Spring programs in Paris, SF, offsite, and online

Kadist Paris

Spring exhibition
“Habits and customs of _______ are so different from ours that we visit them with same sentiment that we visit exhibitions”
February 20–April 30
Opening: Friday, February 19, 6–9pm

Curated by: Biljana Ciric
With: 3-ply, Irena Haiduk, Ho Tzu Nyen, Siniša Ilić, Li Liao, Lu Huanzhi and occurrences of works by Eva Barto
See here for details on public programs.

With what sentiment do we visit exhibitions today? This exhibition and series of events explore models of working within the cracks of the art system, questioning its expectations, and parameters founded on geo-political stereotypes, and its image-based art history. A number of works within the exhibition abandon the image and the visual, others question territories as fixed boundaries proposing threads instead. These practices could be understood as strategies of active withdrawal. Withdrawal as a way of staying away from the mainstream, and gaining autonomy; withdrawal as a two-way strategy that allows one to go into the world and to leave it; withdrawal as a needed break, as a form of self-cultivation.

“To become an invisible man, a man who will not be captured, motion-stopped, by images, means to become the opposite of a ‘man of images’—to resist the order of reality that is embedded in our bodies.”(1)

Biljana Ciric, curator in residence at Kadist Paris from December to February 2016 is an independent curator based in Shanghai.

(1) Excerpt from Buried Alive by Lu Huanzhi.
 

Spring artist in residence: Shooshie Sulaiman
Residency: March–June

Often drawing on her experience and memories, Shooshie Sulaiman (lives and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) makes works and site-specific installations that create highly nuanced and personal interactions with their subjects and audiences.


Kadist San Francisco
3295 20th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110

Spring exhibition
Hank Willis Thomas: Evidence of Things not Seen
February 24–April 9
Opening: Wednesday, February 24, 6–9pm

Borrowing its title from James Baldwin’s 1985 essay, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen,” this solo exhibition challenges notions of presence and absence, sound and silence, and visibility and invisibility in the work of Hank Willis Thomas. Through his installations, photography, videos, and media works, Hank Willis Thomas uses images and themes from advertising and pop-culture to expose their reinforcement of generalizations surrounding economics, gender, race, and ethnicity. In his text-based works, “voices” are disembodied or silent, but their narratives and images reveal a hauntingly voluble history of resistance. Similarly, where figures are visually present, words are absent, suggesting a tension between when, how, why, and who society enables to speak. Including recent installations that incorporate the echo of pioneers of racial equality—like Baldwin and Nelson Mandela—the artworks comprising the “evidence” foreground the complexities of how visibility and invisibility are inexorably attached to identity. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of film screenings curated by Hank Willis Thomas and presented in partnership with the Roxie Theater, San Francisco.

Spring artist in residence: Yin-Ju Chen
Residency: February 21–May 15
Exhibition: May 4–June 18

Working with video, drawings and installations, Taipei-based artist Yin-Ju Chen investigates notions of power and authority in human society, collective (un)conscious, and more recently the influences of pseudoscience such as cosmology and mysticism on human behavior. For her residency, Yin-Ju Chen will develop a new multimedia installation drawing from science-fiction and conspiracy theory. 


Kadist offsite

Kadist + SFAI artist in residence: Mariana Castillo Deball
Residency: March 14–April 16
Exhibition: April 14–July 30

Deball arrives in San Francisco to develop a project exploring the tension between indeterminacy and narrative in archaeology and art, resulting in a solo commission and exhibition at San Francisco Art Institute.

Camera of Wonders curated by Jens Hoffmann
April 20–July 3

After its presentation at Centro de la Imágen in México City, Camera of Wonders travels to Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia.


Kadist online

Instagram Residency: Artist not at the Studio, Curator not at the Office

Every month, Kadist invites one artist or curator to take over our Instagram account for a period of two weeks to present their ongoing research, scenes from their everyday lives, or studio visits. Previous and upcoming participants include Mario Garcia Torres, Latitudes, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, Arseniy Zhilyaev, Marcelo Cidade, Jennifer West, Li Liao, and Adam Carr.


*(1) Li Liao, Rather turn on the cellphone, than bore a hole on the wall in order to get some light from neighbor’s house, 2016. (2) Siniša Ilić, Without a Proposition for a Concrete Solution, 2016. (3) Shooshie Sulaiman, Maka Panau/Tinea Vesicolor, 2005. (4) Hank Willis Thomas, Black Righteous Space: South African Edition, 2014. (5) Yin-Ju Chen, One Universe, One God, One Nation, 2012. All images courtesy the artists and Kadist Art Foundation.