Photography (Photography)

This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005. His broad smile, on the verge of laughter, encourages reciprocity on behalf of the onlooker. This could be said to be a typical tactic in Creed’s work as it is so infused with humor and irony.

Photography (Photography)

Femme dans la baignoire

Photography (Photography)

In her 2003 series “Better Lives”, Sue Williamson explores stories of immigrants in search of a better life in a historically contentious South Africa. In an attempt to address and confront xenophobia in South African history, Better Lives series subverts racism and prejudice by emphasizing the immigrant as human, and thus gives the subjects a voice. “Better Lives: Richard Belalufu” tells a tale of surviving in a hostile South Africa through the undercurrent reflections on violence, abuse and the difficulty of finding home as an immigrant.

Performance (Performance)

This work needs to be considered in relation to one of his performances during which people were made to queue in front of the Kunsthalle of Frankfurt in 2003 (Tate Collection). In this instance Ondak collected images of people queuing in front of all sorts of buildings in various newspapers. He then inserted these in a Slovakian newspaper without trying to give any coherence with the information in the text on the same page.

Installation (Installation)

Solo (2003) is a video exhibited as a video/sound installation depicting shots of drum, voice, guitar, clavier/synthesizer, and a melodica player cut into segmented fragments from the perspective of a studio recording set. Rather than deploying a narrative strategy, Grandmaison focuses on the gestures of the musicians and the repetitions they carry out when recording their individual tracks. The musicians are portrayed nodding, dancing, improvising, strumming, creating resonance that is repeated over and over– however, Grandmaison is sure not to document their entire faces or expressions while they perform, just details.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Rosier’s body of films, gleam with that indeterminate in-between glow of twilight. Things hardly move at all in her films. They are, quite simply, often without plot, without spoken voice and without narrative elements.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Drawing, which is the essential embodiment of Fabrice Hyber’s artistic thinking, is at the origin of all his works. The artist uses accumulation, hybridization and mutation to create constant shifts between extremely varied domains. Each work is just an intermediate, evolving stage of this “work in progress” that spreads like a proliferation of thought, establishing links and exchanges that then help to create other connections.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people. The opening of the film presents us with a dramatic process that transforms the documentary image. The lack of human presence makes creates a strange atmosphere in the film.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

Photography (Photography)

San Francisco, Moscone Center is a silver gelatin print from the series American Surveillance , a ten-year-long project where Richard Gordon photographed surveillance cameras across USA. In the image’s foreground we see the silhouette of a man, darkened and in contrast to the bright streetscape unfolding behind him. To the left, an American flag flutters in the wind, saluting the skyscrapers—among them the iconic architecture of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Installation (Installation)

In the installation Our Love is like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, Martin Boyce uses common elements from public gardens – trees, benches, trashbins– in a game which describes at once a social space and an abstract dream space. The trees, unique sources of light in the exhibition space, produce their own environment. These sculptures, as if extracted from a set, are enough to suggest an atmosphere, a landscape, or a movie.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

As the caption purposely admits, these drawings were made by friends of Ondák’s at home in Slovakia asked to interpret places he has journeyed to. The description of the blond artist wearing the same outfit and bag in places of transit like airports, stations or streets are faithful in straightforward (verging on naïve) styles. His own skill as artist is displaced and delegated to others with no particular gift in draftsmanship.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father. Jonathan Monk bridges a conceptual art and his family privacy, and ironically ensures that there is “no difference between Sol Lewitt and my mother, he does not know more than she do not know. ” What is the status of the O-backed chair rail to the white cube?

Photography (Photography)

Bhanwari and Lichhma from the Balika Mela series by Gauri Gill explores human expression through the medium of photography, bringing questions of agency, the role of photography, and feminism together through its portraits of adolescent girls from rural Rajasthan, India. Balika Mela is an annual fair for girls aimed at uplifting a population severely maligned in Rajasthan. Having set up a stall in this fair, Gill invited local girls to voluntarily pose for photographs which they were allowed to keep, expressing their performative individuality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities. A newspaper is both reproduced and modified to call attention to the newspaper as a means of information transmission. This also emphasizes the effect of various seemingly unimportant support mechanisms: the role of visual layout and images.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Biennale, Dog is an appropriation of the posters made to promote biennial art exhibitions. Displayed alongside the official marketing materials of biennials (Shanghai, Berlin, Venice, etc.) Xu’s works provide a satiric and provocative alternative to the official system and make publicly visible images of many realities.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Flight Rehearsals focuses on Subbaiah’s desire to fly as a means to highlight the relationship between human ambition and limitations of the physical world. The video presents philosophical explorations of the human desire to defy gravity and time. The minimalist set of a table highlights the intention and persistence of the protagonist rather than technological innovation.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

Photography (Photography)

In her 2003 series “Better Lives”, Sue Williamson explores stories of immigrants in search of a better life in a historically contentious South Africa. In an attempt to address and confront xenophobia in South African history, Better Lives series subverts racism and prejudice by emphasizing the immigrant as human, and thus gives the subjects a voice. “Better Lives: Richard Belalufu” tells a tale of surviving in a hostile South Africa through the undercurrent reflections on violence, abuse and the difficulty of finding home as an immigrant.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001. The title already implies the cultural complexities about to be ironically unravelled: Ho Chi Minh is parodied and Okinawa (where this was filmed) was a battle site in Japan during World War II which then became an American training base during the Vietnam War. To a remix of James Bond movie tracks composed by Quoc Bao, no less than thirty divers in wet suits and full gear advance against the water resistance armed with cartridges of color.

Painting (Painting)

The works of Fabrice Hyber provoke divergent ways of thinking. In a kindred spirit with Raymond Hains, image and writing are intertwined. Drawings and diagrams are visually direct, as shown in the series of “Peintures Homéopathiques” (“Homeopathic Paintings”), collages covered in transparent resin (1986-1988).

Sculpture (Sculpture)

A cat, standing like a human being, is looking at us with round and dazed eyes and holds a gun. In the background, we notice a range of unwelcoming buildings, closed in with barbwire. A sentence is inscribed inside of one of the clouds, as if it were a speech bubble, and comments ?with hope or disillusion?