11:00 minutes
La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank. The artist runs until exhaustion across a dirt field in what looks like a military site. Recorded for the camera, and projected on loop, the video performance was created for Documenta 14. Galindo dedicated the work to all women who go unnoticed and whose screams remain unheard. The artist states that she wanted to highlight the under-recognized fact that Germany is a major arms exporter, with Guatemala a prize client. The work thus seeks to unpack the city of Kassel’s loaded yet veiled history as one of Germany’s biggest arsenals. The battle-tank that pursues the artist in the video was made for cross-country warfare and invented in Germany. The company who manufactured the turret of the tank is in fact still partially owned by the family of Arnold Bode who founded the Documenta exhibition in 1955. La Sombra points to the entanglement of the apparatuses of art and war and the international art market.
Regina José Galindo is a visual and performance artist. Her work investigates the universal ethical implications of social injustices such as racial, gender, and other abuses in our society’s inequitable institutions of power. In the context of a newly democratized culture, Galindo has developed a socially and politically motivated practice. She strives to acknowledge her country’s thirty-six years of civil war while also looking forward to a more peaceful and productive future. Galindo’s work focuses on historical issues that persist in the “new” Guatemala. Her work is confrontational and often shocking, bringing to light issues that few Guatemalans are willing to confront. Galindo’s unapologetically graphic actions amplify her contentious statements. She hopes to shake her Guatemalan audience out of their trance, breaking the numbness caused by years of violence. Galindo is best known for her performance work addressing the social, political and cultural violence that has affected her native Guatemala. Her work stages her own body, often submitting it to severe acts in order to evince the mass violence, crimes and sacrifice experienced by indigenous Mayan communities and the women among them who suffered the brunt of the conflict during the thirty-six year conflict. Indifference is not an option for Galindo, by appropriating destruction and loss, her work condemns the abuse of women, and propels viewers to response or resistance.
In 2012, former Guatemalan President José Efran Ros Montt was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video Tierra is a chilling reimagining of the atrocities recounted during his trial...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
Although best known as a provocateur and portraitist, Opie also photographs landscapes, cityscapes, and architecture...
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
Charwai Tsai’s photograph documents her Hermit Crab Project installation upon the construction site of gallery Sora in Tokyo...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
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...
Cinthia Marcelle’s video work Automóvel (2012) re-edits the mundane rhythms of automotive traffic into a highly compelling and seemingly choreographed meditation on sequence, motion, and time...
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...
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 Last Post was inspired by Sikander’s ongoing interest in the colonial history of the sub-continent and the British opium trade with China...