Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Stefana McClure, Protest Stones (Brexit) (2016). Paper-wrapped stones. Left 6 x 11 x 8 cm, right 9 x 12 x 9 cm. Courtesy Bartha Contemporary.
Bartha Contemporary was founded by Swiss-German couple Niklas and Daniela von Bartha in January 2000. The gallery relocated to its current space in Fitzrovia in early 2012. The program has a strong emphasis on non-figurative and conceptual contemporary art. The gallery regularly participates at international art-fairs.
Ocula Insight Frank Gerritz at Bartha Contemporary, London 17 June 2016 Frank Gerritz is a sculptor, but this isn’t immediately apparent from a cursory glance at his most recent work. The artist’s current exhibition at Bartha Contemporary in London, MDF (13 May – 2 July) includes pencil drawings on MDF alongside recent drawings on paper. A concurrent and related exhibition at the Sleeper...
Ocula Insight Adam Barker-Mill at Bartha Contemporary, London 20 January 2016 Who has been the biggest influence on your work?Josef Albers.Looking at your wall installations, what is it that lead you to create works in this style?My first light piece was an attempt to put light of a certain colour into the context of light of a second colour in order to experience how changing the intensity and hue of the...
Related Press Kate Shepherd and Allyson Strafella at Bartha Contemporary Saturation Point : 28 November 2016 Although modern art was initially slow to respond to technology, its history went on to become inextricably linked with it, starting before the First World War with the Futurists’ first manifesto (1909) and their fascination with the machine. During the past two decades or so artists have been engaging with digital aspects of technology...
Related Press Frank Gerritz: LDN/EDI Minimalissimo : 17 May 2016 Frank Gerritz is a sculptor. A sculptor, however, who for years has developed his sculptural ideas principally in the form of drawings that nonetheless emanate a markedly space-encompassing energy.
Related Press Ambitious work by Frank Gerritz at Bartha Contemporary Widewalls : 17 April 2016 In order to celebrate groundbreaking work by one of the finest abstract artists of our time Frank Gerritz, Bartha Contemporary will organize two separate yet complementing exhibitions of his works in the UK. Frank Gerritz exhibition in London will be composed of artist’s paper works and pieces created on industrially manufactured MDF panels....
