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Didem Pekün
Of Dice and Men is a video diary-essay: in it, Didem Pekün’s daily life and political events are intertwined, just as they are in our individual realities. Displayed on two screens, the video brings us back and forth between London and Istanbul from 2011 to 2016, the two cities the artist inhabited at the time. Dice are thrown repeatedly throughout the video, each time triggering the occurrence of fleeting moments – sometimes very common, sometimes very violent.
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Aline Baiana
Indigenous educator and curator Sandra Benites, of the Guarani-Ñandeva people, narrates the origin myth of the bird Urutau in her native language. This nightjar stands still on a branch all day long and, at dusk, cries a low hoot resembling a human weeping. In 2013, indigenous activist José Urutau Guajajara remained on the top of a tree for 26 hours, deprived of food and water by state forces.
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Bahar Noorizadeh
The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism is part of a three project lineage, following Bahar Noorizadeh’s research on the architecture of the Soviet Union. The video focuses on the peculiar story of the Russian architect Moisei Ginzburg, who, in the late 1920s, suddenly turned his back on Le Corbusier, the French father of urbanist modernism. While Ginzburg had been a fervent follower of Le Corbusier’s philosophy, the story says that he was converted to disurbanism in only half an hour by the urban sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich.
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María Buenaventura
The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban. As an art object and installation, it comprises multiple stacks of paper each containing the decrees of land expropriation from many different peasant farmers who are being forced to sell their lots of land back to the government. Usme lies at the southern urban-rural border strategically located next to the Páramo de Sumapaz, an enormous neo-tropical tundra ecosystem and water reserve.
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Mary Helena Clark
The Dragon is the Frame by Mary Helena Clark is an elegy that is somewhat paradoxically organized as a film noir or murder mystery, one that pays direct homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo . But the parts don’t fit, and it is only in the eventual recognition of this faux raccord that Clark’s higher purpose becomes apparent. As we hear Bernard Herrmann’s score, we see the Golden Gate Bridge, Mission Dolores, and other Vertigo locations in the present day.
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Angela Su
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
In the first part of Cosmic Call by Angela Su the voiceover proposes in a neutral, documentary-like tone, a series of stories to rethink the way we usually understand, justify, or place blame for epidemiological events. Comets carrying an infective bacterium are linked with the invasion of viruses—our current nemeses—coming from outer space. Second-century BCE medicinal writings correlated the appearance of 29 comets over 300 years with events including plague and drought.
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UuDam Tran Nguyen
Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development. The single-channel video Waltz of the Machine Equestrians is a response to the overwhelming number of motorbikes and scooters overtaking the streets of Vietnam as small agrarian communities have been displaced by the construction of skyscrapers. The video shows 28 “equestrians” on motorbikes and scooters arrayed into a rainbow cavalcade held together by strings clipped onto brightly colored ponchos.
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Bo Wang
Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings is a two-channel short film by Bo Wang and his frequent collaborator Pan Lu. It takes the history of the British colonial search for tropical plants as a starting point, revealing how early colonial rule and ideologies shaped Hong Kong through the Western gaze. Through the process of transporting and collecting plants, Joseph Banks, who was the botanist and naturalist of the first British diplomatic mission to China (also known as The Macartney Embassy) and advised King George III on the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London with the most diverse botanical and mycological collection in the world.
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Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
La Ruta by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through untouched natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico. The Panoramic Route was designed for residents and tourists to connect with the traditional center of the island, as part of a political agenda to modernize the country through infrastructure and social programs. Today, the highway is notorious for dismal road conditions, resulting in isolation between more densely populated metropolitan areas and contributing to a loss of cultural sites and practices that once took place along the Route.
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William E. Jones
In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street. A series of boarded-up storefronts marred by peeling paint conveys a sense of the pre- or post-apocalyptic—the hush just before or after a disaster. The reds, pinks, and oranges of the buildings give off warmth, but the absence of human activity makes the glow eerie and strange.
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Jompet Kuswidananto
Third Realm (2011) grew out of the artist’s long-term research of Indonesia’s colonial history and the processes of modernization and urbanization that have taken place there. Kuswidananto describes the nation as perpetually in an “in-between” state of transition. Thus he has developed the concept of a third reality, third space, or third body—an identity specifically for Indonesia that reflects its spatial realities and national character.
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Pablo Rasgado
Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior. Rasgado wanders through the urban landscape in Mexico City and other major cities, looking for moments of intrigue in the dirt and debris. He captures these details by extracting materials from the sites and deploying them in the gallery.
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Lin Yilin
For his action, Safely Maneuvering across Lin He Road , Lin built a brick wall on one side of a busy main street in the city of Guangzhou. He then took bricks from the sidewalk end of the wall and moved them to the street side, slowly extending the wall into the street. Repeating the same gesture for hours, he leapfrogged the whole wall across the street.
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Stan Douglas
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground.
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Julio Cesar Morales
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes. It is a study of the realities and consequences of exploited labor that simultaneously aims to record the living history of labor.
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Runo Lagomarsino
Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video. It features a single shot of a vintage postcard depicting the Columbus Monument and the port of Barcelona, both of which are linked to colonial histories and historical trajectories. The sea is an unnaturally bright blue.
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Qing Zhang
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.
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Chen Shaoxiong
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective. This “return to origin” reveals an interesting critical reflection on the interactive relation between outside change and internal reflection, and the possibility for more experimental approaches that revive “traditional media.” For Ink Diary , Chen recorded his daily life and impressions within a rapidly-changing urban setting in ink wash paintings which he then turned into an animated film. The complex result of this simple process is both highly innovative and reflective of modernization.
Mary Helena Clark
Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation...
Qing Zhang
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Suzhou, China
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s films explore familial, neighborly, and citizen relationships in the context of Puerto Rico’s fraught history with the United States and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of families’ material and spiritual trajectories...
Runo Lagomarsino
- location: Malmo, Sweden
- location: Sao Paolo, Brazil
- year born: 1977
- gender: male
- nationality: Italian-Argentine-Swedish
- home town: Sweden
UuDam Tran Nguyen
- nationality: Vietnamese
Angela Su
Angela Su’s practice is derived from her two divergent backgrounds–she received a degree in biochemistry in Canada before pursuing visual arts...
Stan Douglas
- location: Vancouver, Canada
- year born: 1960
- gender: male
- nationality: Canadian
- home town: Vancouver, Canada
Lin Yilin
- location: Beijing & New York
- year born: 1964
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Guangzhou, China
Pablo Rasgado
- year born: 1984
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico
Bo Wang
Through new media, installation, and video and film, Bo Wang’s practice embodies sociopolitical and cultural subjects in contemporary China and beyond...
Jompet Kuswidananto
Inspired by Indonesia’s complex social history, political identity, ideologies, and culture, as well as his training as a musician, Jompet Kuswidananto makes multimedia installations that often combine video, sound, and mechanized elements...
Aline Baiana
Aline Baiana’s work is informed by extensive theoretical and field research on indigenous, feminist, ethnic, environmental, and social justice matters...
Bahar Noorizadeh
Bahar Noorizadeh is filmmaker, writer, and platform designer...
Chen Shaoxiong
- location: Beijing
- location: Guangzhou, China
- year born: 1962
- gender: male
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Shantou, Guangdong Province, China
Julio Cesar Morales
- location: San Francisco, California
- year born: 1966
- gender: male
- nationality: Mexican
- home town: Tijuana, Mexico
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1990-1999
Stan Douglas
1997Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
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2000-2009
Qing Zhang
2006603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
Chen Shaoxiong
2006After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
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2010-2019
María Buenaventura
2011The Territory is not for sale is a process of reflection and research with people, thinkers and community leaders from Usme, a rural part of Bogotá on the tenuous verge of becoming urban...
William E. Jones
2011In Restaurant, Canton, Ohio (2011), a convenience store offers food, liquor, and Coca Cola to an empty street...
Jompet Kuswidananto
2011Third Realm (2011) grew out of the artist’s long-term research of Indonesia’s colonial history and the processes of modernization and urbanization that have taken place there...
Pablo Rasgado
2011Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior...
Julio Cesar Morales
2011Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes...
UuDam Tran Nguyen
2012Like many Asian countries, Vietnam has lost an immense amount of natural environment and rural landscape to economic growth and industrial development...
Mary Helena Clark
2014The Dragon is the Frame by Mary Helena Clark is an elegy that is somewhat paradoxically organized as a film noir or murder mystery, one that pays direct homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo ...
Didem Pekün
2016Of Dice and Men is a video diary-essay: in it, Didem Pekün’s daily life and political events are intertwined, just as they are in our individual realities...
Aline Baiana
2016Indigenous educator and curator Sandra Benites, of the Guarani-Ñandeva people, narrates the origin myth of the bird Urutau in her native language...
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
2018La Ruta by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo follows the Panoramic Route, a now weakened infrastructure that meanders through untouched natural landscapes and off-road destinations on the island of Puerto Rico...
Angela Su
Drawing & Print
2019(Drawing & Print) In the first part of Cosmic Call by Angela Su the voiceover proposes in a neutral, documentary-like tone, a series of stories to rethink the way we usually understand, justify, or place blame for epidemiological events...
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2020-2029
Runo Lagomarsino
2020Yo también soy humo (I am also smoke) is a 16mm film that has been digitized to video...
Bahar Noorizadeh
2022The Red City of the Planet of Capitalism is part of a three project lineage, following Bahar Noorizadeh’s research on the architecture of the Soviet Union...