Arpedia

Changi, Singapore, possibly 1970s is from the series “As We Walked on Water” (2010-2012), which looks into Singapore’s history around the phenomenon of land reclamation. After exhausting the country’s own soil from its tiny hills and ridges, the government had to buy sand from Malaysia and Indonesia to continue its reclamation efforts. At the early stages of a land reclamation project, the imported sand would sit idle for some time, forming an artificial desert-like landscape.

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The Ghost of Modernity (Lixiviado)

Miguel Angel Ríos

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Superb production values and special effects that in the hands of Miguel Angel Rios do not get in the way or distracts from the content and deep essay of this work. The shadow of Modernity represented via a clear cube floats over and through a barren landscape in Latin America. Juxtaposing the corrupt politics of the land, with the artist’s struggles and questioning of the effects and burden of influence of Modernity.

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Untitled (Set of Six Drawings)

Adrian Villar Rojas

Based on historical prophecies and fantasy, the artist creates apocalyptic scenarios that posit an enigmatic world plagued by social, political, and environmental upheaval. Untitled (Set of Six Drawings) (2012) is an intricate watercolor of a child sitting cross-legged with its head stuck inside a giant mask resembling a duck head covered with eyes. It looks like a scene snatched from science fiction or a surreal dream; it is tempting to see in it some kind of warning sign, or an ominous vision of the future.

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Intersticio (Interstice)

Elena Damiani

Intersticio (Interstice) by Elena Damiani traces the topography of a non-specific site, an in-between zone. The video presents a panoramic view of two territories of a shifting and unresolved character, composed out of segmented events that visually intersect at a shared horizon point. Over the images, a fragmented and ambiguous poetic narration describes, by means of images found in digital archives, a hybrid site that permutes the representation of nature through its fusion of source material.

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In Search of Vanished Blood

Nalini Malani

Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel. The video is largely silent until violent crashes and female voices overwhelm the viewer, portraying the inner voice of a woman who is brutally gang raped. Malani addresses the fatal place of women in Indian society and the geo-politics of national identity.

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Untitled (Celestial Motors)

Maria Taniguchi

Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney. This ubiquitous form of public transportation, originally built from U. S. military jeeps left on the islands after World War II, is normally exuberantly painted and personalized. They are known for their crowded seating and kitsch decorations, which have become an omnipresent symbol of Philippine culture.

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Taiwan WMD - Uranium

James T. Hong

Sculpture (Sculpture)

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.

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Making Chinatown

Ming Wong

Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown . According to Wong, the latter is a “textbook” of Hollywood filmmaking . In Ming’s version, he plays all four main characters portrayed originally by Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and Belinda Palmer, shooting against a backdrop of a film set reproduced as wallpaper in a gallery space.

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A Soldiers’ Garden #c

Nguyen 'Quoc' Thành

A Soldiers’ Garden by Nhà Sàn Collective is a night portrait series located in an army camp outside Hanoi. Here new recruits assemble for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to their assigned battalion. Night is the only time the soldiers in training have a few moments for themselves.

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Skin Set Painting: Orange People Are Rotting Rays From Ruins Refore The Last Enjoy The Griot Convey The Shrapnel Deploy

Pope.L

Painting (Painting)

“When Pope. L shakes his head he makes drawings that keep him from laugh-crying to death,” writes Helen Molesworth about William Pope. L’s Skin Set Drawings .

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A Variation on Powers of Ten

Futurefarmers

In 2011-12 the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers staged a 10-part series of conversations and collaborations with scientists, theorist, and philosophers inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film, Powers of Ten (1977). PoT was an IBM sponsored documentary that visualized the relative scale and limits of the known universe, both macro and microscopic, through a sequence of magnifications by 10-to-the-x-power. Using the picnic as human-scale index, Futurefarmers capture their meetings with scholars through audio, photography, and then distributed the results publicly through a website and publication .

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Future Gestalt

Brody Condon

Future Gestalt re-imagines a large-scale sculpture “ Smoke” by Tony Smith as embodying a futuristic intelligence that communicates with a group of communitarians undergoing experimental psychotherapy. Future Gestalt is not a video of a performance, rather, it is a documentation of the last of four unscripted sessions of guided participation led by the artist. Through the title and form, the sessions suggest Gestalt therapy, promoted as a form of personal transformation in California at the Esalen Institute.

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Impression

Amol k Patil

The title of the performance video work Impression by Amol k Patil refers to an Indian tradition. During a Hindu or Muslim weddings, all the inhabitants of the chawl (very modest buildings) cover their chests, arms, and feet with henna. For this work the artist covered his chest with temporary henna tattoos before applying Fervicol, a synthetic resin adhesive.

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Museum of the Foreigner

Ícaro Lira

Icaro Lira has been developing the project “Museum of the Foreigner” since 2015, in which he recounts the trajectories of populations inside Brazil, from the north to the big cities of the south. The artist is himself Nordestin and moved to Rio to study cinema before enrolling at art school. The term “museum” is ironic, it evokes the institution and with it, the official history that the artist seeks to deconstruct by creating multiple stories that intertwine.

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My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked

Som Supaparinya

The flat, wide river holds on its surface a tour-boat of memories, as Som Supaparinya documents her Grandfather’s return via cruise to familiar territories in rural Thailand that were submerged after the Thai government installed a series of dams. An unsettling sense of trauma emerges from the absence of what is being described in My Grandpa’s Route has been Forever Blocked . Supaparinya’s juxtaposition of unceasing waterways and cruise life with a series of dams, obstinately responsible for these conditions.

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Roca Grafito (Graphite Rock)

Mateo Lopez

Sculpture (Sculpture)

With Roca Carbon ( Charcoal Rock , 2012) and Roca Grafito ( Graphite Rock , 2012), López plays with our relationship to inert and unremarkable objects such as rocks. Traces of art history reverberate through the sculptures; their mediums reflect traditional materials for drawing and sketching, and the simplicity of their forms gesture toward minimalism. But López dislocates these common objects from their ordinary utility by replicating their component parts in paper, graphite, and charcoal, thus drawing attention to mechanisms of representation and translation.

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No Lye

Danielle Dean

No Lye by Danielle Dean documents a group of five women, including Dean herself, confined to a small, cramped bathroom, communicating only by using slogans culled from beauty advertisements (“beauty is skin deep”, “naturalise, it’s in our nature to be strong and balanced”) and quotes from political speeches (“we must protect our borders”, “we are fighting for our way of life and our ability to fight for freedom”). The result is a fragmented conversation that defies legibility. As sounds of a possible conflict rise from outside, the characters work together producing what looks like explosives from soap, towels, and an unmarked blue liquid.

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Exquisite Eco Living (executive Properties series)

Vincent Leong

The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city. This images reflect on a dystopian future of the country, perhaps drawing parallel with the political changes in Malaysia.

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Hands Around In Yangon

Moe Satt

Hands Around in Yangon is both a secular and religious exploration of the meaning of hands in Myanmar. Moe Satt’s father is Muslim, while his mother is Buddhist. In the Buddhist context, hand gestures or mudras are often important in signifying the identity of deities.

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Absentia

Tony Oursler

Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium. Mounted on platforms suspended in space on metal stands, the video sculpture contemplates human relationships, expressed here by shouts and murmurs, the strange and the familiar.

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Comparative Monument (Palestine)

Tom Nicholson

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.

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Espectacular cortina

Pia Camil

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Camil has made numerous paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (she calls them “highway follies”), and of abandoned billboards that look like theater curtains dramatizing failed capitalist strategies. (Espectacular, the colloquial Spanish term for “billboard,” also translates more literally as “spectacle,” and of course recalls Guy Debord’s famous 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle .) In Mexico, the urban landscape has been taken over by billboards; they are totally integrated into the landscape.

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Klau Mich

Dora Garcia

KLAU MICH is a TV and performance project by Dora García with Ellen Blumenstein, Samir Kandil, Jan Mech, TheaterChaosium, and Offener Kanal Kassel, during the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13).

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Eniko Mihalik

Jeff Burton

In Eniko Mihalik (2012), the camera captures a glimpse of the eponymous Hungarian model as seen through a rearview mirror. They are both two examples of the artist’s many enigmatic photographs of models, actors, musicians, and other powerful figures rooted in the celebrity-driven culture of Los Angeles. Catching a glimpse of the model, the viewer enters into the world of the celebrity.

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Rotation (Moiré, Rome)

Asier Mendizabal

Rotation presents the image of a crowd, a re-appropriation of 19th or beginning of 20th century photographs published in newspapers and magazines. This artwork is composed of the same image repeated four times with different resolutions. The last image in Rotation is less focused than the original one.

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let this be us

Richard T. Walker

let this be us is a single-channel video by Richard T. Walker featuring the artist himself roaming around the wilderness of a deserted landscape, sporadically humming a melody, strumming a guitar, or playing a few notes on a keyboard. As he traverses between striking locations we see him carrying large photographic prints of the same landscape that he is treading, which he then rests onto tripods so that the horizon in the photograph seamlessly matches that of the real landscape. As we hear the music, Walker comes in and out of view, dissipating into the landscape as his body becomes invisible, hidden behind the photographic prints.

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A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

Anthony Discenza

In Anthony Discenza’s 23-minute audio loop that makes up A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats , a nondescript male voice narrates a series of unlikely pairings: “think Dune meets South Pacific;” “think dubstep meets the Magna Carta;” “think the Food Network meets Igmar Bergman.” Given without inflection or emotion, this recitation uses the structure of a Hollywood elevator pitch to sketch out an unknown project, idea, or structure, conflating and collapsing cultural referents into an implausible mass of contradictions.

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Pleasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh - 3

Yang Zhenzhong

Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall. With its cushions removed to reveal its internal mechanisms, the chair’s programmed rubbing, kneading, patting, and vibrating motions create a strange sight and soundscape. The work explores the relationship between flesh and machine as they come together through technologically simulated social behaviors, challenging normative ideas about human interaction.

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Trópico entrópico

Felipe Arturo