Film & Video (Film & Video)

Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbass region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbass region, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war.

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.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Sofía Córdova’s film dawn_chorusiii: the fruit they don’t have here / coro_del_albaiii: la fruta que no tienen aquí weaves together six California migration stories that resist dominant social narratives that flatten the experience of migrants. Though each woman’s story is based on interviews conducted by Córdova through voice memos or phone calls, the women’s lines in the film are reinterpreted and altered by the artist as a gesture that affords them opacity and relative anonymity. The opening sequence begins with four of the women looking into the camera, reciting a poem about the transition from winter to spring in Spanish and Mandarin: the birds dropping seeds they brought from afar, planting saplings that grow into trees bearing the fruit they don’t have in their new homes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace takes its title from a 1967 poem by American writer Richard Brautigan, which describes a utopian future where computers are in harmony with and protective of mankind and nature, performing all the necessary work while we retreat back towards nature. In Sisto’s work, a computer generated voice recites Brautigan’s poem while a series of digitally rendered 3D objects with a sleek, mirrored finish, float weightlessly across the screen. Sisto’s work also shares its title with the 2011 BBC documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis, which has the view that computers have failed in their task of liberating humanity and have instead created a simplified and distorted world around us.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Polanszky’s sculpture is made from raw, found materials that have the patina of age. He brings together disparate material discarded by society to form aggregates. Although it is not his intention to make works of meaning the viewer endows them with poetic meanings and constructs.

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.

Textile (Textile)

A Year · Marx by Liu Ding consists of a piece of silk onto which a poem about Marx is printed using inkjet. The work is part of the silk inkjet series A Year, which features political poems from Pine Trees on the Square , a series that Liu Ding wrote for the 2015 Istanbul Biennial. The year 2015 marked a critical political juncture for China, orchestrated by its current leadership and centered around propositions for nationalism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

biarritzzz is interested in how the development of the internet, and experimentation in the virtual world happens simultaneously with the experimentation in the material world of the human species; and how these developments reflect the precariousness of life within neoliberalism. The title of their video work Mandacura is a corruptela (a linguistic distortion on writing or pronunciation) of the Portuguese sentence Mão da Cura (Healing Hand), distorting Portuguese into what sounds as Brazilian Afro-Indigenous. Inspired by and using the music and poetry of Alberto Marques, and drawing sources from archival images, webcam videos, screenshots, gifs and memes, the video asks: What provokes our feelings toward society, history, culture, and the future?

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

The virtual reality work Aquaphobia by Jakob Kudsk Steensen examines it’s title subject matter – the fear of water. Inspired by psychology studies used to treat aquaphobia, the work employs VR technology to merge imagery of past and future geological landscapes, as well as external ecosystems with internal psychoscapes. Steensen mobilizes the visual exploration of the fear of water to transform viewer’s perceptions on water-related climate change, such as rising water levels.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom. This composition is stuck to a metal plate by a series of button magnets, with interjecting phrases on them. The juxtaposition between the mysogynistic, almost puritan poetry that stripes across the bottom and the powerful crouching pose that the femme demon assumes inverts the hegemonic text , instead creating a space of alterity.