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THE
ANNEX
GALLERY
There are cities that return the gaze: they do not yield docilely to the frame, but instead address the viewer directly. They demand a way of looking that does not reduce, that does not close off meaning. Havana, in this Dossier conceived by the Cuban photographer Pedro Abascal, appears as an entity that observes, folds, and tenses itself; it refuses to become a mere setting or backdrop.
Cuba and Spirit in the Work of Ivonne Ferrer and Ciro Quintana
We have previously discussed how a photograph — or an image — can rearticulate the public perception of reality. How it can encapsulate experience, much like a verb does, rendering it transferable, exposable, and legible in a specific way. Any story is a continuum, difficult to apprehend in its full extension and multidimensionality. In order to be understood and fixed as experience — and as argument — it must be reformulated through its most expressive qualities...
Watching the American Alex Honnold perched on the skyscraper tower in Taipei—508 meters high—immediately carried me to the image of King Kong. With one difference: the latter has an intellectual author, the filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who directed the original 1933 film alongside Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO Radio Pictures...
The Clark Art Institute is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the United States. Located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, it has been devoted to the study and exhibition of art since 1955. The Institute uniquely combines a museum of the highest caliber with a leading research center—the Research and Academic Program—positioning it as an international point of reference for art historians, curators, and scholars...
It is generally understood that national museums ought to be the natural custodians of their cultural memory. Spaces where the history of national art is presented in an ordered and intelligible form. Where foundational images can still be contemplated. Yet, primarily for reasons of funding, an increasing number of state institutions...
Perhaps since the beginning of time, yet within the landscape of contemporary visual culture, polemic, interpellation, and reply operate as devices of symbolic production that act directly upon the processes of meaning and the circulation of images. These controversies, or provocations—beyond merely situating themselves within a context that already shapes the imago—become structuring agents that reconfigure spaces of reading, disarticulate iconographic hierarchies, and redefine interpretive frameworks.
Politics as Form in the Work of Kina Matahari
Within Next to Nothing, we will present an exhibition whose name is, precisely—and paradoxically—Next to Nothing. The Annex Gallery will host a pop-up show by the Cuban multidisciplinary artist Claudia Ricardo, known in the Cuban art circuit under the pseudonym Kina Matahari. Next to Nothing explores how tensions between opposites generate new realities—paradoxical thought, an oxymoron that, from within dilemma, produces a result free of ambiguity. Here, contradiction itself becomes the discourse that underlines it.
Featuring the formative body of work of a young Vietnamese photographer.
I met Mark at Annex Gallery, where he is working as an intern. Before I knew he made photographs, and therefore counted as an artist, I thought of him simply as someone who always needed a drink bottle within reach. One of those insulated flasks used by athletes or hydration fanatics that seemed to follow him more faithfully than his own shadow. I also knew, before seeing a single picture, that he supported Barça, a very popular club in this ecosystem and reason enough to label him an “irreconcilable enemy.” Still, perhaps because of his background and his way of being, he is not a visceral fan and does not behave like many of his peers, who are mostly Latin American.
More than a dozen portraits of the current President of the United States
Jorge Rodríguez Diez, known across the cultural circles of Havana, Madrid, and South Florida as R10, began his series on Donald Trump on November 9, 2016, only hours after he had won his first election. In the artist’s own words, it was an unexpected turn and a stark reminder that in today’s world anything—however unlikely or unthinkable—may indeed happen. The very first piece in the series was immediately acquired by collectors from North Florida, curiously together with a portrait of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.