Ocula Conversation Bani Abidi: ‘What you see in my films is what I know’ A group of voices accompanies me in the exhibition. They are singing words I cannot comprehend, yet the warm tunes are familiar: folk songs, love songs, songs of longing. There are letters, too. They speak of the quotidian details of a soldier's life: the hardness of the war, sending money to the family, and longing for familiar landscapes, food,...
Ocula Report Aichi to Okayama: Art in Japan Looks to the Future 11 Oct 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula There has been a flurry of triennial and biennial art activity in Japan this year. The Aichi Triennale opened in Nagoya this August, sparking a national debate about the shutting down of a display of formerly censored works—the result of public backlash against a burnt image of Emperor Hirohito and a statue commemorating the women forced into...
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 Daido Moriyama: The Erotics of Photography 11 Oct 2019 : Tianyuan Deng for Ocula In a documentary video published by Tate Modern to accompany its exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama in 2013, Moriyama, one of the most influential avantgarde photographers to emerge out of postwar Japan, roams the urban streets of Shinjuku equipped with a compact digital camera. Dressed in a low-key black jacket, his gait is relaxed but...
Ocula Photolog Frieze Masters 2019 7 October 2019 'Coinciding with Frieze London, Frieze Masters features more than 130 of the world's leading galleries specialising in antiquities, Asian art, ethnographic art, illuminated manuscripts, medieval, modern and post-war art, Old Masters and 19th century, as well as photography and sculpture.' –Frieze Masters (3–6 October 2019).
Ocula Report A Journey That Wasn’t at The Broad, Los Angeles 29 Sep 2018 : Jareh Das for Ocula A Journey That Wasn't showcases 55 artworks from the permanent collection of The Broad in Los Angeles, some of which are on view for the first time (30 June 2018–10 February 2019). Located in the museum's first-floor galleries and curated by Ed Schad and Sarah Loyer (both curators at The Broad), the show explores how artists have dealt with...
Ocula Report Best institutional shows in Turin during Artissima 4 Nov 2015 : Rachael Vance for Ocula Each November the art world casts its attention on Italy’s art centre of Turin for the annual Artissima art fair. However, its not only the fair that attracts the international art cognoscenti to the Piedmont capital. With a history steeped in the cultural avant-garde of the Arte Povera movement and with strong philanthropic arts circles,...
Ocula Report Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection 5 Jun 2015 : Jane O’Sullivan for Ocula Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible is both unyieldingly monumental and humble. In the latest presentation of the work in Sydney, all 3,000 of the diaries he has collected from Beijing’s fleamarkets are placed in neat rows on a large, rectangular plinth. Dated from 1949 to 1999 they record 50 turbulent years in China’s...
Ocula Conversation Gene Sherman & Suhanya Raffel Collector and Curator When Australian collectors and philanthropists Gene and Brian Sherman moved from South Africa to Australia in 1976, Gene says they instantly recognised a “buzz about Asia” that they weren’t expecting.As an academic teaching French literature, the push towards Asian languages also put her out of a job. “I went into...
