Sculpture (Sculpture)

Naama Tsabar’s sculptural works are developed serially. The series Work on Felt references the history of post-minimal sculpture: from Robert Morris to Joseph Beuys’s social sculptures. However one can equally relate her work to 1970s conceptual performers such as Terry Fox or Paul Kos.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Facing one another, each projection screen of the work Food Fight respectively features Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris preparing multi-course meals at a kitchen counter. As the artists dice, mix and plate meals, they begin throwing food at each other—the scene rapidly turning into a battlefield made of food projectiles, broken glasses, and dirty settings. Disruptive, playful, and aggressive, the protagonists’ actions fuse the spontaneity and innocence of children’s games with the force and reality of adults.

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.

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)

Something Other Than What You Are by Camel Collective is formed by two works: a multi-channel video installation with controlled lighting, and a single-channel version with stereo sound. In both works, the 36 minute video depicts a narrative taking place outside of a live theater performance in the form of monologues that moves between the production and technical crew. There is a set of three different characters—a lighting technician, a lighting designer, and a professor all played by the same actress who share in their personal experiences and attitudes the precariousness of their work, the problems and myths of collaboration, and the obsolescence of theatrical technology.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ein Ding Mehr , or ‘one more thing,’ is part of a long-term collaborative performance series by artists Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam, which consist of the pair embodying an array of material through holding various poses for extended periods of time. As the artists perform each gesture, we see them gaze on the preparatory drawings, which act as an instructional score of sorts. The drawing itself, besides featuring carefully drawn sketches of each position, also contains a list of the source material that inspired them: a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, Salo, Eugène Delacroix’s Pietà, and a reference to a monument by Auguste Rodin among others.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia (Colombian Satellite Space Center) , Calderón & Piñeros (La Decanatura) play tribute to two “stunning” satellite antennas installed in the small municipality of Chocontá where, in 1970, the Space Communications Center of Colombia was inaugurated. That same year, the first antenna, responsible for the transmission (via microwave) of radio and telephone signals was put in place and eleven years later, the second antenna or Ground Station for International Communications would complete the complex known as Space Communications Center. Excursions to visit what became known as the “Satellite City of Colombia” were common for decades.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sung Hwan Kim created the drawing push against the air 01 during a rehearsal for his eponymous 2007 performance at De Apple (as part of Prix de Rome), Amsterdam, and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. For the performance, Kim interviews his frequent collaborator David Michael DiGregorio and a fellow musician, Byungjun Kwon, about love songs they have composed. The performance appears spontaneous and creates a space of vulnerability and intimacy, however in reality, the three rehearsed the performance numerous times and performed it in numerous cities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Images is a two channel video work addressing the relationship between art and ritual. On the left side, the artist is filmed in a sparse, red room with his tongue nailed onto a red table. With Lim’s freedom of movement and speech limited, the viewer focuses on the facial expressions of the artist as different streams of thoughts and realizations enter his mind.

Painting (Painting)

The installation Self Tracking (the five stages of grief) was realized from a performance that is to be re-activated. One of the rows in the piece corresponds to the artist’s metabolism data, another to the artist’s ranking data in Artfacts.net and the data of the World Trusted Currency Authority on the exchange rate of the pound sterling against the euro between 2012 and 2016. There is an interposing orange line, a trace of self-tanning lotion that signals the presence of the body.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the seminal video Workout , Kanis looks at the phenomenon of exercise in public space—specifically aerobics exercises in parks around Moscow today—as a broader lens for thinking about generational change. She leads a local group of participants through a work-shopped sequence of aerobics and marching. Each participant moves steadily and confidently in unison.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

For the two-channel work Asking the Repentistas – Peneira & Sonhador – to remix my octopus works Shimabuku asked two Brazilian street singers to compose a ballad about his previous works with octopi (in which he created traditional Japanese ceramic vessels to catch octopi, with a fisherman who took him on his boat to test them out as we can see on one of the channel). In the Brazilian singers’ ballad, Shimabuku is transformed into a fisherman, the greatest fisherman in Japan, but a kindly fisherman who returns his catch to the sea. The artwork thus becomes facilitator for an interaction between different cultures and interpretations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ones Who Looked at The Presence

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Following Bruce Nauman’s seminal performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967) – which sees the artist carefully trace a small delimited area of his studio exaggerating the movements of his hips as he places one foot in front of the other – Idir reproduces these performative gestures in Algiers, Algeria. Idir continues the artist’s previous work on ‘hittistes’, which translates as someone who spends their day with their back to the wall, the city’s unemployed and the gestures proper to them. In collaboration with cinematographer Babette Mangolte, Carole Douillard’s performance takes place across three emblematic sites within the city: Bab El Oued, Les Sablettes and Diar Es Saâda.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), Reid Kelley transported her heroine to the French demimonde. The film centers on a pregnant Parisian prostitute who exemplifies Baudelaire’s paean to the superiority of cosmetic over natural beauty. With sets that shift between Sisyphus’s boudoir and the streets of Paris, the work is an antic romp through Revolutionary and post Revolutionary France, with brief vignettes involving everyone from Diderot, Marie Antoinette, and Marat to Robespierre, Napoleon, and Haussmann.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

El Contorno (Outlines) is a three-channel video installation that features five actors performing a script—at times individually and at times in unison—choreographically moving across an indistinct urban space. As the view shifts from one performer to another we notice that they are all in close proximity and that the feed from all three channels was simultaneously filmed. The scene unravels with actors moving in and out of view in an elaborate negotiation between their bodies and the camera’s movements.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist writes about her work: “There is an endless desire to know what we look like from outer space and many of us have evolved into a species that exists across the disorienting spaces and timeframes of virtuality. Within my current work, dance and simple movement scores act as a language for simultaneously collecting, mapping and producing volumes of information and knowledge. Moving makes a map and performing is observation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present. Developed from a literary work, it deconstructs notions of narrative forms, styles and conventions. It is a hybrid piece, an example of the elasticity of the medium.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda remake a clip from the 1970s they found on the internet, and without really changing this archive material, displace it by imitating the staging and the acting with scrupulous precision. The slightest details are reproduced identically with great minutiae. The facial expressions are absurd, the prim attitude makes no sense.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Erratum: Brief Interruptions in the Waste Stream exists as performance, sculpture, drawing, video and the printed word. In a short video the two artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine transform a porcelain toilet into bricks in four movements. In quite brutal actions, they use sledgehammers to smash the toilet into small shards that are then reshaped to form a stack of bricks.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Untitled” is inspired by the movie “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands playing the role of a fallen woman, anguished by her distressed life. In the film, we witness the drama of a blended family, heightened by adultery and finally murder. For the film’s decor, Cytter, instead of filming a domestic interior, uses a theater stage, a place of representation by excellence.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silver & Gold combines video, performance, and original costumes into a self-proclaimed “filmformance” that evokes the legendary filmmaker Jack Smith and his tribute to 1940s Dominican movie starlet Maria Montez in a magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen. Taking Smith’s interest in Hollywood’s obsession with the reproduction of the exotic as a point of departure, Bustamante embodies Miss Montez. Here, video and the body function as both material and subject in her bizarre search for the new bejeweled body part that is at once her curse and oracle.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“A man wanders near the windows of a gallery, situated adjacent to the street. He occasionally gazes through windows into the gallery but never enters.” Passersby are numerous since these windows are by a tram stop on a busy street. It is surprising to note how few of them take any notice of this man peering repeatedly through the slightly tinted glass into an empty meeting room with no distinctive signs to be seen.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pixelated Revolution is a lecture-performance by artist Rabih Mroué about the use of mobile phones during the Syrian revolution. The lecture looks at the central role that the photographs taken with these devices played in informing and mobilizing people during the revolutionary events, due to their ability to be shared and spread through virtual and viral communication platforms.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Landscape for fire is a major work by Anthony McCall. The film recounts a performance where characters in white, light up fires in a very orchestrated choreography of lights in a vast flat landscape. The performance is carefully planned – the fires are lit and geometrically aligned in a precise temporal progression.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Turtle Walk is a video installation that documents two performers carrying large white disks on their backs as they walk through the urban environment of Seoul. The simple disks disrupt normal social behaviors in urban space, acting like parabolic antennae that cause the performers to interact and communicate unusually with their surroundings. The performance causes viewers to reflect on their expectations for normal behaviors within the social space of the city.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame. Twelve characters (amateur actors hired by the artist) appear in black-and-white in highly stylized surroundings wearing patterned cloths. The identities or time period of the characters, all deprived of languages, are impossible to determine.

Photography (Photography)

For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied. Against a bare white background, the men appear unexpectedly vulnerable, caught between performance and rehearsal, public and private. While they present themselves deliberately as exemplars of strength, they also inadvertently expose something about the value system that underlies their endeavors—whatever drove them to keep building by tearing tissue, and whatever makes flexing feel like the most honest pose possible.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site. Here, Tanaka has spread out various objects he collected throughout the city of Guangzhou. By fiddling with a window frame, water buckets, plastic bags, cardboard, soda bottles, and many other things, Tanaka creates fragile, temporary sculptures.