Arpedia

Steak House is a video representing two small puppets smearing the artist’s face with paint while he is sleeping. The work is based on modest means and reuses the classic theme of inanimate objects coming to life during the night while humans sleep. Is this the artist’s return to repressed feelings or fatigue provoked by the task?

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She’s gone

Jay Chung and Takeki Maeda

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda remake a clip from the 1970s they found on the internet, and without really changing this archive material, displace it by imitating the staging and the acting with scrupulous precision. The slightest details are reproduced identically with great minutiae. The facial expressions are absurd, the prim attitude makes no sense.

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Destinos Posibles (Possible Destinations)

Luis Garciga

In Destinos Posibles Garciga performs a service in Havana, Cuba by offering strangers in the streets a “ride” to wherever they are going for free, in exchange he demands that the passengers address the question “what do they want from life?” A poignant video within the context of the limitations the Cubans have in terms of choices, desires, fantasies, and longing.

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Ohne Titel

Matti Braun

During a residency in 2009 at L’appartement 22 in Rabat, the artist traveled in Morocco and Senegal on the traces of the German sculptor Arno Breker. On this occasion he learned about batik, a fabric printing technique which originates not only from Indonesia but also from Senegal. It is also widespread in Africa.

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The Beautiful Beast

Goddy Leye

In Goddy Leye’s installation work The Beautiful Beast , a video is projected onto a gold-colored wooden box filled with sesame seeds. The sesame seeds look like pixels underneath the video, suggesting the texture of animation. The artist portrays a strange man who writhes on the ground like a beast against this ‘pixelated’ field.

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They Were Here

Elisheva Biernoff

In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs. Although the imagery present in her work might seem nostalgic upon first encounter, Biernoff’s complex tableaux often reveal the artist’s skeptical look towards her subjects matters. They Were Here (2010), constitutes a clear example.

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Untitled (Zimbabwe)

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson’s flag paintings document the 20th century history of African people, indexing the period of liberation from colonialism. As the majority of African flags were created during the 1950s and 60s, they were intended to reflect a so-called ‘modern’ aesthetic and ideology. Many African flags maintain the typical flag tropes such as stripes, stars, birds, and blocks of primary and secondary colors; green to represent the land; blue to symbolize the ocean or sky; and red to recall the violence that occured in the pursuit of liberty.

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Walking Through

Koki Tanaka

Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site. Here, Tanaka has spread out various objects he collected throughout the city of Guangzhou. By fiddling with a window frame, water buckets, plastic bags, cardboard, soda bottles, and many other things, Tanaka creates fragile, temporary sculptures.

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Milton Friedman on the wonder of the free market pencil

Kennedy Browne

Milton Friedman on the wonder of the free market pencil is an installation based on 42 blank pages. On the first page, one can read the original version in English of the liberal speech by Milton Friedman on “The Story of the pencil”. On the other pages, the same text has been translated into 41 different languages by using Google Translate, before coming back to English.

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CAMARADERIE

Mahmoud Khaled

CAMARADERIE is a precursor to and a blueprint for Mahmoud Khaled’s later forays into queer aesthetics and modes of visual representation. This work is based on videos that the artist collected over the years through YouTube, of Egyptian professional bodybuilders exercising or rehearsing before posing in local and international competitions. The selection also includes videos of amateur young men from Cairo, who obsessively train and exhibit bodily transformations resulting from their admiration for those bodybuilders.

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Canned Laughter

Yoshua Okón

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city. Okón focuse d on Ciudad Juárez as a site for many ‘ maquiladoras ’ ( factories) and on its role within the global context. A mixed media and video installation , the work takes the form of a fictitious factory that produces canned laughter for sitcoms.

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Stone Deaf (Drawing)

Milena Bonilla

Milena Bonilla’s discursive practice explores connections among economics, territory, and politics through everyday interventions. Her drawings, sculptures, and photography are active investigations into our often-fallible notions of history. Stone Deaf (2009) is a direct intervention into Karl Marx’s gravesite, for which the artist literally traced the history of Marx’s grave.

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Tropical Vulture

Miguel Calderon

Tropical Vulture is a cross-generational project which highlights the artistic influences between George Kuchar, a Bay Area legend of independent filmmaking, and Mexican artist Miguel Calderón. Conversations with a Tropical Vulture is an experimental narrative video, co-directed by both artists, and blends Hollywood glamour and drama with an all-too-real life approach, which creates and inspires a counterpoint of unattainable desire against unbearable actuality. The video, shot on location in Acapulco, utilizes a “lo-fi” aesthetic and playful use of non-professional actors.

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Les Etoiles du Nord (Northern Stars)

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain

Letters of the Greek alphabet glisten on a black background. When a letter appears, there is a sound. Each letter corresponds to a star in the sky.

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Large Heart No. 49 (Rasen Kaigan series)

Lieko Shiga

Photography (Photography)

Lieko Shiga’s photographs appear like dreamscapes. They gain much of their visual power from the unusual interplay between light and color, and the way in which her motifs often seem to defy physical laws such as gravity. She often photographs nocturnal landscapes that are both enchanted and haunted, invoking an emotionally and psychologically complex, contemporary inner landscape, as well as the ancient relations between mysticism, spirituality, and folklore, specifically invoking Japanese traditions and beliefs, while at the same time transforming them.

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Untitled: Furniture Island No. 3

Matthew Darbyshire

Matthew Darbyshire has made several Furniture Islands, all of which employ different objects and different color values. Furniture Island No 3 looks like a shop display tastefully arranged in complementary colours. Darbyshire’s use of colour is like that of a designer or a painter.

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Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper

Miljohn Ruperto

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts. The video’s title figure, a Filipina actress, vaudeville dancer and singer who played racialized, peripheral roles in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, flits in and out of a montage of scenes. Ruperto digitally modified the 16mm film by blurring the background and all of the figures in each scene except for Cooper herself.

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John Heartfield and Silvio Berlusconi

Thomas Kilpper

These two images come from the series called “State of Control” which Kilpper made in the building formerly occupied by the Stasi in Berlin. As a symbol of the past there could be none more powerful than this. By carving into its floor, Kilpper laid bare its history by making images of its occupants and political figures associated with that period of history.

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Partituras

Raimond Chaves and Mantilla Gilda

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Many of Chaves and Gilda’s works use recycled cardboard. For Partituras, they arranged stacks of cardboard into long rectangles on the ground, which are visually analogous to fields of graphite in Chaves’s pencil drawings. While the blocks have a spare presence in space, they exist more full solidity within their borders, and the recycled nature of the cardboard adds some play into the clean minimalist rectangles and cubes.

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Untitled 1

Pratchaya Phinthong

Photography (Photography)

Phinthong made four photographs depicting fragments of meteorites of which the faces have been polished to reflect the sky. Lying on the ground, on what appears to be woodland ground, the form of the meteorite disappears and the reflections of the clouds seems like a piercing of the ground.

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Dorian, a cinematic perfume

Michelle Handelman

In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present. Developed from a literary work, it deconstructs notions of narrative forms, styles and conventions. It is a hybrid piece, an example of the elasticity of the medium.

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Arbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican)

Federico Herrero

Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape. Rooted in Central American folklore, politics, and culture, his works often move beyond the canvas onto the wall or into the streets. In Á rbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican, 2009), a tree with cartoonlike creatures drawn in pen beside it emerges from a field of bright swaths of color.

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Killed

William E. Jones

Killed is a video projection in which William E. Jones appropriated and edited, in a rapid sequence, a selection from the more than 68,000 censored or discarded films produced by the Farm Security Administration’s photographers between 1935 and 1943. Roy Emerson Stryker, the then director of the program, was in charge of what he called “killing” negatives by punching holes in them to render them unusable. Killed continues Jones’s use of discarded film footage seen in his video created from vintage 1970s and 1980s gay porn that was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

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The Book Cover series

Heman Chong

With a habit of reading eight to ten books at the same time, Chong paints his two-foot tall novel covers through referencing an extensive reading list (accessible on Facebook) he has kept since 2006. Entitled “Bibliography (1): The Lonely Ones,” the list outlines representations of solitude that has been imposed on individuals or communities. Chong divides these archetypes into three over-arching notions: the Hide-away, the Castaway and the Prisoner.

Untitled (Diptych) by Mary Ann Aitken is a pair of paintings; one entirely abstract and the other a hybrid of representational and abstract elements. The left-side painting is a cacaphonous all over composition of brushstrokes layered in the artist’s signature primary colors. In the same color scheme, the right-side painting portrays a still life with an arrangement of flowers as its focal point, with marks and splatter spilling from the left-side composition into the right.

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Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger

Geoffrey Farmer