the climate and landscape, listening to the desert’s chanting and whispering, while attempting to construct a unique topology. Shot during the film production, the accompanying stunning photograph Winter North Summer South No.

Photography (Photography)

Zhou Tao spent almost two years in 2017 and 2018 in an eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains in China exploring the activities of humans and other species in that particular topography between the mountain, the land and the desert. From the discovery of ancient desert villages to the billions of black chickens that will be raised under the snow-covered Kunlun Mountains, the resulting film and the photographs capture the climate and landscape, listening to the desert’s chanting and whispering, while attempting to construct a unique topology. Shot during the film production, the accompanying stunning photograph Winter North Summer South No.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Cluster Illusion examines the brain’s tendency to recognize a pattern as something abstract. Rather than seeing the distinct dots of which the images are composed, our brains turn these dots into illusory clouds. This series is a study of human vision and a commentary on the human urge to find shapes and patterns in anything, giving coherence to the whole.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Anne Imhof’s video work Untitled (Wave) creates resonances between the feminine, adoration, and immateriality, while also referring to the history of art and aesthetics, in particular the concept of the sublime. Starring Imhof’s partner and collaborator Eliza Douglas, the film depicts a woman, naked from the waist up, dressed simply in tracksuit trousers, long black hair, feet dipped in the ocean water. The woman bears a long whip, while she looks out at the horizon and the waves lick at her bare feet.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

dawn chorus ii: el niagara en bicicleta is a work produced in Sofía Córdova native Puerto Rico and was largely shaped by the financial crisis, the islands’ histories under colonial rule and most recently, the climate-change related natural disasters which have affected the island. The latest of which, hurricane Maria, and the subsequent political mishandling of the situation, gave the project its ending. Prior to the hurricane, this work also engaged in conversation with blackness and anti-blackness in the Caribbean, syncretic religion and dance music as modes of survival and liberation, and fantasy and science-fictional strategies as means to break out of our current arc of history.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Full title of the work: Grain par Grain, sur le parterre humide et fissuré. Érosion sévère, graine, ma cote. Où est la manne, semence de l’antiquité.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gary-Ross Pastrana’s video installation Rewilding consists of three large-scale projections placed across the exhibition space. The poetic footage filmed by the artist portrays three interconnected worlds: a colony of termites; a piano repair workshop in the outskirts of Manila; and an empty concert theatre. Their interconnectivity is shaped by the voice-over of three narrators: a musician discussing the balance between order and chaos found in classical music; a piano repairman describing termite infestations in an instrument of European origin; and a scientist describing the unique social structures of this tropical parasite.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Jet Folder & Data Tree (2013) offers a humorous take on how computer and screen-based technologies affect our relationship to the natural world. In a statement through his gallery, Gallery Yang, Lin remarks that “one day in 2010, I discovered that the folders in my computer began talking to me. So I created lots of empty folders with no content but name.” Lin’s print, by extension, functions as a collage in which screen-based media becomes part of the natural world, and vice versa.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

After Reality is a video by Zhou Tao, which was born out of his residency with the Kadist Foundation in Paris in 2012-13. Prior to arriving to the residency, the artist had begun filming in in Guangzhou, China, capturing footage of the lush vegetation from the semi-wild and semi-urbanized zones of Guangzhou’s urban fringe and a group of Dragon Boat rowers training in the adjacent river. As he arrived in Paris, he was confronted with the radical difference with which Europeans arrange and organize environments: the highly manicured cityscapes of Paris in stark contrast with the overgrown abundance of Guangzhou.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread. The work is self-supporting and stands in a crack or a hole in the floor. The work suggests precariousness, frailty as well as humanity through its verticality, and its gentle sinuous form, referencing perhaps the work of Giacometti.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

This anarchist flag is made from Huayruro seeds, a native plant of South and Central American tropical areas. In some cases, the Huayruro seeds are used in the preparation of psychotropic plants such as Ayahuasca (Tohé). These plants occupy a central place in Amazon biopolitics.

Installation (Installation)

In the hologram “Mano con hojas” (”Hand with Leaves”, 2013), nature is portrayed simultaneously as an interconnected system of processes and the essence of the universe. A change in the understanding of nature challenges the understanding of our own natures. The visual metaphor of the human hand enmeshed and inextricably entangled with leaves suggests that humans cannot be divorced from nature, and moreover that they are always engaging with the problematic of overtaking nature or being overtaken by it.

Installation (Installation)

Descent into the Fungal is a two-channel video and a sculptural installation. The mushroom / sculptural element is site-specific and is grown from readymade mushroom blocks sold by mushroom farmers. They are given two weeks to mature and follow their natural cycle, bringing the natural element directly into the white cube.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In conjunction with KADIST’s 2017 exhibition If Not Apollo, the Breeze , artist and filmmaker Lynn Marie Kirby performed Transmissions , a video and live reading created with longtime collaborator Etel Adnan. Inspired by time spent together in Paris, the piece incorporated open-ended conversation about the oracle, Mount Tamalpais (a subject of long-standing fascination for Adnan and the subject of hundreds of works), and a suite of collaborative drawings. The drawings, made in India ink and created spontaneously, are remarkable evidence of two lives, minds, and hands in dialogue.

Painting (Painting)

In the painting called “The Consciousness of Memory, Time, and Guilt” as in many of her recent works, the body is fragmented. The brain, the ear, the eyes, these body parts that put us in relation with the other and link the visible to the invisible, remain isolated. Whereas the skulls are joined by lines evoking rivers.

Photography (Photography)

To the Cardinal Gods: Central Axial Consecration (Site 6) is from a 2017 series made by Ren Zi during a residency in the Arctic Circle. The work reflects upon the serious ecological issues we face today. During the residency Ren Zi was joined by other artists, scientists, architects and educators exploring the high-Arctic Svalbard Archipelago in an interdisciplinary and collaborative endeavour to create work addressing such issues.

Installation (Installation)

Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr. Martin Hauser, Senior Insect Biosystematist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, and longtime acquaintance of the artist. In Villa Dei Fiori, September to November, Zhao Renhui tracked and collected multiple insects within the everyday urban environment, either finding the insects dead or following them around for few days.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth. As the camera fades to black, the viewer hears the repeated sound of a shovel striking dirt. The camera fades back to the clearing and zooms in on a shirtless man digging up the ground.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Monteverdi Ici by Laure Prouvost is a non-narrative video work that depicts the back of the artist’s naked body standing, with her back towards the camera in a field. Her bare arms gesture outwards and forwards, as if her movements are influencing the wild flowers billowing in the foreground. Alternating between the artist’s body and imagery of leaves, flowers, cats, and caterpillars, Prouvost speaks directly to the viewer, stating: “The world behind that field would be here, the world would enter through here”.

Photography (Photography)

Half Dome Hough Transform by Trevor Paglen merges traditional American landscape photography (sometimes referred as ‘frontier photography’ for sites located in the American West) with artificial intelligence and other technological advances such as computer vision. This photograph was taken at Half Dome, a frequently visited granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park, California. For this work, Paglen created a digital file of the 8 x 10 inch photographic negative so that the artificial intelligence program can apply computer vision to evaluate the content of the image.

Textile (Textile)

Monteverdi Ici – Deeply, Feeling Filling the World by Laure Prouvost is a tapestry that references a video by the artist entitled Monteverdi Ici (2018). Both artworks feature a woman’s naked body as a central visual element. In the video, the woman’s body is outdoors, with her back to the camera, moving her arms gently through the surrounding flowers.

Painting (Painting)

Human Quarry is a large work on paper by Leslie Shows made of a combination of acrylic paint and collage. Both through its title and formally—through how the shapes in the composition resemble a mountain or natural formation—the piece relays us to a mineral quarry or a deep mining pit where materials are extracted. Interspersed among the block-like figures and rocky textures, we also see several human silhouettes, either cut-out, or as if they were whited out by a shining light, or lost in the shadows.

Photography (Photography)

The lengthy titles in Chen Xiaoyun’s work often appear as colophons to his photographs that invite the viewer to a process of self realization through contemplating the distance between word and image. Near his studio, Chen often walks over fallen branches in late autumn and sense their existence. Thus, his placing them in diverse contexts builds a “narrative Ariadne’s thread” where the branches become “the language of things” intertextually cohering his oeuvre.

Photography (Photography)

Untitled is a black-and-white photograph of a wave just before it breaks as seen from the distance of an overlook. Donnelly’s interest in the waveform–visually, aurally, and perceptually–is made manifest in works across multiple media, including photography, drawing, video, sculpture, and performance.

Photography (Photography)

Arms & Legs (Specif. Elbows & Knees), etc. : Arm (with Bottle) belongs to Baldessari’s most recent series of paintings in which the artist brings together photographic, painted, and three-dimensional elements, to juxtapose unlikely body fragments such as noses and ears, elbows and knees, or eyebrows and foreheads.