Visual Arts

Borders and Crossings Examined through Film, Media, and Engaged Discussion at CICI’s Inaugural Conference

April 14, 2023
By Stella Kotik, Arts & Humanities Communications
How do border policies and technologies reanimate histories of racialized and imperial violence? How are climate and environmental changes affecting borders and their crossing? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian and human rights discourses on migration and refugees?

These are only a few of the complex questions posed and discussed at the inaugural two-day conference titled Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration, hosted by the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) this March. Co-...

Exhibit of emerging UC Berkeley artists’ work opens May 10 at BAMPFA

May 8, 2023
AJ Fox

It’s a Tuesday morning at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and Samuel Wildman is covering the wall of an art gallery with night-lights. At a glance, these objects could be mistaken for mass-produced lights from the local hardware store, the sort you might find installed in a child’s bedroom to ward off bedtime anxiety.

But take a closer look, and you’ll notice that each light is covered in a porcelain flame that seems more ominous than comforting. The sense of unease deepens when you...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/05/08/exhibit-of-emerging-uc-berkeley-artists-wor…

PBS Art21 Presents: Stephanie Syjuco (Season 9, Bay Area)

Art21 proudly presents an artist segment, featuring Stephanie Syjuco, from the "San Francisco Bay Area" episode in the ninth season of the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" series. "San Francisco Bay Area" premiered in September 2018 on PBS. Watch now on PBS and the PBS Video app: ...

Documentary "Borderlands" Featuring Ronald Rael (The New Yorker)

“Isn’t it so fascinating that the simple act of drawing a line on a map can transform the way we see and experience the world?” Ronald Rael observes in the opening of the documentary film “Borderlands,” which looks at communities in San Diego and Tijuana, Brownsville and Matamoros, and El Paso and Juárez. Rael, an architect, explores the area near the border fence outside El Paso with an eye tuned to reimagining the space around him and plotting ways to transgress it. He is accompanied by his nine-year-old son, Mattias, and he teaches the boy how to interpret a wall that has come to...

Elianna Ku, Recluse, 2021

Inspired by the Brown Recluse Spider, Recluse is the visualization of a secluded place for hermits and ominous activities to take place. I’ve used horror elements to illustrate the nightmarish experience of arachnophobia and seclusion. The place is infested with spiders, cramped with clutter; the entirety of the box is weighed down by the suffocatingly heavy atmosphere that contradicts the chilling coolness of the green-lit room. My intention with this work is to better understand human expression and unfold the human experience through conceptual elements, such as the pawn with the keen eye...