Darren Bader

The Vagrant

XPLEX (proposal for exes)

proposals for Sculpture #4, Sculpture #3.95, Sculpture #3.985, (Sculpture #5) and Sculpture #7

Karimah Ashadu 

Machine Boys

Kobby Adi & Nina Porter

Carriers and Manifestations

Nate Boyce

Discipline

Lee Kit

Cloud talks (III)

Sin Wai Kin

The Fortress

Diego Marcon

Fritz

Kobby Adi

Lesson

Ellen Pau

Yau Ma Tei Massage Body Movies (油麻地拍身推拿)

Enzo Camacho & Amy Lien

Decomposition Animation

The Universe

Dolle

Rei Hayama

Hollow-Hare-Wallaby

400 feet of factory fresh unexposed VISION3 500T 5219/7219 Colour Negative 16mm film, buried in the Camden Art Centre garden for an indefinite period of timed in the Camden Art Centre garden for an indefinite period of time

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

17SC-06Trees-78Mountains-78Mountains-08Special-08Special-39Sky-17Trees

Jill Magid

Hand-hacked Bouquet 2

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

merry-go-round like a lullaby

Paul Pfeiffer

Vs. (Battle of Brisbane)

Cici Wu

Belonging and Difference

Langit Lupa

Kawita Vatanajyankur

Pendulum

Leung Chi Wo

My Random Diary 0

Hand-hacked Bouquet 10

Kang Seung Lee

The Heart of A Hand

you build a home in my mind

P. Staff

La Nuit Américaine

Shala Miller

Genesis

Vs. (Fight of the Century)

Helen Marten

Writing A Play (dark blue orchard)

Jes Fan

Palimpsest

Aki Sasamoto

Point Reflection (Video)

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Mouth 1

Angela Su

The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

For Bruce (致布魯斯)

Sonia Boyce

FEELING HER WAY

Lydia Ourahmane

Tassili

Tiffany Sia

What Rules The Invisible

Samson Young

The messengers

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

The Same Track

James Richards

Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold

Walid Raad

Festival of Gratitude, Mao Zedong

Alex Da Corte

ROY G BIV

Nikita Gale

HOME

Shirin Neshat

Ungrateful/Blasphemy (Fragment 1)

A Dream of Wholeness in Parts

Tony Cokes

SM BNGRZ 1 + 2

Weather Bar Forecast #1

Juria Toramae

Pelagic Dreams

Shuang Li

ÆTHER (Poor Objects)

Yee I-Lann

Tikar Reben 

Zheng Bo

Le Sacre du printemps

Tao Hui

Being Wild (奔放)

It's Always You

Kenneth Tam

Silent Spikes

Martine Syms

Carolyn Lazard

Weather Bar Forecast #2

Scale of Injustice

Ugly Plymouths

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Paradise

Ho Tzu Nyen

Waiting (Ripon Chowdhury with Ho Tzu Nyen)

Klara Liden

You're all places that leave me breathless

The Spade 

Alan Kwan

Bad Trip

Jonathan Horowitz

Best Picture

Quỳnh Lâm

I Am Not A Spy (video performance)

My Random Diary

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Lovers Revolt, Lovers Revolve 1

Evil.80.Empathy?

S1:E4

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Boat People

Charles Atlas

A Prune Twin

Blink and blank

Imran Perretta

the destructors

The Prince of Homburg

Vvzela Kook

Drowned in, or not in the swimming pool

Unfinished Return Of Yu Man Hon

Thao Nguyen Phan

Becoming Alluvium

Lawrence Lek

AIDOL 爱道

Knit

Pulsating Atom (跳動的原子)

Martha Atienza

Tarong 11°16'12.0"N 123°45'23.4"E 2019-08-06 Tue 2:27 PM PST 1.50 meters High Tide Kaongkod 11°16'12.0"N 123°45'23.4"E 2019-08-03 Sat 12:14 PM PST 2.03 meters High Tide

Mute Grain (潘濤阮)

Andrew Thomas Huang

Kiss of the Rabbit God (兔兒神)

Su-Mei Tse

Shaping (塑形)

Wong Ping

Wong Ping's Fables 2 (黃炳寓言)

The Modern Way to Shower 摩登沐浴法

On Venus

Julian Simmons

EGG: Sarah Lucas & 750 eggs

Panangatan 11°09'53.3"N 123°42'40.5"E 2019-10-24 Thu 6:42 AM PST 1.29 meters High Tide 2019-10-12 Sat 10:26 AM PST 1.40 meters High Tide

Yuri Pattison

sunset (provisioning)

Capricorn

Robert Sandler

Fatal Loins

WangShui

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances

Garden

Do Nut Diagram

Jeremy Deller

Everybody in the Place, An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992

Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in the year of the golden rooster, 1981 (1974 in the Ethiopian calendar), on a Sunday. If she were Ghanaian, her name would be akosua/akos for short. During the same year of her birth, there were perhaps 22 recorded Atlantic Ocean hurricanes and 4 Indian Ocean cyclones close to Mozambique. The Brixton riots took place; the song “endless love” is popular on the airwaves; Umkhonto We Sizwe performs numerous underground assaults against the apartheid state. The Boeing 767 makes its first air flight; Zaire is the premier producer of the world’s cobalt; Winnie Mandela’s banishment orders are renewed for another 5 years. In Chile, the Water Code is established, separating water ownership from land ownership; two people were injured when a bomb exploded in a Durban shopping centre; Bobby Sands dies. There was an earthquake that killed maybe 50 people in China; an International NGO Conference on Indigenous Populations and the Land is held in Geneva; the name 'internet' is mentioned for the first time; there is a coup d’etat in Ghana; princess Diana of Britain marries Charles; Bob Marley dies; an annular solar eclipse is visible in the Pacific Ocean. Apartheid SA invades Angola; AIDS is identified/created/named; Isabelle Allende begins to write 'The house of the spirits'; Greece is struck by three earthquakes over a period of 11 days; the Slave trade is officially abolished in Mauritania; the remains of the Titanic are found; Muhammad Ali retires; USA and Japan are in the leading position in the seabed-mining industry; the 15th IVF baby is born; Thomas Sankara rides a bike to his first cabinet meeting; Machu Picchu is declared a heritage site; a series of apparitions of The Virgin Mary commence to a group of school girls in Rwanda; also similarly, in Yugoslavia. New Zealand recognised 16 rivers and lakes as 'outstanding' and protected them in perpetuity. Her paternal grandmother dies affected by dementia; MTV is launched; it is said that right whales born in that year, are taller than right whales born since. Other concurrent events of the year of her birth, and of her lifetime, are perhaps too many to fully know. Some things continued, some transformed, some shifted, others ended(?), some began… The world’s human population was then apparently at around 4.529 billion... today she (Bopape) is one amongst 7 billion - occupying multiple adjectives.

Dineo Seshee Bopape’s artistic process engages with the matter of self-sovereignty, 'exploring the metaphysics of "self-presence" (the sense of being present to one’s self) and matter (in the literal, alchemical and symbolic sense) often surveying the wounds of the personal and collective body; this at times through the historical contexts backdrop of colonialisms, imperialism, and slavery.' Informed by Afro-diasporic spiritual aesthetics, she interweaves these themes through her large-scale, immersive installations that often encompass storytelling, sculpture, drawing, video, and sound.

For further information about these artists please click 

Dineo Seshee Bopape

, John Coltrane’s seminal 1964 recording plays in the background as the artist licks chocolate from a pane of glass, slowly replacing it with her own image. Through this sensual yet laborious process of unmasking, Bopape is consciously countering the erasure of the lives and work of Black women. Since the colour of chocolate parallels the colour of her skin, it’s as if she’s consuming herself, uncovering the actual self behind what is visible at first glance.


Dineo Seshee Bopapea, courtesy of Blank Projects, South Africa.

, 12 August- 18 November 2023, A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town. Image courtesy the artist and A4 Arts Foundation, Cape Town

 a love supreme

 (2023) is a short video that cohabits the complex realms of the artist’s sculptural and installation works. Over a series of largely depopulated scenes – a bedroom, an empty swimming pool, a backyard and other snowy vistas – we hear a voice-over repeatedly set the scene for a would-be play, each a dizzying revision that replaces the last. Here we discuss Marten’s impetus for making the film, her reasons to be merciless when making an artwork, and the need to talk about the weather.



, I was taken by the voice-over, read by Gwendoline Christie, which describes a process of the excision of body parts – of cutting off a leg, an arm and removing innards. It seems you want to begin by throwing out the body.




This text is excerpted from a chapter in Roger Caillois’ book 

 (1961) that describes the social function of games. It recounts a dystopic Inuit game of cup-and-ball, where a single participant is disguised as a schematically stylized animal – a fish or a bear – and ‘stabbed’ many times by countless friends engaged in playing the game. The highly specific nature of the play means that each mode of attack, the positioning of the knife in the hand, the rhythmic move towards the act of stabbing must be performed with the correct gesture and in the correct order; if the participant fails in this replication of given movements, the knife is passed to the next player. Throughout the actions of attack and withdrawal, the player with the knife must narrate the story of a journey or a hunt, enumerating each of the phases of attack and dismemberment. The player is free to envisage beyond animal prey, occasionally substituting the proxy ‘animal’ player into the dialogue and weaponizing the attack upon the friend in costume: I beat 

head. The dialogue that Caillois recounts is so abrupt, so distinctly unadorned in its literal linguistic tone, but the parsing of the actions themselves is tender and specific to the degree of total mania: 

 folds the skin in half, soaks it in urine, dries it in the sun

 I love the idea that within the pathology of a social death or excoriation, there are multiple speeds of revelation: that within the refrain of total violence, there is equally tactile specificity and instinct for preservation. I found the whole constellation fascinating, imagining that the use of animals as prey within the format of the game is something of an eccentric surplus, a kind of cute security function (like a notation) that permits social violence at a soft remove. I imagined the replication of this text within the video as a prologue, a cataloguing of a very specific emptying out of literally depicted figuration. The final words – 

the pieces for the dogs, the dogs eat – 

are algorithmic in the sense of having reduced the human physicality to zero – a subtraction – whilst offering a digestive filling – an addition – to the roaming animals forthcoming. The text is a portent of sorts, theatre in a diagrammatic and deliberate mode, but absolute abstraction too, if considering a system for quantifying pleasure.


The film shows a series of depopulated habitats that codes as a generic suburban North American town, including a vacated home and barn surrounded by woodland. Contours of lives are felt but not made visible. A sense of unease is underscored by the strike of a pensive piano chord and occasional digital brush of sound. What led you to want to make these environments for this film?



The score is brilliantly composed by Beatrice Dillon, using physical modelling synthesis combined with live piano and clarinet sequences. The sound terms of such a method of composition enable the building of certain hypothetical ‘spaces’ and reciprocal ‘instigators’, such that you can invent the tonal quality of both the receiving environment and the tool that activates it: a shape made of lead struck by an object made of glass wrapped in leather, for instance. The approach is radically expansive, but of course the sonic delivery of the score does not itemize the ingredients. This type of hyper-specificity is also important to each of the environments of the video. Every scene unfolds with an incredible amount of detail – the wooden remnant texture and number of holes excavated in a concrete wall; the slump and quantity of snow on a branch; the positioning of planks and stones on a burnt-out car. Each of these details is pre-drawn in ink, plotted by me in endless written descriptions and animation cel sheets. I’m interested in this spatial paradox of absurdly laboured detail existing in a suspended state, piled up until it almost negates itself to emptiness. The cognitive dissonance is extreme because these are all plausible environments – both domestically and as part of a ruptured capture of nature – but they are exactly nowhere. Of course there are inferences, and these are important too, but the gesturing is miscellaneous and changing rather than precisely underlined. And this simulation exists also in multiple dimensions because the literal substance we are crafting is a treachery, the ghost matter of CGI. Akin to the opening prologue, the dissection of parts is both overarchingly swift – the generic blanketing of snow – but sadistically controlled: the arrangement of objects on a table, how each falls into a geometrically gridded, diagram-like experiential traffic. These are careful instigations of overlap. And snow, too, like a white tablecloth, like an empty page, is a flirtatiously invitational plane.



Rather than encountering your own depictions of humans, we see the appearance of people or bodies through the quotation of other artists’ works, for example Gustave Courbet’s 

 (1933), alongside a more pornographic-type image pinned to a clothes line and flapping in the breeze. It is perhaps no accident that in two of these images we are looking at a vulva. Could you say something about the selection of these artworks?



I love this question! Each of the images belongs to a varying scale of unabashed perversity and indulgence. The Courbet is shorthand and universal. The pubic hair, the opened thighs are radically present and dense, but the body is dimensionally cropped in the manner of a bizarre amputation: there are no full limbs to mobilize the prowess of this implied female shape, so the body instead is inferred as a supplicant, a kind of ambiguous votive vessel to the be fucked and filled on repetitive terms that do not belong to the woman herself. Of course the title implicates both crassly and with wonder, but ultimately the image-vulva belongs to a domain of male structural power. The controversy of Balthus is his erotic fixation on young girls, but this abject complication leads to some very provocative painterly subversions. 

is paired in the video with a second Balthus painting, 

 (1955). The centralized graphic protagonist of 

 is an entirely white-clad and face-obscured baker/decorator carrying a wooden plank. The symbolism is fervent: the man totally unspecific, de-facialized, but radically phallic in his kinetic posture – the plank is diagonally elongated and upright in intent! In pairing the images side by side, I have deliberately rescaled the naked child to the same size as the mercantile man. They are newly equivalent forms. What’s interesting between them is the corruption of detail: the child figure may be completely naked, but she is highly stylized, softened to the degree of becoming only a few slight curve inflections, more like an economically moulded piece of bone than actual radiant flesh. She is an absent and unparticipating figure; the mantel she stands before becomes another surrogate and densely decorative vulva. The street scene in contrast is impressively detailed and painstakingly choreographed, such that every bodily interaction is an attentive part of highly mobile scenography.

In making a simple size analogy between the figures, the parity between male and pubescent child is staggeringly unhinged; terminologies of desire are sublimated beneath algorithmic painterly tricks: geometric forms that offer vectors and holes of flight. The pornography is equally removed, rendered in black and white as a photograph, but with none of the wet pleasure-warmth of any kind of sex. The bodies are once again cropped so they are part of an abstract figuration rather than pure depiction. In all cases, the images have been manipulated in CGI to appear as on paper – fly-posted, pasted to walls, blowing in the breeze. There is a recasting of historicized painting as deliberately causal, excerpted imagery, as casually snipped Jpegs. The historicizing intent has been stripped out, with each image not an icon but part of a poor relegation. The simple answer to this question would be that as bodies, we are all mad particles, raggedly sacks and a collection of small holes in continual mobile use; but the penetrative power in meaning and metaphor alike is continually rearranging. The more complicated answer is likely an avalanche of gender or sexuality marginalization and exploitation.

An occasional light wind animates sequences, while in other moments other seasons, rain or fire takes a prominent role; at other points we become aware in a shift in daylight. These more abstract forms of animation seem to hold fascination – it feels as if you are drawing our attention to the way moments and sequences of experience are in fact indirectly ordered by outside conditions.



, there is a deliberate reckoning of the world as complicit in a type of innate ‘languaging’, whereby all interactions of matter, in a default atomic way, are part of the mobile wonder of the universe: all pieces of all things scattered and overlapping in infinite combinations of tactile exchange. This premise is reliant on the idea of a default mode of forming grammar – rhythms and punctuation – from object overlap, from sound, from structure, from metaphor, and thus creating new vehicles of meaning into which bodies and conditions plunge themselves: a kind of Newtonian action and reaction clause. Birds take flight, accumulate and land, their silhouettes becoming punctuation and rhythm like notes on a music score. Wind is myth and temperament. Weather is analogous as a personal emotional barometer – the nuanced intensities of apathy or bodily dissatisfaction – but it is also social code and distraction. We talk about weather colloquially to disguise discomfort or alleviate social fatigue. Time, here, then, is perhaps not meant as pulse or metronomic speed but as more physical span or length – the space between 

 – but not something segmented like a ruler where portions are literal, but something mythic and encompassing, with the possibility of even and uneven behaviour, like a tree or a bush. The weather is conceptual instigator: beautiful; glacially erratic.


In one striking scene we see a deer that appears shot, its mouth bloody, while a drawing of a deer is lodged under the animal; an iPhone and a paper cut-out in the shape of a snowflake rest on its side as a more realistically rendered snow falls from above. Do you see your work as producing or commenting upon forms of dissociation that otherwise linger or are hidden in today’s dizzying material world?



I don’t see them as dissociation, but more an optimistic, wilful defiance. The dead deer is a literal bleeding animal, but the accumulation of parts atop its body are not composed for the convenience of presentation, rather they belong to the reality of our throbbing human insatiability. Pleasure taken and pleasure abandoned. The iPhone and the paper snowflake are loaded motifs, metaphor and analogy alike – they are 

 – but they are equally humble and shorthand. There is a powerful, refined stillness to the deer, despite its evidently draining prowess, to even offer itself as a tablet upon which to host these items – a collusion in the sacrilege of desecration that triumphs as a kind of elegiac clarity. The phone is replaced at times by ribbons, by oranges and lemons, by an owl that lands to post vigil – the symbolism is hefty. But there is absolutely no irony to this circulation of objects. The deer is the mystical avatar of unplottable realms of language or speech as the spectre. It is also desperate romanticism, unreasonable silence, passionate absurdity – love and shame conjoined.



We tend to think of the descriptive role of language as additive, as if we are endlessly refining the realms of the sensory and what is observed or thought. However, it doesn’t come as a surprise when the sentence ‘Mathematics is a major category’ is firmly uttered by the voice-over – given that one often feels when watching this film that one is in the realm of a visual and linguistic play of subtraction and addition. Indeed, there is even the use of homonyms of ‘nun’ and ‘deer’ to imagine a calculus of objects culminating as something both expensive and voided.



 became an important guide. The book speaks about complicated and fanatic systems of quantifying pleasure, the social function of games and performance, the corruption of intoxication, chance, competition and all manner of other strangeness. There is a refrain in the script, repeated numerous times: 

butterfly, plus elephant, plus cat, plus dead man, plus sailor, plus nun equals deer

. This text is taken from the Caillois book.

screening

Medium	Video
Duration	7 minutes 51 seconds
Edition	Edition of 3 + 1AP

Akeroyd Collection

Works

Dineo Seshee Bopape, a love supreme, 2005-2006