At first glance, Cityscapes (2010) seems to be a collection of panoramic photographs of the city of Istanbul—the kind that are found on postcards in souvenir shops. A closer examination, however, reveals that a key element—the minaret—has been systematically removed, thereby changing profoundly the history and religious character of the city. The work is a response to a November 2009 referendum in Switzerland that approved a ban on the construction of new minarets in that country. It was also a crucial time in Turkey’s negotiation for entrance into the European Union. Instead of making a direct, didactic comment on the controversy, however, Abbas offers up a clever question regarding how landmarks are interpreted in vastly different ways depending on their cultural context. In the Western imagination, minarets are political symbols as much as they are religious architecture. In the Muslim world, they serve as mnemonic devices that enable residents to recognize their own city.
Hamra Abbas, who lives and works in Boston and Islamabad, Pakistan, makes work that has a profound connection to her own cultural context. She asks probing questions about the everyday and its complex relationship with history and ideology; her subject matter ranges from religious rituals to war and the sexual iconography of the Kama Sutra. Working with a diverse range of materials and media, Abbas frequently intertwines the contemporary with the classic to offer up a critique of both modern Western and Islamic cultures.
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...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Untitled (San Francisco) was made in Idaho in 1984 and was facetiously dedicated to Henry Hopkins, the then director of the San Francisco Museum of Art who added “modern” to its name...
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
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...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
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...
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...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...