Gohar Dashti

Work from Land/s.

“Regardless of who we are, our lives are layered and richly textured with physical and figurative uprooting(s) and migrations.

On one of my trips, an immigrant friend asked me to take a postcard back to her family in our country of origin (Iran); on the front of the postcard was a photograph of the natural environment in her new home (U.S). On the back she had written, “I live here. A place similar to our home.” Furthermore, I remember a documentary (Jaddoland, Directed by Nadia Shihab), in which the filmmaker visits her Iraqi mother living in Texas. During a drive through the Texas landscape, she reflects on the “vastness” of her mother’s longing for a sense of home. “The landscape of west Texas was a mirror image of Iraq, and it was this other memory of home that she searched for.”

I am drawn to nature with these similar stories and their ubiquitous presence in my life. The idea of my “Land/s” series grew out of a fascination with these human/geographical narratives and their interconnection with my own personal experience.

As for so many others, nature is what connects me to my homeland. It transcends borders and stays with me in the space that I live in now (Cambridge, MA). It is a base layer, a lens, an overlay; a tendril of wild fern sneaking into the frame. The limitless reach of nature and landscapes – that reach across cultural and political divisions –as well as the ways in which immigrants inevitably search out and reconstruct familiar topographies in a foreign land, together tell a story familiar to all humans.

However, this is a paradox of identity and belonging. Sometimes, I see a tree similar to one we had in our yard in my hometown (Ahvaz, Iran) but I feel a different connection with this new tree because its roots and fragrance are different as they grew in another climate and soil. I even hear distinct bird sounds from these two trees. When I stand in the new land and look at this new tree which I have no memories associated with, I try to recall my old memories and reinvigorate.

In my practice, I bring two disparate environments into coexistence, creating staged interventions that induce uncertainty and complicity in equal measure, announcing themselves as fictitious yet compelling a suspension of disbelief. The images in the “Land/s” are not created using a simple montage technique. They are, rather, the result of endless journeys across two continents and the subsequent transportation of these images into an alternate natural landscape, by the sea, in the mountains, or in the forests, where the composition of the picture acts as a link between what is in the foreground and what is in the background, sometimes exposing and sometimes obscuring the way the picture was constructed. I consider how the intimate relationship between mankind and nature can create new narratives related to issues on global migration. How landscapes could have Human/geographical narrative meaning.” – Gohar Dashti

Taca Sui

Work from Steles – Huang Yi Project.

“The latest body of work collectively titled Steles (2015) focuses on the stone steles that have played such a crucial role in the documentation of the history of China. In this case he was inspired by the late Qing dynasty imperial bureaucrat Huang Yi (1744-1802) who in his leisure time was also a dedicated amateur archaeologist, painter, poet and calligrapher. In the last years of the 18th century he made two trips in which the focus was on documenting steles mainly located in Shandong Province and Henan Province. Through his travel diaries, paintings, and rubbings, he provided an invaluable record of cultural artifacts that otherwise might have disappeared altogether through neglect. Like Huang Yi 200 years before him, Taca embarked on expeditions to locate traces of the past as preserved in steles but whereas Huang Yi could still identify, describe and catalogue actual examples, Taca had to be satisfied with inscriptions that are largely erased through the passage of time or exist only in fragmentary state. Recognizing the futility of his task, he nonetheless perseveres in preserving whatever he can. At the opposite end of the spectrum from documentary photography, Taca’s images have a forlorn and timeless beauty that are simultaneously totally specific and yet evocative of the relentless passing of time.” – Taca Sui

Mishka Henner

Work from Evaporation Ponds.

“Evaporation Ponds presents the dazzling geometries of waste reservoirs created by natural gas production. Seen from above, their glowing expanses resemble luminous abstractions, recalling Colour Field painting or celestial photographs. Yet beneath this painterly surface lies a record of toxicity: landscapes engineered to dispose of industrial by-products, rendered strangely seductive through the impartial gaze of the satellite. By aestheticising what is ordinarily concealed, they expose the dissonance between beauty and harm at the heart of contemporary energy systems.” – Mishka Henner

Lawrence Lek

Work from Nepenthe.

“Nepenthe is an ongoing series of site-specific video games that explore themes of memory and identity in virtual worlds. Named after the fictional medicine for sorrow from Greek mythology, the installation was first realised at the 2021 Ljubljana Biennale within an ambient chill-out club environment. The meta-fictional installation creates an atmosphere of uncanny healing and escapism that suits our current age, while imagining a future of total automated entertainment. For its latest presentation at the QUAD, Derby and the Sydney Biennale, Lek explores the complex symbolism of one of the most iconic landmarks in Beijing, the ruins of the Old Summer Palace. Lawrence has created a new physical installation and game map based on the ruin of Da Shui Fa, the waterworks at Beijing’s Old Summer Palace. Widely regarded as the Garden of Gardens and the pinnacle of classical Chinese garden palace design, the Old Summer Palace was destroyed by a combined Anglo-French expeditionary force during the Second Opium War in 1860. Within the installation is a playable version of the game, where the ruin has been brought into a virtual museum on an island for further preservation. Built using the Unreal video game engine and featuring an electronic music score by the artist, the game is accompanied by a walkthrough short film that imagines a lone traveller stumbling across the island and encountering the ghosts of past civilisations within glowing ruins and pristine architecture.” – Lawrence Lek

Liz Nielsen

Work from her Black & Whites.

“Liz Nielsen’s innovative practice upends the traditional method of analog photography. Working in the color darkroom, she exposes light sensitive paper and processes it through conventional photographic chemicals, creating light-paintings by way of camera-less photography. Her photographs are made without a camera and can also be described as light paintings. Replacing the traditional negative with hand cut collages comprised of different colored gels, Nielsen projects her forms on to chromogenic paper creating bright and luminous abstractions. As the paper she uses is a negative rather than a positive paper, the colors of the gels are reversed often creating surprising new combinations where Nielsen’s compositional control comes face to face with the magic of photographic chemistry. The analog color darkroom is a magical place where a pitch-black environment allows only the vision of the mind’s eye to prevail.” – Danziger Gallery

Sander Coers

Work from POST.

“POST explores the intersection of constructed memories and perceptions of masculinity in visual culture through the use of AI-generated imagery. With this project, I aim to investigate the role of photography in shaping our perceptions of the past and question its authenticity in the age of digitalism where memories can be constructed and manipulated.

As a child, I spent hours immersed in my grandparents’ photo albums, fascinated by the details in each picture. I longed to connect with the people captured in those images and to have a glimpse into the past of my grandfather. In those albums, I discovered a part of my heritage tied to my grandfather’s birth in Indonesia during World War II. But there was a silence surrounding the past, making it difficult to grasp the full story.

To bridge that gap, I decided to train an AI bot to expand my family history based on my grandparents’ photo albums ranging from the 1940’s to the 90’s. These AI-generated images evoke similar elements found in my grandparents’ albums, landscapes, clothing, and colors from that time. However, everything is completely false. Combining the visual style of my grandparents’ albums with its vast database, the AI bot comes up with a dark-skinned man running through a field of flowers, located in what seems to be the Alps, an image that is not necessarily rooted in our visual memory. It’s interesting to see how the bot makes room for a new narrative.

The link between the concept of memory and masculinity in this project is multifaceted. On the one hand, memory plays a significant role in shaping our perceptions of masculinity over time. By looking at the recurring symbols in the AI-generated images, such as suits, belts, and hats, we can see how these have been used as stereotypical visual markers of masculinity through different eras. On the other hand, the project also explores the idea that memory itself, like masculinity, is a construct. Something that can be manipulated and fabricated. This raises questions about the authenticity of our memories, and how our perceptions of masculinity might be shaped by constructed memories rather than actual experiences.” – Sander Coers

Jesse Mockrin

Work from The marks of a stranger at Nathalie Karg Gallery.

“What makes Jesse Mockrin’s paintings sing is what she leaves out. All the pieces in The Marks of a Stranger at Nathalie Karg Gallery were inspired by Renaissance and post-Renaissance depictions of the rape of Lucretia, the possibly mythical royal outrage that ancient Romans credited with spurring them to oust their kings and found a republic. On smaller canvases, Ms. Mockrin crops out the woman’s face and most of her body, along with any context, everything but an elegant silver dagger pressing into bloodless, yielding flesh. You’re reminded of the value we still put on possession, in all its senses, the sexual, the impassioned, the violent, and of the all too common urge to destroy what we admire. In the larger scenes, Ms. Mockrin crops less, to even more powerful effect. Two Lucretias turn toward each other, in the diptych Weep into my eyes, their faces disappearing into the gap between the canvases. This gap is something like the caesura, or metrical break in a line of poetry, and it has its violent and sexual subtext, too. But most of all it’s a brilliant demonstration of how dramatically we can change our perspective on art history without changing the history itself.” – Will Heinrich

David Douard

Work from Permanent Hymns at Galerie Chantal Crousel.

“Language is the very basis of David Douard’s work. The texts and poems he collects on the Internet are manipulated, transformed in order to become a vital flow, feeding into his sculptures. Through language as an ingredient, David Douard redefines space as hybrid and collective by injecting anonymous, chaotic, deviant, ill and frustrating poems in it. As he recreates an infected environment where the real world used to be, the fantasy brought by new digital technologies expands.” – Galerie Chantel Crousel

Anthea Hamilton

Work from The Prude.

“… For the prude, modesty becomes extreme. The prude will not permit themselves, or others, sensuous enjoyment in life. Hamilton’s interest in the literary figure of “the prude” in part, references Cecil Vyse — the aloof character of E.M Forster’s A Room with a View (1908). Perceiving himself a sensitive intellectual, Vyse in reality, remains detached from lived experience. This obstinate self-awareness is matched by a cultivated, exaggerated style. This skewed mode of being, the prude-as-persona, serves a framework for the exhibition, where the prude is put to use as a proxy for Hamilton, who performs a “hands off” physicality.

The balance of materiality and economy is consistent with Hamilton’s practice, where tactile surfaces are often conceived through digital production. Suggestive of previous exhibitions and series, The Prude is largely a continuation of Hamilton’s The New Life at Secession, Vienna (2018). Four distinct interiors emphasise the confluence of domestic and gallery space through a number of wall treatments: airbrushed, textile clad and digitally printed wallpapers. One monochrome room at No.11 includes photographs by Lewis Ronald. Taken at Kettle’s Yard, the images show multidisciplinary artist Carlos Maria Romero interact with objects in the house, specifically, four brass rings and one jade ring (pre-1966) made by Richard Pousette-Dart.

The Prude also challenges relationships of scale and content, with large soft sculptures of moths and butterflies, and extravagant stone, marble, and walnut wavy boots. The effect is less an analysis of artifice, more a consideration of the way objects and images may influence meaning when treated to different processes of realisation.

Though Hamilton’s use of material may appear mercurial, her approach to form remains acute. Hamilton’s interest in the reducibility and expansion of spaces — in meaning, and as objects — harmonises visual material to a level plane. Here, bodies of research co-exist in a manner that questions the remit of research itself. The recurrence of familiar forms composes this reflexivity: both the work and Hamilton’s original interests are situated under renewed scrutiny. Here, the works behave twofold: they are objects as receivers of ideas, while appearing to emit ideas themselves.

Hamilton’s work holds an internal logic based on the cultural connections of things: the implicit subtext of an idea, the lineage and physical sensibilities of images, or the curiosity and adaptability of an object’s ontology. Tracing the shifting usages and sensitivities of an image, Hamilton brings the frequencies of authenticity and artifice into plain relief — their competing status collapsing. Multiple images or materials may extrapolate from one nucleus: a moth species, an Ed Ruscha gradient, a Robert Crumb figure, a Hamilton tartan swatch. The fundamental economy of Hamilton’s choice however, allows the obvious to be both simple and complex; the permutations are high, though the “origin” is concentrated and transformational…” – Thomas Dane Gallery

Anne de Vries

Work from his oeuvre.

“Anne de Vries is a Dutch artist working on the border of digital photography and other media, such as video and sculpture since 2003. De Vries is interested in how our understanding of reality is influenced by new media. He reconnects paradoxical elements, including different types of materials, to construct his works, often assessing how matter and information are constantly impacting one another.” – ISCP