Burak Delier’s sculpture Homage to Balotelli’s Missed Trick is a symbol of resistance to the demand for success and performance. The sculpture represents Italian soccer player Mario Balotelli, who intentionally missed an opportunity to score during a 2011 game between LA Galaxy and Manchester City. The miniature Balotelli stands on his left foot, raising his right foot to kick the ball. As the viewer approaches the piece, Balotelli begins to spin and the noise of a cheering crowd plays from speakers. The noise turns to audible confusion and then booing, tracking the moments during when Balotelli suddenly turned kicked the ball in the opposite direction of the goal. Because this gesture can be seen as one of the most forbidden behaviors in contemporary society—wasting an opportunity—Delier’s homage to the gesture can be seen as an opposition to the social pressure to achieve conventional forms of success.
Political Turkish artist Burak Delier works in a variety of media. He explores links between capitalism and art, freedom and unpredictability, seriousness and humor, employing the aesthetic strategies of the neo-liberal media that he opposes as a means of political and artistic resistance.
In the video Rebels of the Dance , two boys are filmed dancing to traditional Kurdish songs inside of the confined space of an ATM...
Braga’s video work Provisão (2009) opens with a still shot of a clearing in a forest, shoots of grass emerging from a muddy brown patch of seemingly dry and barren earth...
Invited in 2007 to the Museum Folkwang in Essen (Germany), Simon Starling questioned its history: known for its collections and particularly for its early engagement in favor of modern art (including the acquisition and exhibition of works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse), then destroyed during the Second World War, the museum was pillaged for its masterpieces of ‘degenerate art’ by the nazis...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
The three monkeys in Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak are a recurring motif in Gupta’s work and refer to the Japanese pictorial maxim of the “three wise monkeys” in which Mizaru covers his eyes to “see no evil,” Kikazaru covers his ears to “hear no evil,” and Iwazaru covers his mouth to “speak no evil.” For the various performative and photographic works that continue this investigation and critique of the political environment, Gupta stages children and adults holding their own or each other’s eyes, mouths and ears...
The Cloud of Unknowing (2011) is titled after a 14th-century medieval treatise on faith, in which “the cloud of unknowing” that stands between the aspirant and God can only be evoked by the senses, rather than the rational mind...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
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...
Los rastreadores is a two-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz narrating the story of a fictitious drug lord, Ernesto Suarez, whose character is based on the well-known Bolivian drug dealer, Roberto Suárez...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
A mesmerizing experience of a vaguely familiar yet remote world, History of Chemistry I follows a group of men as they wander from somewhere beyond the edge of the sea through a vast landscape to an abandoned steel factory...
Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015...