Character Development | Co-presented by KADIST @ Minnesota Street Project Foundation
Public hours
Thursdays & Fridays, 3-7pm
Saturdays, 12-6pm
Minnesota Street Project Foundation and KADIST are pleased to present Character Development, a group exhibition that brings together six video installations, each featuring the artist on-screen in different guises and roles. Calling upon cinematic history through citation, reinterpretation, and critique, the artworks in the exhibition address contemporary social issues ranging from consumer culture to feminism, treating characters—in all their instability—as both structure and strategy.
Artists: Sophia Al-Maria, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Beatrice Gibson, Martine Syms
Public Programs
Out of Character, a reading
Thursday, September 17, 7pm
Exhibition Warehouse, 1201 Minnesota Street
Free and open to the public
An evening of short readings, connecting six writers’ personal perspectives as a way of decoding the layered meanings of the artworks in the exhibition Character Development, followed by a discussion moderated by Joseph del Pesco, KADIST Americas Director. With readings by Dodie Bellamy, Deena Chalabi, Shona Mei Findlay, Elena Gross, Glen Helfand, and Heidi Rabben.
AY NO SE, a performance by Sofía Córdova
Friday, October 23, 7pm
Exhibition Warehouse, 1201 Minnesota Street
Free and open to the public
As part of the Character Development exhibition, artist Sofía Córdova will stage a multi-screen, multi-sound performance of “ideas that cul-de-sac, then eddy, swirl up and swirl down, tornado, evanescent hurricane." Through video, sound, and text, Córdova and a constellation of accomplices will trouble our notions of self and other.
Artist Biographies
Sophia Al-Maria (b. 1983, Tacoma, WA; lives and works in London, UK) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker whose practice spans video, installation, drawing, and speculative fiction. Together with Fatima Al Qadir, she coined the term "Gulf Futurism" to describe the hyper-consumerist, dystopian conditions of contemporary Gulf life, and her work has since expanded to examine orientalism, resource extraction, colonial authority, and suppressed futures through the lenses of science fiction and horror. Her films move between myth and reportage, often drawing on her experience moving between the United States and Qatar. In 2023, she had a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, and in 2025 she was awarded the Frieze London Artist Award, for which she staged a daily stand-up comedy performance inside the Frieze tent.
Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986, Bangkok, Thailand; lives and works in Bangkok and New York, NY) makes videos, paintings, and installations that move fluidly between autobiography, spirituality, and geopolitical history. At the core of his practice is a narrative-based video work structured as an ongoing film series, populated by friends, family, and alter egos, drawing on Buddhist animism, the Anthropocene, and a post-human sense of collective grief. His 2021 twin films Songs for dying and Songs for living wove together footage of the 1948 Jeju Massacre, Thai pro-democracy protests, and the death of his grandfather. A major solo exhibition, Sing Dance Cry Breathe, was presented at Museum MACAN, Jakarta (2024–25), and his work appeared in the 14th Taipei Biennial (2025) and 36th Bienal de São Paulo (2025). A comprehensive monograph of Arunanondchai’s work, Songs for Living / Songs for Dying, was published in 2023.
Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, Canada; lives and works in New York, NY) works in photography, film, and installation, building dense archives of advertisements, catalogues, and found imagery to examine how consumer culture shapes desire, gender, and value. Her layered compositions borrow the visual grammar of design and marketing, to expose the systems of control embedded in everyday images. A two-part solo exhibition, Sara Cwynar and Sara Cwynar: Alphabet, drawing on the structural logic of Aby Warburg's image atlas opened at ICA Boston in 2025. That same year she was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Fine Arts.
Alex Da Corte (b. 1980, Camden, NJ; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) makes paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos that put American popular culture through a tragicomic pressure test. Rooted in Pop Art but inflected with psychological strangeness, his immersive environments draw on cartoon logic, store-window display, and the visual excess of consumer goods to explore desire, taste, and the absurdities of late capitalism. In his films he inhabits characters drawn from art history and television with deadpan intensity. He was commissioned for the Roof Garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021, and his work appeared in the Whitney Biennial in 2022. Surveys of his work have been held at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2025, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, in 2023, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2022–23. He was the 2023 Philip Guston Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and in October 2026 he will co-curate the largest exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s work in 30 years at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978, London, UK; lives and works between London and Palermo, Italy) makes experimental films that draw on avant-garde literature, poetry, and music to explore the personal and political through collective and improvisational forms. Her practice is resolutely feminist and citational, populating films with friends and influences—Kathy Acker, Gertrude Stein, Bernadette Mayer, Cornelius Cardew—treating collaboration and shared credit as formal principles. A complete film retrospective was presented at Fondazione Prada, Milan, in 2023. Her 2024 films Leisure, Utopic, and Someplace in Your Mouth both screened at TIFF Wavelengths. In 2021, she co-founded Nuova Orfeo, an experimental film and music initiative based in Palermo.
Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles) is one of the defining voices of her generation. She is an artist and director whose practice spans cinema, art, and theater. Her work has been exhibited widely at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the ICA London, and MOCA Chicago, and is held in significant public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, the Guggenheim, LACMA, and the Walker Art Center. Alongside her institutional practice, she has undertaken commissioned projects with Louis Vuitton, LeBron James, H&M, Rihanna, Nike, Prada, and Bad Bunny. Syms is the writer and director of The African Desperate (2022), which premiered as the closing night film of New Directors/New Films and is distributed internationally by MUBI. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, and the Future Fields Prize, among others. Her upcoming exhibition opens at Sadie Coles HQ this September and is followed by a solo exhibition at MOCA Los Angeles in 2027. In 2026, she was awarded Best Emerging Director by the Locarno International Film Festival for her debut feature At Night. She’s currently working on her next film.
KADIST is a non-profit contemporary art organization that believes artists make an important contribution to a progressive society through their artwork, which often addresses key issues relevant to the present day. Dedicated to exhibiting the work of artists—from more than one hundred countries—represented in its collection, KADIST affirms contemporary art’s role within social discourse, and facilitates new connections across cultures. With a hub in Paris and staff and advisors on five continents, KADIST organizes exhibitions, physical and online programs, and hosts residencies. KADIST stays apprised of developments in contemporary art via a global advisor network, and develops collaborations internationally, including with leading museums, fostering vibrant conversations about contemporary art and society.