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.
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.
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.
Youthfulness and gestures of play are central to Aziz Hazara’s practice. The artist uses these mechanisms as a lens to give pause to the behaviours of children as foreboding reflections of the enduring and all-pervasive effects of conflict and war. In the short video Rehearsal the artist documents two young Afghan boys imitating the guttural rattling of an automatic rifle, play-shooting in the field in front of them, and swivelling as if to suggest the gun is mounted.
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.
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. The work references mass disappearances at the hands of corrupt armed forces and paramilitary groups that have taken place in Mexico since the 1960s and significantly escalated over the last decade due to the War on Drugs. While the piece may be installed any number of ways, it is marked by the precision of its material content: 71 liters of gasoline, 23 used car tires, and 760 kilograms of wood.
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.
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.
The Last Riot was originally created for Venice Biennale in 2007. In reference to Baroque Painting tradition and Chiaroscuro, this video installation imagines a dystopian virtual world where bodies removed from conscience and emotion exist weightlessly in a cyber paradigm. Light, shadow and digital manipulation slate a post-apocalyptic world where young teens enact conflict as ritual.
Phan Quang’s portrait series Re/cover grapples with a lesser-known history in Vietnam. After World War II, many Japanese soldiers who fought in Vietnam stayed in the country. They married Vietnamese women, had children, and lived in the country until Japan recalled them home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of a series of videos called LIFE, where Shay Arik videos that re-enact iconic journalistic photographs. As explained by the video’s title, the departure point for LIFE #1 is the iconic 1943 photograph published by Life magazine that captures Japanese officer Yasuno Chikao from the Imperial Japanese Navy as he raises his sword, seconds before publically beheading Australian war commando Leonard Siffleet in the shores of Papua New Guinea. In Arick’s restaging there are no onlookers in the scene, the only two figures represented are Chikao and Siffleet: the perpetrator and victim of this fatal act of violence.
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. characters: a Belgian prostitute working near the frontlines and a young German soldier charged with monitoring the brothels. Harboring literary aspirations, the soldier goes in search of material to complete his novel.
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
A rich and isolated region, El Catatumbo is located near the border with Venezuela. Different groups fight over its gold and oil, while narcotic plantations have exploited the region over the years, provoking massacres, displacement, and migrations amongst its native populations. Nohemí Pérez’s skillful and eloquent watercolors, titled Apuntes para panorama Catatumbo , testifies to this aspect of Colombia’s history that has been veiled by other equally pressing political issues.
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. This is not Manila whittled down to a scale model but a re-imagination of the city by Ryan Villamael in his ardor to approximate its complexity both as a physical, urban fact and an evolving concept. Behold A City 4 features an entirely new topography and arrangement.
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.
In Mobile Military Medical Clinic 9/1970 , a stretcher carrying an injured solider is being carried through swamp-land towards a makeshift operation table.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G. I. character, personified through an action figure that comes to life. The protagonist breaks into Chicago’s Oriental Institute to “liberate” Mesopotamian votive statues, who are likewise animated through voice-over narration, from their imprisonment in the museum’s vitrines. This set-up allows for meditations on various war and colonial histories; as a barbed twist on the Bush-era rhetoric of promoting “democracy” in the Middle East through regime change, the G. I. cannot understand why the statues wish to remain in the museum and not return to their (currently war torn) “homelands”.
Drawing & Print (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. Needless to say, the wars also affected Lebanese cities, buildings and institutions. It is clear to me today that these wars also affected colours, lines, shapes and forms.
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.
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. The project began in 2005 when Fletcher visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. He was shocked by images that depicted the lasting effects of the war and the atrocities committed by the United States.
Viktor Kochetov became engaged in photography in 1968 and was also a professional photographer in film and photo laboratories...
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...
Pratchaya Phintong’s works often arise from the confrontation between different social, economic, or geographical systems...
James T...
Ibro Hasanovic is a film, video, photographic and installation artist currently based in Brussels, Belgium, concerned largely with the powers of individual and collective memory...
Yuichiro Tamura works in a wide range of media including video, photography, installation and performance...
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...
A self-taught photographer, Vandy Rattana has focused on challenging conditions in Cambodia, his home country, by documenting natural and manmade disasters...
Meiro Koizumi is a Japanese video and performing artist, born in 1976...
Walid Raad is a Lebanese artist whose work investigates the way historical events of physical and psychological violence affect bodies, minds, culture, and memory...
Sharif Waked is a Palestinian artist who’s work enages with with Islamic culture and history, and its interaction with the Israeli occupation and hegemonic Jewish culture in Palestine...
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...
Dana Kavelina is an artist and activist who works with video, animation, painting, illustration, and text...
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...
The work of Julien Creuzet reveals painful stories – both personal and political – making it impossible separate one from the other...
Martha Colburn is known for hand-made animations, which she creates through puppetry, collage, and paint-on-glass techniques...
Madani’s paintings have a caricatural quality that suggest a satirical intention...
Aziz Hazara works across various media such as video installation, photography, sound, and sculpture...
Vuth Lyno’s artistic practice operates at a crucial intersection of contemporary Khmer culture...
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...
Randa Maddah, was born 1983 in Majdal Shams, occupied Syrian Golan...
Ali Yass is a painter and filmmaker whose work entangles personal and collective memory in its psycho-affective interrogation of power...
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...
Lu Pingyuan works with a variety of media such as texts, videos, installations, paintings, performances and other...
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...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Tom Nicholson’s Comparative Monument (Palestine) engages a peculiar Australian monumental tradition: war monuments that bear the name “Palestine”...
Bath Time by Sharif Waked is a short video based on the tragi-comic outcome of the Israeli Blockade and the wars in Gaza...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Words by Meiro Koizumi: “The video installation work In the State of Amnesia is made with Mr...
Note on Multitude is a chilling black-and-white short movie recorded with a single camera in Prishtina, Kosovo, in 2015...
The video work Volga by Aslan Goisum begins with a sweeping field caught under a misty, gray sky...
In the Soldier’s Head evokes the traumas of war through the prism of the hallucinations of a soldier...
Drawing & Print
A rich and isolated region, El Catatumbo is located near the border with Venezuela...
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...
Masterpiece in the Water by Lu Pingyuan tells the story of an impatient collector who is killed by an artist...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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)...