EINDHOVEN.- The exhibition Positions #2 brings together an ambitious and significant body of works by Anna Boghiguian, Chia-Wei Hsu, Nástio Mosquito and Sarah Pierce. Coming from different regions of the world, these four innovative artists have all come to international prominence over the last few years. They show for the first time a major part of their oeuvre, including new projects, in the Netherlands. The works are loosely grouped around the thematic of history, testimony and storytelling.

During the course of the exhibition there is a programme of staged public events including new performances, which will engage diverse audiences to the projects in new and unexpected ways.

Anna Boghiguian
Anna Boghiguian lives and works in Cairo, Egypt and elsewhere. For Positions #2 she will show a wide range of works which give an insight into her artistic production and how it has developed over the last twenty years. Along with drawings and paintings, the exhibition will consist of a series of new displays, including The Salt Traders (which premiered at the Istanbul Biennial 2015), Ani (developed for the Venice Biennial 2015), and a new installation developed at the Van Abbemuseum bringing together her series of Scissors books and paintings. Boghiguian is a prolific artist who is constantly sketching and painting on location. She often takes a certain site, whether the ruined medieval Armenian city-site Ani or a major river like the Nile or the Ganges, as the source for dense and associative explorations. In her installations and drawings she makes dynamic and resonating displays bringing together myths, ancient history and contemporary events and associations. The new work The S alt Traders for example, draws links between the salts mines of Turkey, the colonial exploits of Columbus, Ghandi’s famous Salt March and modern political realities interposed with symbols of the sea.

Chia-Wei Hsu
The practice of Chia-Wei Hsu (lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan) is often connected to Taiwan and the history of geopolitics in this region, especially during the period of the Cold War. Through retelling forgotten histories, he shows how the dense and complex layers of culture and histories fundamentally transform the lives of people now. His new video Ruins of the Intelligence B ureau (2015) is situated in the village Huai-Mo on the Thai-Burmese border. The film is made collaboratively with a priest who used to be a spy, other army veterans, and traditional Thai “Kam Nai” puppeteers. It brings an eloquent synthesis between traditional and new forms of storytelling. The exhibition will also show Memorial Chamber of the Intelligence Bureau , a new architectural study of the ruins of the CIA office there. Now disappeared and perhaps willfully forgotten by the inhabitants, Hsu and a team of professional architects literally bring them back from the ruins and give them form again. A second related video - Huai - Mo Village (2012) - will also be shown. Hsu’s work was recently shown at the 55th Venice Biennial, the Liverpool Biennial Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Museo Reina Sofia.

Nástio Mosquito
Nástio Mosquito (lives and works in Ghent, Belgium) uses performance, poetry, film, photography, music and spoken word to explore the contradictions and complexity of contemporary life through the eyes of the individual. The characters he plays in his works and performances may be fictional or composed of many experiences. Fundamental to his work is the idea that these stories and emotions reside in one individual and are experienced by one body. Language and testimony lie at the core of Mosquito’s practice. He plays with, performs and undermines language, and the resulting installations are emotive and provocative. Embodiment and selfhood, social position and economic power emerge as central concerns in the work. In this exhibition he will show two major video installations alongside each other, I am Naked (2005) and Ser Human o (2015). Ser Humano refers to a current topic of caged refugees, the mass of humanity seeking a safer live.

In 2014 Mosquito was the winner of the International Future Generation Art Prize for artists under 35. This year he had a solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and his work was shown at the Venice Biennale and the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art.

Sarah Pierce
Sarah Pierce (lives and works in Dublin, Ireland) uses performance, installations, video and archival material to research sites and contexts of artistic production and their public display. In a series of three installations she examines fixed and sedimented histories, referring to artistic figures of the 20th century: Eva Hesse (in Meaning of G reatness , 2006), Joseph Beuys (in Intelligen c e of th e Measured Ha nd , 2011), and El Lissitzky and Alice Milligan (in Gag , 2015). Pierce uses collaborative performances and installations that rework historical scenarios. The starting point is an archive which references both the immediate past and the ‘historical’ present. History becomes dynamic and malleable; a tool which can be used optimistically to disagree, to dissent, and most importantly, to self-determine one’s own intellectual “craft”. Through the duration of the exhibition, Pierce will develop a series of live events.

Earlier this year Pierce participated in a group show at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and in the past years her work has been shown at Project Arts Centre, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, the Lyon Biennial and with If I Can’t Dance.