13 April 2020 Creative Time is calling upon its community of artists to respond to this unprecedented moment of uncertainty. Starting this week, Creative Time is commissioning a new artist each week to create a timely and original comic as a rapid response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative highlights the comic as a means for communicating complex ideas about society, honoring the medium’s long history of expressing the zeitgeist in times of war, distress, and upheaval. It also affirms the vital importance of artists’ voices in shaping contemporary discourse, while exploring the digital realm as an expansive and dynamic public space. Creative Time Comics 2020 features an array of international voices, offering a global perspective on the crisis. The resulting works will be released on Creative Time’s Instagram account weekly, and featured on our website and other social media platforms.
Creative Time Comics 2020 references our long history of interpreting digital platforms as forms of public space, and calling on artists to provide critical perspectives on current events. From the first iteration of Creative Time Comics in 2010, to our global initiative Creative Time Reports, we have long championed work that can circulate widely without physical proximity, and that transforms individual viewership into collective experience.
Each week we will release a new comic by a new artist addressing the ongoing global pandemic. The comics will appear below and on our social media as they are published.
The Comics
VICTORIA LOMASKO
Life Long Race
June 28, 2020
Describing her work as accurate, rather than political, Victoria Lomasko’s practice explores contemporary Russian society, especially the inner workings of the country’s diverse subcultures, such as Russian Orthodox believers, LGBT activists, migrant workers, sex workers, prisoners, and so on. Victoria Lomasko’s most recent book Other Russias (n+1 and Penguin, 2017), is a collection of ‘graphic reportages,’ a self-described style of art making and record keeping. In the past few years, mural making has become a central facet of her practice.
CHITRA GANESH
Anima Mundi
April 17, 2020
Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed media works on paper often expand upon historical and mythic texts as both inspiration and a point of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Her vocabulary draws from surrealism, expressionism, Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and South-Asian pictorial forms, which she connects with contemporary visual languages of mass media, including comics, science fiction, and illustration. Her upcoming projects include the 2020–21 Queer Power Facade Commssion at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. Ganesh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
CARLOS AMORALES
Offline Dark Age
April 24, 2020
Amorales’ practice encompasses animation, drawing, installation, video, and performance; he also collaborates with professional animators, composers, designers, musicians—and even wrestlers. Having grown up with the influence of both Mexican and European cultures, Amorales frequently explores the commonalities and disparities between the two by juxtaposing their distinctive vocabularies. His work is also deeply personal and reflective of emotional introversion; it journeys into a dark world of fantasy, blurring the line between the real and the imagined. Amorales lives and works in Mexico City.
PABLO HELGUERA
The Covid Prince
May 15, 2020
Pablo Helguera is a Mexican artist based in Brooklyn working with projects that range from drawing to socially engaged art. He has received the Guggenheim and Creative Capital Fellowships as well as the First International Award of Participatory Art of the Emilia Romagna region (Bologna). He is the author of several books including The Parable Conference (2014) and Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011).
FAIZA BUTT
The Necessity of Survival
May 22, 2020
Faiza Butt was born in Lahore, Pakistan, in 1973. She received her BA from the National College of Arts in 1993, with honours, and was awarded the Berger Gold Medal for outstanding student of the year. Butt’s elaborate drawings are obsessively crafted with passion and rigour, and create surfaces that hover between photography and embroidery. Born into a family of five sisters, gender related themes are close to her heart. She holds a master’s degree in painting with a distinction award from the Slade School of Fine Art, and a teaching certificate from the Institute of Education. Her work can also be found in private and public collections, including the British Museum, around the world.
KAMBUI OLUJIMI
Kilter
June 12, 2020
Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as “inevitabilities”. This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. His works have premiered nationally at The Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, and Mass MoCA. Internationally his work has been featured Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid; Kiasma Museum in Finland and Para Site in Hong Kong among others.
