Installation (Installation)

Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.

Installation (Installation)

Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Now; 1992 is Ali Yass’s attempt to remake his childhood drawings, which were lost after he was forced to leave Iraq following the 2003 US occupation. The drawings are chimeric compositions of animated limbs, animal, human, and machine, that seem to hurl in all directions and mediums, unified as colorful figurations posed against blank backgrounds, rendering the curious characters suspended in time. This suspension materializes the artist’s view on violence and temporality, on which he has claimed: “I will not talk about war because it is from the past.

Installation (Installation)

The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions. This work by Native Art Department International signals a reminder that we–the audience and institution–are located on and occupy traditional territories. The work appropriates and twists white artist Sam Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) in response to his work Scaffold (2012) installed in 2016-7 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Installation (Installation)

Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.

Installation (Installation)

Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.

Installation (Installation)

Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.

Installation (Installation)

Notebook 10 , l ‘enfance de sanbras (The Childhood of Sanbras) series by Kelly Sinnapah Mary is a sequel to an earlier series by the artist titled Cahier d’un non retour au pays natal (2015). This earlier work considers the process of reconstructing an identity of the Indian workers who arrived in the Caribbean during the post-slavery period. The work addresses the conditions of recruitment of these Indian workers, the strategies of the recruiters, how they lured them onto ships to bring them back to the plantations.

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.

Painting (Painting)

In “And so it is” shows the image of a faceless man before a microphone, ready to deliver an important message. The viewer is faced with the familiar image of political power seen in our homes on the television, yet this time located in a whimsical abstract landscape. The speaker appears as a shadow in front of a crowd that is responding to him by holding bubbles containing images of animals and plants.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tropical Siesta begins in a rural landscape of Vietnam. Very quickly, painted images of students sleeping on their school benches appear. A text speaking of how the communist regime has placed agriculture at the center of its economy reads alongside the images.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

246247596248914102516… And then there were none narrates a semi fictional account centered around the ambiguous history of the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, and on the aftermath of the 1973 demonstration of 400,000 people who marched against the military junta from Thammasat University to the monument. Built on archival and oral history, the story interweaves the personal with grand historical narratives to consider the complicated history behind the monument – symbolic of the unrest and violence that led to the Thammasat University massacre on October 6, 1976.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Dhuwã (term used by indentured people of Natal for ‘smoke’), is a single-channel film by Sancintya Mohini Simpson that traces back to the lived experiences of indentured labourers taken from India to Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) to work on sugar plantations during the late 1800s and early 1900s. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family were contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal. Filmed originally in 16mm film, Dhuwã captures sugarcane plantations in North Queensland, initially in moments of stillness that are gradually disrupted by a crescendo of repetitive sounds and fast camera movements that culminate in the fields being engulfed by flames.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gikan Sa Ngitngit Nga Kinailadman (From The Dark Depths) by Kiri Dalena is a stylistically collaged film inspired by the true story of a young activist’s drowning. Moving between reality and fantasy, it depicts the story of a dead communist who sinks to the bottom of the ocean into a dreamlike subaquatic utopia. In the film a young woman mourns the death of an activist that took place years ago.

Textile (Textile)

In 2011, Mounira Al Solh began a series of drawings that documented her meetings and conversations with displaced Syrian refugees in Lebanon and various European countries. The oral histories she collected are very different from those told in administrative interviews or police interviews. My specialty was to make a peasants’ haircut, but they obliged me work till midnight often (2017) is part of a series of embroideries that speaks to how personal stories in this political context create collective history.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Painting (Painting)

Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture. The green acrylic paint used for the subject’s skin in Maka Panau / Tinea Vesicolor (2005), for example, evokes cultural associations between phenotype and diseases such as hypochromic anemia, a blood-related illness historically diagnosed by the green-hued tone it produced in a patient’s pallor. Staring at the viewer a forlorn gaze, Sulaiman’s subject appears caught in a distressingly static state, at once both uncomfortable and yet incapable of ameliorating his condition.

Painting (Painting)

This painting is the direct result of the artist’s research into her roots. Kudzanai-Violet Hwami sought to find a way to immerse herself in present-day Zimbabwe, spending a month at an artist-run space Dzimbanhete on the outskirts of Harare and living with a traditional healer. According to the artist, the experience left her feeling othered by the inability to fully integrate herself into the place she called home.

Photography (Photography)

Vandy Rattana’s Bomb Ponds series was made following a transformative encounter with the craters left over from 2,756,941 tons of bombs dropped by U. S. forces during the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1973. Dissatisfied with the level of documentation on the bombing and its repercussions, the artist began to study the historiography of his country. He travelled to the ten most severely bombed provinces, engaging villagers in locating and testifying to the existence of the craters, and how they are lived with today.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Shooshie Sulaiman’s pictures of unidentified figures initially appear alien and even monstrous: rendered hairless in unusual and even sickly colors, they stand in stark contrast to the aesthetic ideals of conventional portraiture. The subject in Dulu atas pedestal, sekarang dalampedestal / Before on pedestal, now inside (2005), a ball point pen and charcoal rendering of a bald figure with a wide-eyed stare, appears caught in a distressingly static state, at once both uncomfortable and yet incapable of ameliorating his condition. Sulaiman’s subject here becomes an almost frightening sight, the emotive brush strokes replaced by the ball point pen’s erratic black lines, the eyes and mouth scribbled over in a deliberately defacing gesture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In collaboration with psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Leon Tan, Receding Triangular Square explores traditional Chinese and Taiwanese modalities of psychological healing as alternatives to dominant Western psychiatric and therapeutic practices. By juxtaposing the differing modalities, Hallberg and Tan make connections between psychological practices and histories of colonization and de-colonization. They challenge Western scientific standards of universality, rationality, and truth.

Painting (Painting)

Hybridized drawing is a continued exploration in Moshekwa’s practice, integrating elements of graffiti, thread and yarn to enrich his abstract drawings of maps and space. Through the combination of ready-found materials with drawing, in the case of “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)”, employing string, Moshekwa’s creates tension lines across the image, both physical and metaphysical to explore the traumatic events of South Africa and more specifically the passing of his grandmother. Referencing gestural painting of the 1940s and 50s, “Landed / Untitled XII (orange string)” is a disfigured and layered mapping of both the African and psychological landscape.

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Hikari (Light) (2015) depicts a fantastical and wrenching story about Juneko, a terminally ill young woman who communicates with her lover, a painter, through a portrait of her produced shortly after her death. As Juneko becomes sicker, her hair begins to fall out, a symptom of her unnamed illness. As her condition deteriorates, the film toggles back and forth with the animated story of Mogeji, a white strand of hair inhabiting Juneko’s body who becomes anthropomorphized through Kondo’s animation and recounts his own story of mortality and loss.

Painting (Painting)

Carib Carnival illustrates Aubrey Willams’s unique artistic language, combining Pre-Columbian iconography with abstraction. A series of abstracted shapes that resemble bones, masks and serpent-like images surrounded by fiery vapors and gases, illustrate the destruction of culture as one of the predominant themes of Williams’s work. He considered the Mayan and Aztec cultures to exemplify a number of present-day faults; according to Williams they developed technologies that would eventually lead to their own destruction.

Painting (Painting)

Although the objects depicted in Titus Kaphar’s diptych 2016/1963 might not be immediately recognizable, the work’s title and the inscriptions ‘Alabama 1963’ and ‘North Dakota 2016’ reveal their use as tools of brutal force. The work with the inscription ‘Alabama 1963’ is a painting of the nozzle of a high-pressure water jet that the Birmingham Police used against black protesters, including children, during a non-violent campaign against racial segregation led by Martin Luther King JR. during the civil rights movement. The second painting depicts the nozzles used against protestors that in 2016 opposed the plans to build the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, many of whom were seriously hurt and left soaking wet during freezing temperatures.

Painting (Painting)

Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu initiated the series 1000 Pieces (of White) in 2009, as a way to produce objects and images as a portrait of their shared life as partners and collaborators. Interweaving public and private, personal anecdote and pop cultural appropriation, their work attests to the poetry of the everyday. In addition to found and original materials, the artists have occasionally incorporated drawings and sketches by artist friends, and even by their own daughter into the ongoing work.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition. This often-overlooked chapter in colonial history is close to the artist, as her maternal family was contracted to a sugar plantation in Natal, then one of the four British colonies in South Africa. These indentured servants, derogatorily called ‘coolies’, were employees by title, but were effectually slaves.

Photography (Photography)

“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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Enrique Ramirez’s La Memoria Verde is a work of poetry, politics, and memory created in response to the curatorial statement for the 13th Havana Biennial in 2019, The Construction of the Possible . Other well known works by Ramirez feature the movement and endless symbolism of the sea—like the simultaneous engagement and retreat of the tide—but La Memoria Verde takes the land, plant life, and its human inhabitants as its subject. The film begins with a soft, green, algae-like image that waxes and wanes in focus, then gives way to swaying treetops blowing in a soft wind.