Shannon Ebner

Work from A Public Character at Sadie Coles HQ.

“A PUBLIC CHARACTER is a newly commissioned work for ICA Miami, where Ebner’s solo exhibition of the same title is on view until 17 January. It centres on text culled by Ebner following research into Hudson Yard’s real estate project – a rezoning of 28 acres of the West Side of Manhattan that will result in a transformed public landscape, rewriting the public character of the neighbourhood and its citizens. Edited by Erika Vogt and scored by Alex Waterman, A PUBLIC CHARACTER progresses in the manner of an extended sentence – accelerating, slowing, or looping erratically yet rhythmically. Photographs of the various ‘As’ – magnified and implanted like adverts in urban settings – reel past at disarming speed, with Ebner periodically pausing on a view or message. Phases of silence meanwhile alternate with a soundtrack of urban noise – voices, vehicles and sporadic bits of found music create a sonic landscape that maps the topography of the city.

Interspersed with the photographs are sequences of text whose elements combine into a chain of indefinite propositions and abstract concepts: Ebner flashes up various statements prefaced by ‘A’, which range in character from public pronouncements to corporate slogans (“A PUBLIC SECTOR”, “A PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE”, “A TIME”). Elsewhere, they seem to reference her own project more closely (“A PUBLIC CONVERSATION”, “A PUBLIC DISCLOSURE”). Ebner returns throughout the film to images of the Hudson Yards development project in Manhattan; and this sprawling construction site evolves into a metaphor for the transitional and unstable nature of language itself. Images of the building works are interleaved with references to verbal tenses (“PRESENT CONTINUOUS”, “FUTURE CONTINUOUS, “WILL AND BE GOING TO”) that enhance the film’s underlying sense of endless flux and redevelopment.” – Sadie Coles HQ

Tega Brain

Work from Coin-Operated Wetland.

“Can a system of water infrastructure be a love story? What does design for mutualism rather than extraction look like?

Coin-Operated Wetland invites the wetland into a domestic relationship with a laundry. And in doing so, it blurs distinctions between upstream and downstream, human and environment. By directly connecting human action with environmental health, the work poses questions around ecology, co-existence and the expectations of engineering. Can our infrastructures be redesigned to support ecosystems as well as human communities?

Yes, it could be beautiful — but will it be?” – Tega Brain

Basim Magdy

Work from Someone Tried to Lock Up Time.

“In the new series Someone Tried to Lock Up Time, Basim Magdy combines recognized objects of history with a poetic mysticism that invokes both alienation and a feeling of familiar complicity. The text acts like a measure of time, be it a philosophical exploration of duration and how to capture it or a seemingly random correlation of past events. The images carry out the same action of free association: a Fayyum portrait that dates back to Roman Egypt, a cyborg bird and an ocean surfer are all parts of the same narrative. Interested in time and processes of selective historicization, Basim Magdy asks what will be made of us when we are looked at from the future and what artefacts remain to tell our stories?” – Gypsum Gallery

Sandra Mujinga

Work from Skin to Skin at Stedelijk Museum.

“Mujinga transforms the Stedelijk’s lower-level gallery into a stark, otherworldly realm with Skin to Skin. Sound, light, mirrors, and sculptures conjure an unearthly space where 55 identical figures occupy the space. Mujinga investigates concealment through multiplication. Identical at first glance, their multiplication could evoke a single form in transformation—perhaps reflecting different stages in a single body’s life—or suggest a hidden society, or even an entirely new species. They become mute witnesses to a speculative or dystopian world.

In Skin to Skin, Mujinga’s otherworldly space vibrates to the artist’s compositions of light and sound. Mutating green light plunges us into a shapeshifting landscape. Reality bends and warps. Skin tones disappear, fabrics gain another texture, shadows pulsate. From time to time, Mujinga’s soundscape grounds the space with an enveloping electronic presence.” – Stedelijk Museum

Taryn Simon

Work from An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.

“In An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), Simon compiles an inventory of what lies hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through the documentation of subjects from domains including: science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. Confronting the divide between those with and without the privilege of access, Simon’s collection reflects and reveals that which is integral to America’s foundation, mythology, and daily functioning.” – Taryn Simon

Lotus L. Kang

Work from Borne at Esther Schipper, Berlin.

“Lengths of unfixed industrial film, ‘skins’ as Kang refers to them, are draped over and across raw steel tubes suspended from the ceiling. The shadowy impressions on the film create layered, visceral timescales, rendered in a palette of yellow, orange, red, purple and brown. By intentionally misusing the material, exposing it to sunlight and manipulating its exposure in both planned and unforeseen ways, the artist has invented modes of inscribing her process, turning the film into indexes of overlapping durations. The film is ‘tanned’ across multiple sites: her studio, her home, and predominantly, in a greenhouse situated in upstate New York.” – Esther Schipper

Nguyen Phuong Linh

Work from Sanctified Clouds.

“Almost 200 small masses of Sanctified Clouds fly over the wall, foam beautifully and shine in a blue hue, the blue of peace, Oriental ceramics, and sacred mosaic paintings in Arabic temples. However, looking closely, we realize that these soft white are not clouds, but actually the masses of dust and smoke bursting all around. Nguyen Phuong Linh collected images of bomb explosions, initially in the Vietnam War, and then gradually expanded to other conflict areas in the Middle East. To emphasize further the insensitive violence of bombing, Phuong Linh cut off the entire context of the photos, leaving only smoke and dust swirling in midair.” – Nguyen Art Foundation

Naraphat Sakarthornsap

Work from his oeuvre.

“…In many of his works, Naraphat Sakarthornsap presents stories of inequality in the society and gender discrimination through photography and installation art, in which flowers play the leading roles. Many kinds of flowers that Naraphat uses usually comes with profound meanings. Those flowers have become the keys to finding the answers that are neatly hidden in the works of art. And sometimes the photographs of these delicate flowers of Naraphat may possibly come from the deepest part of his devastated heart.

Naraphat’s early works presented the challenge against nature in trying to prolong the freshness of the flower before he develops the ideas to become the challenge against power and influence in the society through the pictures of these flowers. Therefore, do not believe in what the flowers in front of you appear to be. But look for the messages these flowers are hiding. Perhaps, what Naraphat is facing and trying to present is the same as the ones many others are inevitably struggling with, over the standards in the society, where inequalities are all around them.” – Naraphat Sakarthornsap

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Work from Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. @ Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.

“Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.’s new body of work explores the image as a space of ellipsis, in which works’ affective and spatial intimacies exist on the threshold of the inexpressible. In these new photographs, images sometimes seem to separate out from their material supports. Even in close-up portraits, subjects and expressions don’t quite find resolution within the image. New portraits yield intense, combative, and sometimes uncanny scenes that are at the same time tender and graceful. In more abstract works, Brown reveals areas of visual friction and pictorial indistinction where we might have sought out clarity of form.” – Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Anna Ostoya

Work from Autopis: Notes, Copies and Masterpieces.

“The complexity of a lived historical reality inevitably gets simplified through representation. On this fulcrum, Ostoya’s art operates critically. She purposefully creates oppositional binaries from her source materials, manipulating history in order to show how malleable and complex (rather than predetermined and fixed) it is. This she achieves through artistic means, first by a process of selection and appropriation then augmentation, transposition, elision, and the countless other tools at her disposal. Ostoya tells us clearly that art is a site of discourse, perpetually in flux and responsive to its time.” – Paulina Pobocha, Zachęta catalogue, 2018