Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Ocula Report 58th Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times 24 May 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula The 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times (11 May–24 November 2019), certainly benefitted from low expectations, given the lacklustre curatorial of the previous edition, when different segments of the show were conceptually framed with titles like 'Pavilion of Joys and Fears' and 'Pavilion of Colours'. Add to this the...
Ocula Report Gwangju Biennale: Imagined Borders 20 Sep 2018 : Tessa Moldan for Ocula 'I have felt persecuted for weeks by this same asphyxiating dream.' So narrates the forlorn Portuguese speaker in Kiluanji Kia Henda's film, Concrete Affection – Zopo Lady (2014), as city scenes and modernist buildings in Luanda flit past the camera's lens. The narration is pulled from Another Day of Life (1971), Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski's...
Ocula Report 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London 27 Oct 2017 : Amina Diab for Ocula Visitors arriving in the courtyard of Somerset House for 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair (5–8 October 2017) were greeted by a large work by Pascale Marthine Tayou entitled Summer Surprise (2017). In this site-specific installation, wooden spears crisscrossed by colourful cobblestones made up a structure that sat atop the Edmond J. Safra...
Ocula Report Sydney Summer Report 12 Jan 2016 : Rachel Fuller for Ocula When Silence Falls Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 19 December 2015 - 1 May 2016Currently showing in the contemporary galleries of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, When Silence Falls is a collection-based, group exhibition curated by AGNSW curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, Cara Pinchbeck. When...
