Film & Video (Film & Video)

Produced in an interview format and as an extended chapter of Cosmic Call (2019) in the KADIST Collection, Angela Su’s True Calling by Angela Su documents the artist’s answers to a series of questions on the conception of her 2019 film that proposes speculative cosmic synchronicities for an alternative understanding of epidemics that is not built on the foundation and authority of Western medical science. Set in Hong Kong, each of the locations draw connections to places commonly tied to dominant disease outbreak narratives, such as a bustling wet market with butchers handling and selling raw meat products and the Hong Kong West Kowloon Railway Station, a cross-boundary transport terminus that sees a high traffic footprint and directly linking Hong Kong’s city center to Mainland destinations without interchange. As the artist travels around the city, she observes systems of surveillance such as police officers patrolling, security cameras, and an encircling helicopter, all playing an important role in managing the population and instating health security.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Modelled and rendered in 3D, Moving Target Shadow Detection by Sung Tieu reconstructs the entire interior of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the site of the first-known instance of a supposed sonic attack, which collectively became known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. First reported by CIA staff in the Cuban capital in 2016, the syndrome includes a range of unexplained disorders ranging from nausea, fatigue and memory loss to brain injuries resembling concussions. In Tieu’s film, CCTV camera footage and images taken by a nano drone lead from the hotel’s lobby to an occupied hotel room, where the viewer is confronted with classified documents and news reportages of the recent Havana Syndrome attacks around the world.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Satirizing an airport security checkpoint, The Ecdysiast – Molt (Body Inspection) by Yao Qingmei offers a comedic and critical inquiry into the logics underpinning collective control and surveillance culture. The three channels of the video respectively feature a dancer (left), a chorus (middle), and a security inspector (right). The dancer and security inspector enact a mechanical burlesque performance that parodies the body inspection procedures implemented by airport security.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

During Summer 2011, few months after the nuclear accident, performance artist Kota Takeuchi got a job at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and kept a blog about the labour conditions of clean-up workers. In 2012, he exhibited an ‘anonymous’ video taken from the 24-hour live feed on TEPCO’s website that monitored the clean-up activities. The video, which then went viral in Japan and became known as the “Finger Pointing Worker”, captured someone in a protective suit, entering the frame and pointing his finger at the video surveillance installed by TEPCO on the nuclear plant site.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Heba Y. Amin’s 2016 film As Birds Flying uses found footage from drones in an allegorical response to a 2013 news story of a migratory bird with an electronic device attached to its ankle who was detained by the Egyptian authorities, suspected of espionage. For the artist, the story represents the paranoia and suspicion endemic to a context of global surveillance. Filmed from a bird’s-eye perspective, or a spy’s perspective, the images span the savannas and wetlands of Galilea.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering. Amy Balkin’s neon sculpture I (heart) Data Mining , takes on this issue by revealing the acronyms or abbreviations of both technology companies and government bodies that have either profited from data mining, or have used it to political ends. The culprits include Facebook, Investigative Data Warehouse, Apple Computer, The Department of Homeland Security, Narus, Target, and Twitter.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

As part of her project Chinternet Plus , a “counterfeit ideology” and parodic take on the strategy “Internet Plus” launched by Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang in 2015, the video work Post commentary, monetary likes, Morgan Freeman’s advice on reality gives an insight into Internet Culture in China. The brilliantly edited video by Miao Ying presents various scenes from a popular Chinese live-streaming platform together with extracts from a TV show featuring Morgan Freeman talking about “What Is Reality”. This work is exemplary of the artist’s practice, questioning, with a degree of humour, the sometimes dramatic consequences of the Internet as it consumes society.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM. Shy, proud and joyful, the two boys appear to be influenced by a third person – the artist and his camera. Their play of eyes creates an atmosphere reminding one of the close scrutiny and state control of the Kurdish population.

Installation (Installation)

For the exhibition 1440 sunsets per 24 hours at KADIST Paris in 2017, Haig Aivazian presented a sprawling installation, which sought to enact various instances of the deployment of light and darkness within public space and sports, reflecting on the double-edged abilities of lighting systems to expose, highlight or dissimulate subjects. For the installtion 1,2,3 soleil ! the space was structured like a material index, posing limbs and skins from stadiums and public spaces —namely floodlights, electric poles and asphalt— alongside abstract drawings inspired by policing and sporting data visualization iconography.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The television monitors utilized in the video installation Come On (2008) ostensibly serve as playback devices for a multi-channel installation of clips from blockbuster films as part of a larger commentary of mass entertainment and its relation to consumer cultures. Arranged in a grid, however, the monitors begin to resemble closed circuit security systems, evoking associations of surveillance and policing. More than just casual documents of the every day, Gao’s video works carry a subversively political charge and force viewers to reconsider their own relationship to media and perception.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

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)

Washington D. C. Constitution Ave. is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image, a woman and a child walk along Constitutional Avenue as a surveillance camera on the street post directs its gaze towards them. The otherwise quiet image then becomes an exercise of resistance: together with the other images from the series, Gordon’s photograph documents the changes that have taken place in architecture, civic life, especially in a post 9/11 experience of public space.

Installation (Installation)

In the nine-channel video installation, Against Step by Yim Sui Fong, a phantasmagorical image of a male dancer appears on a large-scale video projected on a floating retro-projection screen. His cathartic sequence of movements is based on an index of the bodily behavior of random people previously recorded by the artist while observing thousands of Hong Kong citizens in public space. Some of this recorded footage, done in poor mobile video quality, is played on loop in a set of TV monitors placed below the large projection.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Eamon Ore-Giron’s new commissioned video project Bite Work, is an experimental genre breaking video that is part-performance, part-conceptual and part-comical addressing issues of mediation, surveillance and trust. The main characters in the video wear traditional dance masks of “La Chonguinada” rituals from Peru and attempt to dance while being bitten by trained attacked dogs. Through this act, the dogs simultaneously become sculptural obstacles and dancers.

Photography (Photography)

San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

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)

Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph. Contrarily to the actions, he took the photographs himself. One of the rules he stuck to in his artistic practice was to always use material at his disposal, a real economy of means.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera. These are very successful in transcending the local into the global and/or universal. Memory, surveillance, and the routine and/or familiar, life in terms of both the political life and the social collective life shared by the constant reminder of the shut-off island psychological landscape.

Photography (Photography)

Back images is a series of six photographs by Sarah Lei Cheuk Wah that explore the semiotics of power and their intersection with representations of masculinity. The photographs feature what seem to be stock images of several policemen—their rugged uniforms, vehicles and weapons drenching the photographs with signs of masculinity and power as the policemen carry on with their usual tasks. The series was part of a larger exhibition entitled In Stasis where Lei transformed the booth of an art fair into what appeared to be a security area inside an airport.

Installation (Installation)

Jonas Staal’s installation is based on the thesis written by Fleur Agema and titled “Closed Architecture”. The paper, written by the second most important person of Geert Wilderds’ Freedom Party, concerns an ambitious model for a new prison that focuses on the reconditioning of prisoners by means of four phases. Staal’s work is developed through a book, a plan and a 3d virtual tour in the social imagery of a current minister of the State of the Netherlands.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including the Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-metre cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This work is based on a temporal loop in which the stories of several duets coexist and interfere with each other. The narrative articulates itself around four key moments or four neighboring apartments that the viewer discovers progressively: an air stewardess having an argument with her unemployed husband, and old lady telling old stories that no longer interest her caregiver, a black woman who is accused of stealing jewelry just when a newcomer, of Arab origin, moves into the apartment block. The narration itself is based on a void or non-event, however its dialogues refer to subjects such as terrorism or iimmigration.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the work Cinema , Fang Lu explores in a meticulous yet un-dramatic — almost casual — way of how “the self” in our today’s life is a controlled and staged construction of oneself. What appears at first sight to be a not unusual performance of self-choreography, becomes at a second glance a disturbing portrait of a – female – persona brought to life under contemporary conditions of attractiveness, anxiety and narcissism. Unlike her previous works, which duel more on the internal, surrealistic human conditions, this seven-channel work elevates the individual relationship with its socio-political environment to a more recognizable and appealing set of behavioral actions of self-awareness and self-inflicted anguish.

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

There’s Gonna Be Sorrow

Film & Video (Film & Video)

603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai. Installed like monitors fed by surveillance cameras, the videos present a voyeuristic entry into a private space, where two teams of men are scurrying around a bed, a desk, and some shelves in to score a goal, represented by a kitchen at one end and bathroom at the other. The game is furnished with complete uniforms, a referee, and a midfield line.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Nightwatch , which is an ironic reference to the celebrated painting by Rembrandt, follows the course of a fox wandering among the celebrated collections of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The path of the fox, from galleries containing 16th, 17th and 18th century portraits of historic figures from British history hung on plush walls, is circuitous and seemingly random. The fox tracks back and forth, sometimes inspecting the gallery furniture, often walking through the middle of the room but sometimes around its perimeter until eventually it climbs on top of a showcase, covered in fabric where he settles down to sleep.