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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In 2019, Ayoung Kim traveled to Mongolia to research its widespread animistic belief system towards land, mother rock, stones, and sacred caves that purify human guilt. The Mongolian people’s belief that rocks and minerals are alive, like other natural elements, consider the particular origin myth that human beings were born from stones. For the video work Petrogenesis, Petra Genetrix Kim creates her own hyperbolic mythology connected to the origin of the fictional mineral genderless Petra Genetrix, a figure who also appears in other recent works by the artist.

Photography (Photography)

This early photographic work by Fre?de?ric Nauczyciel, titled Untitled (Boîte à prière, Istanbul, Novembre 2005) , features a young man in religious attire reading a religious text from inside a glass prayer box. Seemingly truncated by the shadows cast upon his seated position, the man is dramatically illuminated by a white neon light above. The harsh synthetic light reflects off of the man’s white robe and the glass box to create a haunting, artificial glow.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

font VII by Catalina Ouyang is part of an ongoing series of ‘fonts’, or sculptures, inspired by Catholic holy water vessels. This particular iteration from the series combines hand-carved soapstone, a stop loss trap, horse hair, fermented egg, and other elements to create an artwork that defies categorization. The work’s most notable feature is a small cavity that cradles a naked egg—a translucent, flaccid egg without its outer shell.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Three men with their backs to each other, dressed similarly in dark colors, stare straight at the camera. They individually deliver sacred lines from the Torah, New Testament, and Qur’an in their representative languages: Old Hebrew, Greek, and Old Arabic. As the camera slowly rotates around the trio, the men begin to perform traditional manifestations of each religious cult: Torah Cantillations, Gregorian Chants, and tilawat of Al-Qur’an.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Yo Daham has been knitting, which he initially took up as a daily pastime, to produce objects that function as an incense burner by releasing smoke. His questioning of the nature of matter led to this unusual combination of knitting (typically considered a form of two-dimensional weaving) and an incense burner (an object traditionally used in rituals). Knitting is an act that requires unwinding a spool infinitely wrapped with thread and determining the form by applying force and pressure.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Erin Jane Nelson’s 2019 body of work Av, panels are covered in collaged images and shellacked with resin or epoxy: photographs of plants intermingle with pictures of men and women engaging in various spiritual activities, cartoons of mothers and their children, or black and white images of window panes. The panels and ceramics act as backdrops upon which Nelson attempts to establish connections between the natural world and the various cultural and religious orders we impose upon it. She incorporates Jewish symbolism and archival photographs alongside her ongoing photographic practice documenting the environmental collapse of her home region.

Installation (Installation)

Addressing the 1966 XVII World Chess Olympics, Pataki 1921 by Ulrik López continues the artist’s interest in chess as a subject and as a symbol for various world affairs and political confrontations. Pataki 1921 is an installation that derives from and expands on Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso’s ballet piece titled La partida viviente (The Living Match) which opened the Olympic. The choreography recreates the 1921 World Championship chess match where the Cuban player José Raúl Capablanca won the world title against the German master Emmanuel Lasker, becoming the first Latin-American, but more precisely Caribbean, player to win this title.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Park Chan-Kyong’s otherworldly film Belated Bosal primarily follows two women as they navigate their way up a spectral mountain and through what appears to be a history museum or nuclear disaster bunker. They converge to jointly perform a funeral rite in a shipping container, which a group of artisans temporarily convert into a makeshift Buddhist temple, replete with traditional paintings. Shot in crisp and densely detailed black-and-white negative, each frame is lit by the format’s spooky incandescence: shadows are white and the sun is black, as if the world were being viewed through X-ray, infrared camera or a plutonium-sensitive film.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The title of Alicia Smith’s video work, Teomama , means “God Carrier” in the Aztec language of Nahuatl. It was the name given to medicine men and women who carried the bones of Huitzilopochtli—the god of war, sun, and human sacrifice in ancient Mexico, and the national deity of the Aztecs. Of the many legends featuring Huitzilopochtli, the origin story of Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City) is perhaps one of the most well-known.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Jepira is a mythical and essential place of the spiritual dimension for the Wayuu people. It is the starting point and final resting place in their transcendence process which is part of the territory and not dissociated from it, such as in the Catholic notion of Heaven. Today, the Pilon de Azúcar hill which corresponds with Jepira is part of their reclaimed land and connects this dessert culture to the sea; it is the place the Wayuu go when they need to speak with the dead which, along with dreams, is the main way to access spiritual knowledge.

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)

The title of Rainbow Body by Chitra Ganesh refers to an elevated state of, or metaphor for, the consciousness transformation known as a rainbow body. The Buddhist master Padmasambhava achieved this state from his union with Mandarava, a female spirit (dakini) and princess in Tantric Buddhism. Through study and physical connection, each played a key role in the other’s enlightenment.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Distorting Words is the second chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

This work forms part of a project that draws upon research into the use of psychoactive substances present in animal brains during the Paleolithic period. Bolstered by research by archaeologist Bethe Hagens, the artist explores the hypothesis that prehistoric shamans consumed the psychoactive parts of animal brains in order to achieve spiritual ecstasy and that the found figurines, reproduced by Marguerite Humeau, are an archival remnant of these experiences. The so-called “Venus figurines” take the form of ambiguous female forms and despite their exaggerated gendered traits, the onus is instead upon the resemblance to the ingested animal brains that led to their production.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The word Coyolxauhqui refers to femicide or the killing of women in rural Mexico on the basis of gender. The mutilation of the Aztec moon goddess Coyolxauhqui by her brother Huitzilopochtli, the sun god and human sacrificer, is reimagined in this film. Coyolxauhqui by Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is the first in a trilogy of films that positions itself as a form of political resistance, delving into the relationship between current Mexican femicide and broader cultural traditions.

Installation (Installation)

On September 22, 1940 the French signed an accord, which granted Japanese troops the right to occupy Indochina. The Japanese presence in Indochina lasted until the end of World War II and during the occupation, jute supplies from India were interrupted. Jute was used to make sacks as well as gunpowder, a crucial material for the war industry.

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)

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?

Sculpture (Sculpture)

escenario chacana by Claudia Martínez Garay is a sculptural work composed of a frame-like structure that contains a series of ceramic pieces. It references the Chakana, an Andean cross that encompasses the different levels of existence (known as Pachas) and sacred elements contained in the Indigenous cosmologies of the region. It often appears in the geometrical motifs of textiles and ceramics.

Installation (Installation)

Sylbee Kim’s Unindebted Life is a single-channel video, commissioned and premiered at the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021). This work is a major production by the artist, addressing her attempts to attractively integrate and intersect elements such as bodies and minds, ancient spirituality, heterogeneity, class and capital, digital temporality, and particular aesthetics of the post-internet generation. In the work, the vitality and the movement in calligraphy motifs, revealed through the flashing light presented in the screen panels and video sequences, are related to the moment of change inherent in the body’s cell energy and living things.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Highly autobiographical, exquisitely made and compiling different aspects of the artist’s practice, Kiss of the Rabbit God is one of Andrew Thomas Huang’s most precise, relevant, and successful videos. This video work exemplifies a new, global wave of queering tradition, indigenous references and international pop/post-internet esthetics. In this short video, a Chinese-American restaurant worker falls in love with an 18th century Qing dynasty god of gay lovers who visits him at night and leads him on a journey of sexual awakening and self discovery.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wailing Requiem is the fourth and final chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Birdstones is a series of flat concrete slabs made from moldings of different shapes, each with two small holes. They stand vertically in space in a precarious stance. Heavy by the density of the concrete, they are also airy and floating.

Textile (Textile)

A “mata ni pachedi” is a piece of painted textile that depicts narrative images of goddesses. Traditionally, the images would be painted onto a piece of cloth found in the temple. Also known as the “kalamkari” (a hand-painted or block-printed cotton textile), “mata ni pachedi” literally translates to “behind the mother goddess”.

The various distinct but connected lineages of Himalayan painting remain thriving languages employed by artists from across the region to express their unique perspective in our shared contemporary world. In Bhutan in particular, this language is prevalent and its maintenance is seen through the political prism of preserving Bhutan’s identity in the global world. That being said, o ffering by Gyempo Wangchuk presented an attempt to bring a critical dimension within the traditional Himalayan forms of expression.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tungus is the third chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy , a film project that Wang Tuo began in 2017. The project is a unique regional research of Northeastern China that addresses the region’s geopolitical contentions. Drawing on significant moments from China’s modern history, Wang’s visual storytelling sets up and displaces a series of socio-historical situations through multiple narrative structures.