NFT (NFT)

Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022). Sun produced this NFT from a still image of the animation that features a drawn notation of the sign “echo” in American Sign Language. Visually the black and white image depicts two side by side mounds, one labelled ‘Hand’ and the other labelled ‘Palm’.

Photography (Photography)

Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition. The title of the series is translated from the Khmer phrase Tuol Sleng , which literally means a poisonous hill or a place on a mound to keep those who bear or supply guilt, and the photographs came from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, a former prison where at least 200,000 Cambodians were executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. In this particular image, three men stand against the backdrop of what looks like a prison interior.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Pianoiss . . . issmo (Worse Finish)

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017. The video is a shot-for-shot remake of the film “The Perfect Human” by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (1967). The original is narrated in an anthropological manner, or as if listening to a guide at a zoo, but Da Corte’s version is stranger and more philosophical.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization. The images show the diversity of forms of life on earth. These forms are associated with texts that relay a form of propaganda.

Installation (Installation)

In a 2002 Pentagon press conference, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld addressed a question about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction with an unforgettable evasion: there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, the latter being the most precarious. In a trilogy of nearly identical sculptures by A. K. Burns, the artist conjures the same string of word compounds on a metal gate nearly 15 years after Rumsfeld’s infamous statement. Resembling ubiquitous black fences across New York City, Unknown Unknown presents the paradox of this statement as a physical division and linguistic deviation, acting jointly as both a threshold and obstacle.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong. Intrigued by the accidental preservation of historical building material by renovations and rebuilding, Wong began paying attention to the experience conveyed by layered forms accreted to affect the visual historicity of a space. The geometric forms in the piece are welded together as a composite replica of a metal grate from a children’s playground next to Wong’s studio, a security grate door from his apartment complex, and the latticework that holds an air conditioner from an electronic store, and a front grate from an elementary school on his bus route.

Installation (Installation)

Map of the Universe from El Cerro continues Chemi Rosado-Seijo’s long-term engagement with the community of El Cerro , a rural, working-class community living in the mountains of Naranjito, Puerto Rico. The project was initiated in 2002 by painting the exteriors of residents’ homes different shades of green, paying homage to the way the community has been built in harmony with the topography of the mountains where it stands. Through negotiation and collaboration with community leaders, volunteers, students and residents, over 100 homes have been painted.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Sara Cwynar’s composite photographs of found objects and images court feelings of time passing. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she produces intricate tableaux that draw from magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogs. Cwynar is interested in how design and popular images work on our psyches, in how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Defunct Mnemonics (2012) plays off woodworking traditions found in indigenous art in order to create a body of formally minimal objects that are both beautiful in their restraint and profoundly moving in their associations with the totemic. Resembling large pick-up-sticks, the complete work is comprised of 126 vertical sculptures wrapped in fabric with alternately monochromatic and graphically patterned dyes and prints. Leaning against a wall and arranged side-by-side, they could be mistaken as highly decorated mallets for use in an undetermined ritual or game.

Painting (Painting)

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form. Here, Capistran humorously remixes the form and style of Frank Stella’s Black Paintings with California punk rock band Black Flag’s song title and logo (created by artist Raymond Pettibon). White Minority , then, appropriates, recontextualizes, and riffs on language and visual signs to unmoor notions of identity, power, and revolution.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In 2007 Lubaina Himid began a series of works she later called Negative Positives: The Guardian Archive (2007-2017). What started out as a one-year project, in the year celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the UK, continued for a decade. Taking a page or a spread of The Guardian (the most liberal newspaper in the UK and her newspaper of choice), Himid sought to expose the unconscious bias manifested in a paper that prides itself on its non-discriminatory policies.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Part of the series Still Life Analysis II: The Island , the two photographs The Objects under the Civic Boulevard and A Yellow Blanket on a Wooden Pallet feature household objects of vagrants living beneath the Taipei’s Civic Boulevard expressway. Such objects include trash, unidentified discarded objects, and plants. For the artist, the underside of Civic Boulevard resembles a subtropical island with its artificial stones and potted plants decor.

Photography (Photography)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways. The video begins with the pedestrian traversing a seemingly idyllic ivy lined stone and concrete thoroughfare. As his pace begins to accelerate, the camera follows him with greater urgency, slowly settling and become stable again as his pace decelerates.

Photography (Photography)

Time they stopped (Forouhars’ house, Tehran) depicts the trace of a recently stolen wall clock. The clock had stopped on the time of death of Dariush Forouhar and Parvaneh Eskandari. Barbad Golshiri is an Iranian visual artist who studied painting at the School of Art and Architecture at the Azad University in Tehran.

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Photography (Photography)

The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale. These photographs present a series of urban landscapes and assembled Foucauldian structures of the present. Du sees the Tower of Babel as a continually reinvented narrative that warns people of “dangerous tendencies in the present time.” Du’s Babylonian towers resurrect from fallen rubbles of religious history in grand scale to focus on modern crises of civilization.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Creole Portraits III alludes to the 18th century practice by slave women on Caribbean plantations of using tropical plants as natural abortifacients. As an act of political resistance against their exploitation as “breeders” of new slaves and to protest the inhumanity of slavery, some slave women chose to either abort or kill their offspring. Armed with practical knowledge passed on orally from their African ancestors and/or Amerindian counterparts, enslaved Creole women collected the seeds, bark, flowers, sap, and roots from various plants which allowed them to secretly put an end to their pregnancies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Like several of Mast’s works, B!RDBRA!N (Addendum) is the result of the accumulation of details from the various chapters and formats of an evolving project. The work is comprised by a sculptural set, a text piece that originates from an instructional score, and footage filmed during rehearsals for B!RDBRA!N , a play that was first performed in theaters in Los Angeles. Originally conceived of as a live response to the legacy of the historical French artist Guy de Cointet, Mast set out to investigate and interrogate Cointet’s work while incorporating the true story of Alex, an African Gray parrot who was the subject of a thirty-year avian language experiment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. The artist asked his parents to perform a flags-raising-lowering ceremony on their home’s cloths drying rack, with the HKSAR regional flag, and the flags of PRC and The UK. Artist Lee Kit hand-painted the HKSAR regional flag following the detail instructions in “The State’s Standards of The People’s Republic of China, GB16689-1996”, issued by The State Authority of Technical Monitoring.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China. In this animation, layers of images, abstract forms, meaning, and metaphorical associations slowly unfold at the same time that more visual myths are created. The identity of the protagonist, a red-coated official, is indeterminate and suggestive of both the mercantilist policies that led to the Opium Wars with China and the cultural authority claimed by the Company school of painting over colonial India.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In her 2011 webcam video, Sickhands , Cortright poses before her in-computer camera, as her hands, hair, and body begin waving and rippling vertically across the screen, distorted by software effects. Capitalizing and commenting on the ubiquity of homemade video, the short film replicates with banal proximity the amateur special effects that thrive on the web. This rather cliched visual trick recalls a funhouse mirror, or, perhaps more aligned with Cortright’s frame of reference, a dream-sequence cue from after-school 90s television.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Kwan Sheung Chi’s work One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills. Divided into three versions, the video first shows a number of Japanese ten-thousand-yen bills being counted without in an orderly, efficient manner. In Two Million , a similar counting of one-thousand-dollar bills from Hong Kong follows.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

One Million is a video work depicting the counting of bills. Divided into three versions, the video first shows a number of Japanese ten-thousand-yen bills being counted without in an orderly, efficient manner. In Two Million , a similar counting of one-thousand-dollar bills from Hong Kong follows.