Bath Time by Sharif Waked is a short video based on the tragi-comic outcome of the Israeli Blockade and the wars in Gaza. The story tells about how, after a war and the ongoing economic pressure, the Gaza Zoo lost several of their animals, and decided that they could paint a donkey so that it could pose as a zebra. The video imagines the donkey in the shower after a shift impersonating a zebra at the Gaza Zoo, as the hot water slowly washes its faux stripes away.
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.
Victory Through Air Power III (1943) by Wendy Cabrera Rubio is part of a series of quilted maps that reproduce different scenes from the eponymous film. Victory Through Air Power the film is an animated history of aviation produced by Walt Disney, and likely one of the first educational and documentary films using animation. Disney’s political agenda, specifically towards Latin America, has played an important role in Cabrera’s practice.
Having a press card allowed Viktor Kochetov to photograph freely in public places, access to which was strictly regulated for amateurs. Seeking a way to transgress the reportage canon, the Kochetovs employed a method of taking images of large gatherings that emphasize the structure and “patterns” of the imaginary collective body. His 1978 photo of women sorting corn, titled Working women, builders of communism, are sorting corn… , is organized on this principle: the scarfs on the workers’ heads are perceived as an element of uniform, which creates a visual rhythm.
Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand). The most bombed nation on earth, Laos still bears the physical and mental scars of the U. S. military’s epic aerial offensive, launched largely from bases in Isaan, during the Second Indochina War. Between 1964 and 1973 the US dropped an estimated 250 million cluster bombs on Laos.
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.
Masterpiece in the Water by Lu Pingyuan tells the story of an impatient collector who is killed by an artist. This murder becomes an artwork in of itself as the story within the story sheds light on the psychological anxieties faced by soldiers during war time, the family bond, and the paranormal. This playful, yet violent, story explores the amusing similarity between supernatural events and the creation of artistic ideas, while reflecting on the complex relationships that exist within the art world.
In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role. Some body parts are absent, mostly the faces which are usually an affirmation of the individual. The characters recall ghosts testifying as to the traumas of war.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
East of Ukraine became a place of armed conflict with Russia-backed separatists, who proclaimed parts of (the) Donetsk and Lughansk oblast (administrative region in Ukrainian) to be ‘People’s republics’. This region, in conflict since spring 2014, is where most of the charcoal is extracted. It is with this same coal that artist Nikita Kadan realizes this drawing in 2018, representing a field on which is juxtaposed a small photograph.
Madani works on a small scale and a large scale. This work is from a series of small paintings called Dazzle Men that take as their starting point the Dazzle patterns used by artists to camouflage ships during the First World War. Dazzle camouflage was designed to confuse the aim of U boat commanders.
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.
The installation Hey Daddy, Hey Brother comprises a series of “Sukajan” jackets, which Tamura collected over a period of several years. They were a popular souvenir among the US military stations in postwar Japan during the Korean War (1950-1953). With origins rooted in military occupation of in the East Asia region, the jackets fuse the American “bomber,” or baseball jacket, with traditional hand-stitched designs of Japanese iconography, including dragons, tigers, Mt.
Clemens von Wedemeyer has imagined a trip back in time at Breitenau. Starting with events that happened there from 1933 to 1945, the German artist has composed three stories that reach the years of the women’s reformatory, in the 1970s, with a different protagonist for each era. A work that attempts to bring out the “pathology” of the site, as the artist tells Bert Rebhandl, and at the same time its “unforgettable” status as a black hole in the history of Germany, that sucked up innocent lives for almost a century.
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s performance Illusion of Matter establishes a dream state through a composition of motifs that were drawn from the artist’s childhood memories. Ramírez-Figueroa recreated the components of the dream as giant props made out of polystyrene, and set in a colorful yellow and orange mise-en-scene. Throughout the performance, the props and set are activated and demolished by children under the artist’s direction.
In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier. Inspired by the artist’s father,a soldier in Algeria who then suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder,the video depicts the delusions flowing from a mind ravaged by violence: a vision grown from the inside out. Like a mirage amidst a blank, desert expanse, specters are conjured as the inanimate comes to life.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Intermission (Halloween Iraq IV) is a large print that depicts U. S. soldiers in Iraq celebrating Halloween. They ride donkeys—apparently playing polo—while wearing masks that simultaneously familiarize the soldiers, through the recognition of a common holiday, and distance them, through the obscuring of their faces. Its means of reproduction—a woodblock print—further amplifies the distance between the event and its presentation, as well as the engagement of the artists.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010. Numerous passive demonstrations against the government have led to numerous police repression of the protestors. The demonstration ‘Euromaïdan’ in 2013 is a perfect example.
The video work Volga by Aslan Goisum begins with a sweeping field caught under a misty, gray sky. In the center of the frame is a white car of the eponymous Soviet make—standard-issue for the imperial administrative class during the USSR’s ‘Period of Stagnation.’ The vehicle is the only indication of cultural geography in the video; what unfolds must be somewhere in the former USSR. In a slow crescendo of activity and tension, small groups of men, women, and children, walk up to the car and squeeze into it.
In Beyond Guilt the two artists create a portrait of our generation in three parts. In Tel Aviv, in confined spaces such as toilets or bar of hotel rooms, they create situations in which participants answer questions and describe themselves. Camera in hand, there is little editing in their works, leaving a rather crude result.
Tom Nicholson’s Comparative Monument (Palestine) engages a peculiar Australian monumental tradition: war monuments that bear the name “Palestine”. Countless of these monuments were built immediately after World War 1 to commemorate the presence of Australian troops in Palestine. The Australian troops had entered Palestine in 1917 after fighting the Turks threatening the Suez Canal with the British, when the main focus was on the European fronts rather than on the Middle East campaign.
Words by Meiro Koizumi: “The video installation work In the State of Amnesia is made with Mr. Nobuhiro Tanaka, who damaged his brain when he had an accident when he was 21. Since then he has been living with a memory disorder. I asked Mr. Tanaka to memorize a testimony of a Japanese soldier who served in the war in China during WWII.
Full title of the work: Grain par Grain, sur le parterre humide et fissuré. Érosion sévère, graine, ma cote. Où est la manne, semence de l’antiquité.
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In very slow motion, he soars through the air like a bird in a graceful dive. We never see him land.
Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program. T. Hong’s research is not only an effort to revisit a dark time that complicates certain histories, but more importantly an investigation of how violence is enacted in the name of rationality.
Lessons of the Blood by James T. Hong pieces together interviews, extensive archival and field research, and TV footage addressing Japan’s use of biological warfare and experimentation on Chinese prisoners during World War II, as well as the revisionism of the Japanese government and Chinese survivors’ attempts to live with this horrific history and to find justice. Co-written, directed, edited and produced with Yin-Ju Chen, whose work is also represented in the Kadist collection, Lessons of the Blood is a meditation on propaganda, the ways in which national mythologies can literally infect and poison the most vulnerable among us, and the legacy of World War II in China, presented through the testimonies of survivors, academics, medical experts, nationalists and activists. The film locates its genesis in the publication of the New History Textbook in Japan in 2000, which infamously glossed over the Japanese Empire’s wartime atrocities, sparking rage and violent protests in China and South Korea in 2005.
Note on Multitude is a chilling black-and-white short movie recorded with a single camera in Prishtina, Kosovo, in 2015. The film, beginning in an unidentifiable location, shows a large, bustling and anxious crowd. Soon, the viewer is privy to the setting: a bus station.
A woman meticulously tidies up the room of a ruined house in the village of Ain Fit in the occupied Syrian Golan. The village was destroyed by the Israeli forces in 1967, as was the case for many other villages. Inhabitants were prevented from returning to their homes, fleeing to Syria’s refugee camps, separated from the rest of their families.
Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945. Yoneda focuses both on the original Japanese features of the houses and on details that have been altered since the end of the occupation. The yet-to-be acknowledged history of the occupation of Taiwan and other East Asian countries by Japan during World War II is subtly disclosed in these pictures.
Martha Colburn’s film, Western Wild … or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand , about the famed German author Karl May weaves together a mixture of stop motion animation, travelogue and biography that generates a kind of sensory wanderlust. Conflating past and present, the film investigates issues of identity and representation, as well as violence and war. The artist considers imagination as an invitation to dream, in order to disrupt the limitations of the everyday context and widen her viewers’ horizons.
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. In black and white, Yao depicts the historical site as an eerie abandoned compound. Reflecting on the centenary of the HsinHai Revolution and the end of the Cold War, Yao questions the existence of an ever lasting dynasty or “transcendental Rules of History.” The soundtrack features a sole voice reverberating through loud speakers.
Trained in large-scale painting, Nikita Kadan’s artistic practice encompasses installation, graphics, painting, wall drawing, and urban postering, sometimes in collaboration with architects, human rights activists, and sociologists...
Viktor Kochetov became engaged in photography in 1968 and was also a professional photographer in film and photo laboratories...
Pratchaya Phintong’s works often arise from the confrontation between different social, economic, or geographical systems...
James T...
Mounira Al Solh’s art practice embraces inter alia drawing, painting, embroidery, performative gestures, video and video installations...
The work of Julien Creuzet reveals painful stories – both personal and political – making it impossible separate one from the other...
Lu Pingyuan works with a variety of media such as texts, videos, installations, paintings, performances and other...
Visual artist and photographer Phan Quang stages nuanced compositions that illustrate the relationship between global historical events and the personal histories of families and communities in Vietnam...
Walid Raad is a Lebanese artist whose work investigates the way historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, culture, and memory...
Chechen artist Aslan Goisum’s work engages with memories–collective and personal, political and cultural–to unearth clues about colonial realities, how they have been endured, and how they might be undone...
A self-taught photographer, Vandy Rattana has focused on challenging conditions in Cambodia, his home country, by documenting natural and manmade disasters...
Violence is key to Shay Arick’s practice who employs photography, sculpture, performance, video and drawing as means to understand what motivates people to enact it...
Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela, two young Israeli women artists work collaboratively or individually by project...
Madani’s paintings have a caricatural quality that suggest a satirical intention...
Through drawing, installation, painting, photography, and video, Erbossyn Meldibekov’s practice examines architecture, monumentality, and value systems in the public domain...
Vuth Lyno’s artistic practice operates at a crucial intersection of contemporary Khmer culture...
Michael Rakowitz uses the novel charm of everyday things to excite new and oblique approaches to loaded geopolitical subject matter...
Wendy Cabrera Rubio is part of a generation of artists that has been invested in revisiting the history of Mexican arts and crafts with a multidisciplinary and pedagogical approach...
Tom Nicholson is trained in drawing, a medium which he has used to think about the relationships between public actions and their traces, between propositions and monuments, and between writing and images...
Taking formal cues from the optical illusions and landscapes drawn in pre-cinematic entertainment, French artist Christine Rebet seeks to unveil the way these kinds of devices are mirrored in contemporary politics and media...
Aziz Hazara works across various media such as video installation, photography, sound, and sculpture...
Sung Tieu’s artistic vocabulary explores the vast and evolving protection and control industries, still rooted in the logic of the Cold War, used to restrict and mould subjects in subsequently globalized capitalism...
Nguyen Thai Tuan was born in 1965, he studied at the school of Fine Arts of Hue where he studied propaganda art, which he got bored of very quickly...
Having a press card allowed Viktor Kochetov to photograph freely in public places, access to which was strictly regulated for amateurs...
According to Viktor Kochetov, Meeting with the awaited guest / Yellow Bows is the first hand-colored print he ever made...
Ukraine-Russia / Volleyball by Viktor and Sergiy Kochetov features a concrete monument of women volleyball players before the railway station in the village of Vodyanoye, Kharkiv region...
In Beyond Guilt the two artists create a portrait of our generation in three parts...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
In the “Black Paintings” series, although the human body is only suggested, it plays an important role...
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...
Lifesize Draft is the second of two sculptures on a similar theme, the first one being Utopia Battery, (2008)...
Drawing & Print
“The Lebanese wars of the past three decades affected Lebanon’s residents physically and psychologically: from the hundred thousand plus who were killed; to the two hundred thousand plus who were wounded; to the million plus who were displaced; to the even more who were psychologically traumatized...
Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945...
Drawing & Print
Intermission (Halloween Iraq IV) is a large print that depicts U...
Situated in German-occupied Belgium at the end of World War I, Y ou Make Me Iliad by Mary Reid Kelley focuses on the story of two...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Bath Time by Sharif Waked is a short video based on the tragi-comic outcome of the Israeli Blockade and the wars in Gaza...
Tom Nicholson’s Comparative Monument (Palestine) engages a peculiar Australian monumental tradition: war monuments that bear the name “Palestine”...
Taiwan WMD (Taiwan and Weapons of Mass Destruction) is part of a long-term research started in early 2010 on the history and aftermath effects of Japanese biological and chemical warfare in China during WWII, as well as the unknown history of Taiwan’s nuclear program...
A woman meticulously tidies up the room of a ruined house in the village of Ain Fit in the occupied Syrian Golan...
Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...
Drawing & Print
Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010...
Drawing & Print
Ukraine is under tension due to the politics of President lanoukovitch since 2010...
Part of a series of videos called LIFE, where Shay Arik videos that re-enact iconic journalistic photographs...
Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam...
The video work Volga by Aslan Goisum begins with a sweeping field caught under a misty, gray sky...
Words by Meiro Koizumi: “The video installation work In the State of Amnesia is made with Mr...
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s performance Illusion of Matter establishes a dream state through a composition of motifs that were drawn from the artist’s childhood memories...
Note on Multitude is a chilling black-and-white short movie recorded with a single camera in Prishtina, Kosovo, in 2015...
In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier...
Masterpiece in the Water by Lu Pingyuan tells the story of an impatient collector who is killed by an artist...
Pyre , an installation by Mexico City-based artist Joaquín Segura, addresses corruption, impunity, and the role that failed governments play in the normalization of violence...
Drawing & Print
A rich and isolated region, El Catatumbo is located near the border with Venezuela...
Martha Colburn’s film, Western Wild … or How I Found Wanderlust and Met Old Shatterhand , about the famed German author Karl May weaves together a mixture of stop motion animation, travelogue and biography that generates a kind of sensory wanderlust...
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 installation Hey Daddy, Hey Brother comprises a series of “Sukajan” jackets, which Tamura collected over a period of several years...
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G...
Game (Six Pieces) by Erbossyn Meldibekov is inspired by the popular Rubik’s cube puzzle and is composed of three colors (red, green and white) instead of six, referencing the colors of the Afghan flag...
Drawing & Print
East of Ukraine became a place of armed conflict with Russia-backed separatists, who proclaimed parts of (the) Donetsk and Lughansk oblast (administrative region in Ukrainian) to be ‘People’s republics’...
The black-and-white projection, Araf by Didem Pekün, begins, as a lithe man stands high up in the middle of the grand, rebuilt 16th-century Ottoman bridge in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina...
Behold A City 4 extols the old grandeur of Manila, the nation’s storied capital – the complex nexus of heritage, modernity, and all sorts of compulsions, political or otherwise, that attempt to define it...
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...
Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Victory Through Air Power III (1943) by Wendy Cabrera Rubio is part of a series of quilted maps that reproduce different scenes from the eponymous film...
Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand)...
Pratchaya Phinthong’s work has explored the mineral and karmic economies of Laos, a country that shares language, beliefs, and a long border with his own native region of Isaan (Northeast Thailand)...