Akeem Smith traverses the slippages between memory, the archive, and history, excavating the personal photographs and videos entrusted to the artist over the past decade by various family members, friends, and pivotal figures of Kingston’s dancehall community.

As planetary-scale computation enables us to measure the inner dynamics of Earth, calculating its past, present, and future, we see the dissolving of the outside/inside mythos—the “out there” is actually “in here.” Produced by the participants of The Terraforming research program at the Strelka Institute, Moscow, these video works cover a range of topics—from space and sci-fi to artificial food, landscaping, and geo-engineering—occupying the interstitial space between speculative design proposal and experimental filmmaking.

The Dawn of Day (2020) is a collaborative work produced in the context of the exhibition GOREGEOUS at the Confort Moderne, Poitiers. The video depicts scanned, zoomed-in details of pictures portraying the atrocities of war and its ensuing devastation. In an attempt to reach a heightened sense of closeness and intimacy with the picture, the scanner, regardless of its technical prowess, delivers a deadened, flattened vision. 

In the Vietnamese-American artist’s work, lo-fi science experiments enact a perpetual transfiguration of matter, catalyzing entropy with the elemental forces of gravity, smoke, water and fire. Emerging from the close-up world of her photographs, her newest video opens up the angle, embarking on a journey through the sprawling spaces of Ho Chi Minh City.

What’s the red thread between the 1989 Monday demonstrations in Leipzig, the extras’ rebellion at the Cinecittà Studios in the ’50s, a Black Friday event, and social ­distancing measures? In his latest cycle of works, the German artist and filmmaker examines the power structures in group dynamics, social behavior, surveillance and mass manipulation.