For Ed Atkins, Marten’s "Evian Disease" embodies ‘flatness’ in all its weightlessness, emotional deficit and hollowness of representation. The fact that it’s completely unapologetic about it is what makes it a dangerous piece to his mind.

“The faster you break it the faster we make it,” says the wooden column at one point, going on to acknowledge the bounteous economic logic of this reality with the observation that “production is sealed in gold.”Early on we see the black-and-white striped house Adolf Loos designed for Josephine Baker. It’s a cardboard model, of course; the plans were never realized. The house is an idea, an image, a virtual presence, a possibility, a provocation. Later in the film it reappears, reconfigured in different materials with a different range of qualities and surface finishes. “Why do so many things look the same, and only one of them is good?” asks a female voice. This is not the column’s voice but that of someone who sounds much like Marten herself. It is, in fact, her sister, one Marten speaking another Marten’s words. After all, in order to manufacture glamour, a little plagiarism is essential. And this process—call it borrowing, copying, paying homage, whatever—is both violent and comic.

In this hyper-realistic digitally rendered video, sandwiches are assembled in sequence. Each component, from the first slice of bread to the last, is dropped dramatically from a height, before bouncing and settling into place in slow motion. Mayonnaise, then ham, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and the final slice on top. This perfect yet uncanny choreography reads like an exaggerated, perverse take on ‘food-porn’ obsessed advertising campaigns. These sequences repeat, the sound gradually incorporates saws and machinery, echos from empty environments, pianos breaking, smashes, crashes and mechanical crescendos like jet engines alongside eerie drones, bells, and hard rummaging noises. Another piece of bread lands, some rubber baby dolls fall onto it, some brown slop, a blanket, denim jeans, some businessmen in suits, and more slop. Ketchup, then a union jack, all encased in the final layer of bread that falls to the top of the pile to the sound of a tolling bell. Infinite continuation, loop.

This video work shows the artist walking the streets of London, trailing a wooden drumstick along a series of metal railings, making a percussive, sometimes bell-like noise. The camera follows behind, focusing on the stick as it hits the railings. Occasionally it cuts to wide-angle shots, capturing the awkward and strangely humorous presence of other people. The work is a playful example of one of Alÿs’s ‘interventions’ in a city.

In “Samples II”, Alÿs walks around London, England with a drum stick in his hand, playing the sounds of metal fences beside him.

First film by Nobel Prize laureate Gao Xingjian.

Journalist Alastair Sooke sets out to discover just how much artists like Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali have influenced our modern lives, and explains why their art is considered so great.

Rachel Whiteread’s cast of a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End was hailed as one of the greatest public sculptures by an English artist in the twentieth century. Completed in autumn of 1993 and demolished in January 1994, House attracted tens of thousands of visitors and generated impassioned debate, in the local streets, the national press and in the House of Commons.

The Tender Skin, a struggling writer-turned-bartender grapples with longing and regret when a chance encounter reignites buried feelings at an art gallery.

remembering/modifying/developing is a musical belief-making system. It consists of three parts; a series of repeated and changing performances that are live and broadcasted as video afterwards; a sculptural installation that shifts its appearance every time I perform; and lastly, the sounds produced in each performance added to the sound from the previous time, creating denser and denser musical belief. I re-inhabit the physical and psychological patterns of this performance over and over again.

Irén, the museum hall guard, is happy to work amongst the great works of classical paintings. But one day, she finds herself confronted with a new, abstract painting. The incomprehensible work has a profound effect on her and will not let her rest. The next workday, she makes an unexpected move.

Essentieel (1964) is a short experimental film made by Belgian abstract painter Jef Verheyen in collaboration with poet Paul De Vree. A cinematic equivalent of Verheyen’s attempts in representing the warmth and vibrations of light in his monochrome or ‘essentialist’ paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s, the film plays on the tensions between abstract color surfaces and natural elements.

A short film shot on 16mm about memory, grieving, and siblinghood.

Through a collage of spaces and times, the interventions and interferences of nature and human beings in the south of Brazil reveals themselves... or try to hide.

“A Two Hearted Tale” is a heartfelt look at the history of the iconic trout label adorning Bell’s Two Hearted Ale, the Michigan-born beer that is the most popular IPA beer in America, and the label’s eccentric artist, Ladislav Hanka.

Arthur “Art” Prince finds escape from his otherwise unremarkable life by dominating the “Sting-Pong" scene at a local underground club. However, when a mysterious challenger suddenly appears, Art is forced to confront his self-destructive tendencies.