Author: jeph945

During the pandemic, I was very lucky to live in a small house surrounded by trees and the ocean on an islet in Hong Kong, which helped tremendously to ease the fear of eschatology in the time of quarantine and lockdown.

INVASORIX is a feminist/queer working group that produces publications, performances, songs, and videos to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting the planet and relating to each other. In their projects, they are committed to collaboration and solidarity as a way of facing the current state of things in society.

Dealing with a wide range of themes, these works represent Nothando Chiwanga’s performance and photographic practice. Reflections shows an almost deserted kombi rank (commuter van stop) in Harare, a rare occurrence before the COVID-19 related lockdown, and is quite prophetic of the ghost city Harare has become during the pandemic. Beyond this, it reveals the poor maintenance of the majority of the city, which is usually obscured by the constant throng of people. Trapped addresses the historical suppression of black women. An Act and Zvokudya (Food) are, by extension, a commentary on the need to counterbalance rising unemployment and poverty with education—issues that have been exacerbated by the global pandemic. In a nation where we do not ask enough questions, the national and municipal government systems have taught us to be resilient. We are constantly negotiating ourselves into situations that lead us to suppressing our emotions instead of expressing them.

Tamás Kaszás’ Sci-Fi Agit Prop (The Science Fiction of Agitative Propaganda) is a series of graphic works on a bulletin board. The posters are displayed as the communiqués of a fictional, self-sufficient, utopian community living in a rural area. While Sci-Fi Agit Prop is set in an imagined future and puts forth possible practices and knowledge after a fictitious political-economic-technological collapse (“innovate and simplify,” “conquer the permafrost”), this futurist project from the past, has now, in the current moment of rupture, arrived in the present.

In 2015, Mona Marzouk created a series of eight murals at Villa Romana in Florence, the city from where the Medici once rose to power, the formidable ruling dynasty of Renaissance Italy and the potent patrons of a new era in art.

These photographs are derived from La Hortua inhospitalaria, a performative action by artist David Lozano, presented in the context of the “World Summit on the Arts and Culture for Peace” in 2017.

In procession, a group of musicians and activists in a provincial shipyard town are walking along the main street leading down to the Volga river wearing paper hats.

Tropical prints and patterned fabrics have long been part of Joiri Minaya’s critical toolbox, having incorporated these materials in her work via photographs, performances, and installations.