H.2. N. Y Skeleton of the Dump revolves entirely around the performance “Homage to New York” (1960), of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), during which the machine built by the artist in the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) had to self-destruct itself in 27 minutes, but, in the end, it had to be finished off by firemenbeing called in after it erupted in flames. Since the discovery of Jean tinguely’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, in 1982, Michael Landy spent two years researching and sketching (charcoal, oil, glue, ink) from his previous research carried out at Museum Tinguely in Basel, and at the MOMA in New York.

Painting (Painting)

Untitled (violet)

Photography (Photography)

Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action. Also characteristic of his work, the scene takes place in front of a mirror, suggesting the kind of personal self-reflection that one is capable of – both good and evil. The video makes clear cinematographic reference to the ‘alter-ego’ transformation in Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and to the “You looking at me?” sequence performed in front of a mirror by Robert De Niro in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which also inspired Gordon’s through a looking glass ( 1999).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Muted Situations #2: Muted Lion Dance by Samson Young, Chinese lion dancers perform the auspicious procession traditionally presented at special occasions such as weddings or during the Lunar New Year. Yet, the customary percussive sound of drums and cymbals are absent. Instead, it is the sound of the performers’ physical exertion that comes to the forefront, revealing the beautiful, exhaustive rhythm of their craft—their feet hitting the ground, deep inhales and exhales, and the rustling of their clothes.

Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa. Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Painting (Painting)

Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa . Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations. Young enters a practicing psychoanalyst room and begins a session. Dressed in corporate business attire, Young encompasses both the corporation and individual.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel. The action is simple: I kick a video camera through a site that is embedded with sociological elements, which I try to question through my practice. I chose Red Square as the site to work in Moscow.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space. This admission seems to hold a rich poetic potential, the human attempts to bureaucratize and control outer space seemingly frustrated by the sublime scale and mystery of its infinite depths.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Lyrics 1, 2, 3 is part of siren eun young jung Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–). The work closely follows first and second generations of Yeoseong Gukgeuk actresses, who later became an important source of inspiration for the artist. Formally, this genre of theater draws from Westernized aspects of traditional Korean music performance, as well as from adaptations of pansori , a Korean genre of musical storytelling, to create a staged version of traditional Korean opera.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk . The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women.

NFT (NFT)

Monuments of the Disclosed by Ahmet Ögüt is an NFT series of digital monuments to whistleblowers. As part of the drop of Augmented Reality sculptures, Ögüt invites the public to participate in populating public space with AR monuments, honoring those who have stood up to corrupt power. Each monument is dedicated to a different individual who stood up to protest systems far larger than themselves.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Taking the same name as their most recent solo show at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, siren eun young jung’s video work Deferral Theatre intertwines various threads from the last decade of the artist’s research into the Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatrical form, in which all of the roles are played by women, as well as performance-based modes of queer resistance in South Korea. The radical and temporally border-crossing qualities of gender fluidity, and lineages of queer subversion within performative spaces, animate Deferral Theatre through a critical deconstruction of Korean history, tradition and gender norms. One particularly powerful scene depicts a young drag king performer tearing at their suit and tie as they lip-sync passionately to a song in English, while the frame lilts with an ecstatic languor, as if the operator of the camera were staggering feverishly.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The absurd condition of human survival under environmental degradation and geonational balkanization is taken as a starting point for WA’AD by YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. The work’s premise is a confessional narrative emerging from a Palestinian astronaut on a desperate international flight mission to colonize Mars. That there is also an Israeli astronaut on the same mission plays into the complexities of the landed history of ethnic antagonism between Israel and Palestine, which has stretched on for centuries.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To the syncopations of a jazzy soundtrack, Korean words in white against a black background flashes between an English dialogue in black text against white ground. Comprised of curt lines such as “forever” “failure” “to live,” the Korean forms non-sequiturs and double entendres to the English script following a line of questioning between a detective and a victim telling a meandering story surrounding a bullet being in a wrist, going to hospital, traveling to Japan, and the discovery of a love triangle. This narrative of a potentially grave situation is told in a nonchalant manner.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Pacific Limn weaves together three narratives that comment on hyper-capitalism pan-Pacific cities that San Francisco exemplifies. Each of the large works comprise of moving images overlaid with giant text, all synched to a stealthy, up-tempo jazz soundtrack. In The Secret Life of Harumi, a Japanese woman fantasizes escaping her job and living a temporary dream life in San Francisco.

Installation (Installation)

Ongoing Time Stabbed with a Dagger was Farmer’s first kinetic sculpture that added a cinematic character to an “ever-reconfiguring play presented in real time.” The assembly of various objects and props on top of a large platform constitutes not only a work, but, to a certain extent, a show in itself. The title of the piece comes from the literal translation of René Magritte’s painting from 1938, La Durée Poignardée , whose more familiar translation is “Time Transfixed.”

Sculpture (Sculpture)

There are several elements to Subject, Silver, Prism . Silver ink is applied to blocks of black foam. A simple stand, reminiscent of cheap furniture, supports a drum constructed from deer hide stretched over plastic cooking bowls and held taut by the hide and twine.

Photography (Photography)

“People often asked if they could pose with the Kodak advertisement where a full scale woman is featured with a camera offering Kodak rolls. They invented the poses, the gestures and situations.” Hashem El Madani. Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer in Saida, began working in 1948.

Painting (Painting)

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.

Installation (Installation)

The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition is a collateral project within the larger body of work around the Indian Ocean, entitled “Wharfage” (2009-13) which has included over the years a radio event, several books and a film. “Boat Modes” (2009-12) dealt with the modalities of maritime life on ships and in ports between UAE, Southern Iran, India and Somalia, using photographs, texts and film based on mobile phone videos made by sailors. CAMP sees this work as a kind of historical intervention on the same subject.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. These drawings were created during the trial of political activists pursued by the government that the artist would regularly attend. During the tribunal, the artist would let his pen slide freely across his notebook, replicating the automatic drawing techniques of the surrealists.

Installation (Installation)

Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon by Cici Wu is delicate, but physically much more robust than Cici Wu’s earlier works. What continues is the sense of longing, of something unresolved; it is haunting, like the images from a dream that we try to remember upon waking up. Unfinished Return of Yu Man Hon revolves around the story of a developmentally challenged young boy, who purportedly disappeared during the handover of Hong Kong by the British to Chinese governance.