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

Naoya Hatakeyama

Work from Tsunami Trees.

“Tsunami Trees, which Hatakeyama has been working on since 2018 and has culminated in a photobook in 2024, is a group of works documenting the trees and landscapes left behind on the Pacific coast that retain the traces of the tsunami. In 2017, six years after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Hatakeyama came across a walnut tree on a riverbank upstream from the Kesen River, which flows through his hometown of Rikuzentakata. The tree, which Hatakeyama calls ‘half a tree’, has abundant foliage on its left half, but the trunk of the right half was damaged by the objects from the Tsunami, preventing water and nutrients from reaching the dead branches. Driven by the urge to find similar trees, Hatakeyama traveled around the Tohoku region with the help of his acquaintances, and when he came across trees that had been affected by the disaster in various ways, he recorded them with his large format camera. The Tsunami Trees captured in the photographs bring us back to our awareness of the relationship between trees and people; at times the trees are revered as a steadfast presence, and at other times they are inconsiderately cut down and used. The newly constructed seawalls and highways around the freestanding trees also provide a glimpse of the time that has passed since the disaster, evoking our individual memories.” – Taka Ishii Gallery

Yang Yongliang

Work from Imagined Landscape.

“Imagined Landscape is conceived during the pandemic. When the world turned black and white during the 2020/2021 COVID lock-down, I stayed in New York re-thinking about Shanghai. The pandemic has affected everybody in the world, even though we might not be able to articulate what’s been changed in us, we’re all responding to it in one way or the other. For more than a decade, I always find peace in my own works; they are a sanctuary for me, like a hermit having their own private utopia. But as I look at them now I almost find them too heavy to go back to, so I imagined something new, something charming and delightful, with colors. This series is dedicated to a shifting world, and especially for the ones who remain hopeful moving forward.” – Artist’s site