Between 1951 and 1974, Dr. Albert M. Kligman, a professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, oversaw medical experiments conducted on incarcerated people at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. These nontherapeutic tests ranged from athlete’s foot powders, dandruff shampoos, deodorants, and detergents, as well as more hazardous materials such as dioxin, radioactive isotopes, and mind-altering psychotropics. During his tenure at Holmesburg, Dr. Kligman worked for companies such as Johnson & Johnson, developing the acne medicine Retin-A, and for Dow Chemical Company and the U. S. Department of Defence, testing the ‘tactical herbicide’ Agent Orange.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana. The forests were felled and immigrants from northern Bihar and South India were brought to exploit the mineral resources. The Indigenous people were then dispersed to live nomadically, engaging themselves as seasonal workers in farms and industries.
In the mid-1990s, Belli started to create soft sculptures that allowed her to reconnect with manual labor and sewing learned from her seamstress mother. Using recycled fabrics and objects collected from friends and second-hand stores in Nicaragua, Belli’s work explored the codification of family space—using dolls, tables, tablecloths, and curtains—making tangible how masculine authority is inscribed onto women’s bodies daily. Produced during her time as an MFA student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Diálogo is part of a group of sculptures that addresses the tension between restriction and agency, imprisonment and liberation, and ultimately, the possibilities and limits of human action in a society with deeply eroded democratic structures.
In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region. As the Yanomami do not have first names, it was necessary to give them numbers to indicate that they had already been vaccinated and identify each one for their medical records. From this series of events, Claudia Andujar’s Marcados series was born: what was supposed to be a mere photographic record, for organizational purposes, ended up raising a big question about the “labels” given to people in the construction of societies.
In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region. As the Yanomami do not have first names, it was necessary to give them numbers to indicate that they had already been vaccinated and identify each one for their medical records. From this series of events, Claudia Andujar’s Marcados series was born: what was supposed to be a mere photographic record, for organizational purposes, ended up raising a big question about the “labels” given to people in the construction of societies.
Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure. The courtroom as a space for the implementation of justice and of legal argumentation, but also through which different affective forces, some hegemonic and others marginalized, battle each other out in their respective quests for acknowledgment, accountability, and retribution. The work was produced at a time during which several popular revolts, such as in Egypt, seemed to have effectively been hijacked by reactionary forces, resulting in the violent dismissal of collective demands for emancipation, including through sham trials and wrongful convictions criminalizing activists, journalists, and protesters.
In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region. As the Yanomami do not have first names, it was necessary to give them numbers to indicate that they had already been vaccinated and identify each one for their medical records. From this series of events, Claudia Andujar’s Marcados series was born: what was supposed to be a mere photographic record, for organizational purposes, ended up raising a big question about the “labels” given to people in the construction of societies.
Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana. The forests were felled and immigrants from northern Bihar and South India were brought to exploit the mineral resources. The Indigenous people were then dispersed to live nomadically, engaging themselves as seasonal workers in farms and industries.
Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure. The courtroom as a space for the implementation of justice and of legal argumentation, but also through which different affective forces, some hegemonic and others marginalized, battle each other out in their respective quests for acknowledgment, accountability, and retribution. The work was produced at a time during which several popular revolts, such as in Egypt, seemed to have effectively been hijacked by reactionary forces, resulting in the violent dismissal of collective demands for emancipation, including through sham trials and wrongful convictions criminalizing activists, journalists, and protesters.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Study of History IV by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949. Wentzel’s original color photographs document the transportation of a Mercedes Benz, carried on a wood armature by sixty porters, over a rocky trail from Bhimphedi to Kathmandu in Nepal. At the time of Wentzel’s photographs, paved roads in Nepal only existed within the Kathmandu Valley and cars had to be carried into the city from the surrounding hills on foot.
Joe Namy’s Half Blue is an installation consisting of a video, a sound, and a sculpture, that triangulates a personal experience of the artist’s cousin Khalid Jabara, who was murdered by hate crime in Tulsa, Oklahoma, U. S. A in 2016. An event that garnered international attention, Jabara’s murder led to the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act passed by US Congress in 2021. The act was named after Jabara and Heather Heyer, two hate crime victims whose murders were prosecuted as hate crimes but not reported in hate crime statistics.
In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers. Danielle Dean’s work True Red examines how a large corporation co-opted a historical fiction (the vampire), in addition to the traditional red and black colors of radical politics and the avant-garde. The animated video considers how capitalism can gentrify notions of radicality and the mutable nature of advertising.
Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey. At once attractive and repulsive, the sculpture combines objects of adornment with what appears to be viscera. The sculpture’s curious delicacy evokes a ritualistic catharsis, in response to persistent forms of medical racial violence and objectification for Black people in America and around the world.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate. The form used for this drawing details a weekly menu for the prisoners. Hough’s drawing depicts three grimacing figures, riding atop the back of a larger, female figure on all fours.
The series The Memory of Trees is specifically about trees, and what trees have witnessed in South Africa: for example, trees that were used as locations for slave trading, or trees that was during the anti-Apartheid struggle as a kind of identifier for a safe house for activists who were fleeing from security forces. Trees and plants are connected and embedded in history; but not only as witnesses and onlookers; Orlow tries to think about plants as active agents in history. This perspective allows for an oblique view of history especially when it comes to specific loci of violence such as in South Africa.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
The Blue Poisoning series , reveals the outcome of artist Tirdad Hashemi’s weary and depressed days in the winter of 2022, following their second migration from Paris to Berlin. The color blue expresses the feelings of sadness and loneliness felt by the artist in the frozen Berlin cold. In the drawing, lonely and tormented bodies seem to struggle to live; despite their suffering, they still hope.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate. This drawing uses a pink form on which an inmate can list telephone contacts for approval. The drawing depicts two uniformed figures, with backwards feet, berating a figure on a toilet.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
This screen-print by Dread Scott titled Imagine a World Without America shows a map without the landmass that is the USA, as if the continents have drifted, or as if it never existed in the first place. Artist Dread Scott’s work is founded upon challenging “American patriotism as a unifying value,” and as such he claims that it is necessary to “burn the US Constitution (an outmoded impediment to freedom), and position the police as successors to lynch mob terror.” Perhaps one must imagine a structurally different world to produce new and freer modes of thought. While not explicitly related to Afro-Futurism, one of the key sub-genres of science-fiction and related thought is speculative revisionism; asking ‘how would the world be different if X never happened?” This modest work is a call to our daily imaginary, an invitation to zoom out to the scale of the global human condition, and implicitly America’s role in trade, war, cultural exchange, and the spread of western values.
Too Many Names by Troy Chew is a patchwork of contemporary Black culture and resistance, including hand-sewn symbols and patterns found in the coats of arms of the kings of the Dahomey region (now Benin) that ruled from 1600-1900. This painting is part of the series Out the Mud, a longterm project in which the artist explores African American history through the lens of traditional mudcloth techniques found in the West African countries involved in the Transatlantic-slave trade. The title of the series references the technique and materials for making mudcloth.
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.
This year: missing witness by Brook Andrew consists of a multi-layered collage of photographs. The work features newspaper cut-outs of the phrases: “This year: be prepared…” and “missing witness” overlaid onto a disaster scene, upon a worn-up manuscript. Pulled from The New York Times , the image is of a destroyed temple on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, that has increasingly experienced natural disasters due to climate change.
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat. The flames surround him eroding the extremity of the bat. The delicate sculpture refers to the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on June 16th 1963, in reaction to the discrimination and the repressive politics of the Diem Catholic regime (regime installed by the Americans) towards the Buddhists.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago. They were Christians and pagans that were often oppressed by the majority Muslims in the Riau community and were eventually forced to convert to Islam. Zai conveyed this history in Converting through the stark contrasts of red, white, black.
“These are negatives that were scratched because of a jealous husband from the Baqari family, who never let his wife out by herself. He was upset to know that she came to be photographed in my studio without telling him. He came asking for the negatives.
The installation “East Side Story” is based on events that took place in the streets of Belgrade in 2001 and Zagreb in 2002, during the Gay Pride demonstrations, where the participants were the victims of verbal and physical injury by neo-Nazi groups and other citizens. This work is composed of two projections: the first uses television images of the demonstrations while the second is the reconstitution of the events performed by dancers. This piece witnesses nationalism at work in society, aiming particularly at the “internal enemy that sexual minorities might represent”.
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors. The artwork belongs to Yee’s series Picturing Power (2013) that deals with the destabilizing impacts of neo-colonialism and globalization on Southeast Asia’s history. Yee approaches the aesthetics and politics of the ethnographic gaze with both irony and humanity, challenging the modes of seeing inherent to the British colonization of Malaysia.
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.
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s story follows a poverty-stricken family during the German depression, as the central character, Frau Hausmann, is forced to impersonate her late husband to procure his job as a nightwatchman to support her two children. Despite her exceptional performance during the job, and even after receiving public commendation for catching a thief, when eventually her identity is discovered during a factory accident she is forced into a precarious existence where she resorts to selling herself to get by.
Part of the Indigenous Tamsaling community in Nepal, Subas Tamang comes from a family of traditional stone carvers...
Claudia Andujar was born in Switzerland in 1931, and then moved to Oradea, on the border between Romania and Hungary, where her paternal family, of Jewish origin, lived...
Working in ballpoint pen, pencil, and watercolor, often on the backs of bureaucratic prison forms, James “Yaya” Hough’s work conveys the burdens of incarcerated life, revealing not only the brutal reach of the carceral system, but laying bare its affects...
Birender Kumar Yadav is a multi-disciplinary artist who experiments with various media including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, etching, found and man-made objects, as well as live documentary...
Artist Zhou Tao has a diverse and varied practice, and notably, he denies the existence of any singular or real narrative or space...
Leaving Iran in 2017, Tirdad Hashemi now cultivates perpetual movement, between their hometown of Tehran, Istanbul, Paris, and Berlin...
Mona Marzouk is an artist whose practice is deeply rooted in a keen sense for architecture...
Inescapably political, Apostolos Georgiou’s paintings are realized by bold and mastered brush strokes...
Brook Andrew is a Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal Aboriginal Australian artist and scholar whose interdisciplinary practice examines hegemonic narratives relating to colonialism and modernism...
Born in 1965 in Mbouda (Cameroun), Goddy Leye was an artist, a teacher, a cultural activist and a curator based in Douala (Cameroun)...
Artist and musician Joe Namy’s practice encompasses sound, its history, and impact on the built environment...
Doreen Lynette Garner’s practice examines the histories and enduring effects of racial violence in the United States...
Sharif Waked is a Palestinian artist who’s work enages with with Islamic culture and history, and its interaction with the Israeli occupation and hegemonic Jewish culture in Palestine...
Ashmina Ranjit is Nepal’s leading figure in the conceptual and performance fields, as well as an emblematic voice in South Asian feminist art making and activism...
Drawing from literature, plays, and historical events, Mary Reid Kelley makes rambunctious videos that explore the condition of women throughout history...
Through her films, photographs and video installations, Clarisse Hahn continues a documentary research on communities, behavioral codes and the social role of the body...
Danielle Dean creates videos that use appropriated language from archives of advertisements, political speeches, newscasts, and pop culture to create dialogues to investigate capitalism, post-colonialism, and patriarchy...
In his research-based and process-oriented practice Uriel Orlow’s work is concerned with “spatial manifestations of memory, blind spots of representation and forms of haunting”...
In order to reveal and critique hegemonic structures of power, Daniela Ortiz constructs visual narratives that examine concepts such as nationality, racialization, and social class...
Working with both still and moving images, Danaya Chulphuthiphong is an activist and filmmaker whose work sheds light on social realities in Thailand...
Carolyn Lazard’s practice centers disability and accessibility through sculpture, video, installation, and performance...
Spanning painting, drawing, and sculpture, Troy Chew’s practice reflects on the legacy of the African diaspora through the lens of urban culture...
“These are negatives that were scratched because of a jealous husband from the Baqari family, who never let his wife out by herself...
In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region...
In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region...
In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region...
In 1980, with the construction of highways in Indigenous territories, an epidemic was brought to the Yanomami region...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...
In the mid-1990s, Belli started to create soft sculptures that allowed her to reconnect with manual labor and sewing learned from her seamstress mother...
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...
Drawing & Print
This screen-print by Dread Scott titled Imagine a World Without America shows a map without the landmass that is the USA, as if the continents have drifted, or as if it never existed in the first place...
In Goddy Leye’s installation work The Beautiful Beast , a video is projected onto a gold-colored wooden box filled with sesame seeds...
Prisons is part of a series of videos, entitled Our Body is a Weapon , representing individuals who affirm the body as a place of political and social resistance...
This work presents the image of an immolated monk engraved on a baseball bat...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
The installation “East Side Story” is based on events that took place in the streets of Belgrade in 2001 and Zagreb in 2002, during the Gay Pride demonstrations, where the participants were the victims of verbal and physical injury by neo-Nazi groups and other citizens...
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...
Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure...
Drawing & Print
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
Trayvon is a series of acrylic paintings by Mona Marzouk that engages the courtroom as its points of departure...
Drawing & Print
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Drawing & Print
Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana...
Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression...
Drawing & Print
This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate...
In 2003, Nike released a pair of red and black sneakers (the Dunk Low Pro SB ) that were marketed as “vampire” sneakers...
Drawing & Print
This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate...
Birender Kumar Yadav comes from Dhanbad, India, a city built on its proximity of iron ore and coal and once forested and inhabited by Indigenous people who compose the Gondwana...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
The series The Memory of Trees is specifically about trees, and what trees have witnessed in South Africa: for example, trees that were used as locations for slave trading, or trees that was during the anti-Apartheid struggle as a kind of identifier for a safe house for activists who were fleeing from security forces...
Drawing & Print
This untitled ink and pencil drawing by James “Yaya” Hough is made on what the artist calls “institutional paper”, or the state-issued forms that monitor the daily activities of prisoners, of which, each detainee is generally required to fill out in triplicate...
The film Demos by Danaya Chulphuthiphong draws parallels between zoo animals and humans through an assemblage of footage and images collected from various news and science websites...
Known But to God: The Dug Up, Dissected, and Disposed for the Sake of Medicine by Doreen Lynnette Garner is a small, suspended sculpture composed of glass, silicone, steel, epoxy putty, pearls, Swarovski crystals, and whiskey...
Drawing & Print
Study of History IV by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949...
Drawing & Print
Study of History III by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949...
Drawing & Print
Study of History V by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949...
Diego Bianchi’s main concern is distorting straight lines, both literally and metaphorically...
This year: missing witness by Brook Andrew consists of a multi-layered collage of photographs...
Drawing & Print
Study of History VI by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949...
While most of Ashmina Ranjit’s work has been large-scale installations, often immersive and site-specific, the series Hair Warp – Travel Through Strand of Universe is a brilliant concentration of both her beliefs and aesthetic...
Drawing & Print
Masiniya Matawali by Subas Tamang is an etching and aquatint print based on photographs taken by German photographer Volkmar Wentzel in 1949...
The Rebellion of Roots by Daniela Ortiz depicts a series of situations in which tropical plants, held hostage in the botanical gardens and greenhouses of Europe, are protected and nurtured by the spirits of racialized people who died as a result of European racism...
Drawing & Print
The Blue Poisoning series , reveals the outcome of artist Tirdad Hashemi’s weary and depressed days in the winter of 2022, following their second migration from Paris to Berlin...
This untitled painting by Tirdad Hasemi presents a space that can be thought of as both a prison cell and a house...