For his debut exhibition as the executive director of Para/Site, Cosmin Costinas has curated a group show with work by Olga Chernysheva, Heman Chong, Federico Herrero, and John Smith. On first glance the title of the show is something of a conundrum, since all of the works––except for Herrero’s Intervention in and around Para/Site, 2011––were created before 2011. Cleverly, Costinas chose to bisect the gallery with a wall that cuts through the space diagonally, forming a triangle that highlights the impact of Chong’s Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you), 2008, which consists of one million blank black business cards scattered on the floor, putting viewers on literal shaky ground as they walk around (an act that feels vaguely rude given the importance of business cards in Hong Kong social exchanges). When viewed with events of 2011 in mind, Monument evokes the recent deaths of several prominent figures, such as Osama bin Laden, Elizabeth Taylor, Steve Jobs, Kim Jong Il and Václav Havel, as well as the rise of a new generation of protesters and activists, within a claustrophobia-inducing physical environment.

Smith’s twenty-four-minute video The Black Tower, 1985–87, is the earliest work on view, and it unifies all the pieces with its tragicomic depiction of a man’s descent into madness due to the appearance of a mysterious black tower. Chernysheva’s Alley of Cosmonauts, 2008, consists of twenty-five photographs that present a vision of crumbling empires and fleeting fame. Countering the bleakness, Herrero’s paintings inject the exhibition with wit, whimsy, and color. His blue abstract marks made directly on the walls, windows, floor, and ceiling here offer a contrast to the range of bleak visions in the other works, and serve to retrieve “Two Thousand Eleven” from seeming as an elegy for what is lost, allowing it to appear instead as a glimpse of what is hopefully to come.

— Doretta Lau