Layered Landscapes
The films of Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, reflect on environmental challenges to communities through economic change, focusing on the redevelopment and gentrification of the landscape caused by new infrastructure or tourism projects, or natural forces such as recent storms and earthquakes.
Prabhakar Pachpute comes from successive generations of mineworkers, and creates immersive, large-scale drawings, his use of surrealist, hybrid figures in spectacular imagined landscapes critically addressing issues of labour, the individual and the collective.
From the Dominican Republic, Firelei Báez’s fantastical, colourful and intricate paintings combine visual cues spanning from lavish textiles and wall coverings with colonial-era floral motifs to calligraphic patterns, hair textures, feathered headdresses and beaded jewellery.
(South Africa) makes powerful, unsettling sculptural installations that utilize everyday, commonplace materials such as bricks or soil to draw together the celestial and the earthly, the bodily and the metaphysical.
Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary American artists working today, her work centred on family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Her complex and multi-award winning body of work in photography and video speaks beyond the Black experience to encompass the complexity of the broader human experience, representation and social inclusion.
Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi makes poignant, intense videos that ask questions about how we might engage with, relate to and confront, painful moments within a nation’s histories and how we remember conflict without recourse to nostalgia or jingoistic propaganda.