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...
Living and working in Singapore since birth, Ahmad Abu Bakar was born in 1963 in Melaka, Peninsular Malaysia, barely two years before Singapore was separated from Malaysia. His highly sculptural practice consistently finds itself mitigating personal ideas of land, identity and providence.
In TANAH LANGIT BUMI, Ahmad invites viewers to encounter his objects in contemplative dialogues by activating intrinsic and mnemonic vocabulary of symbols. Presented in three groups, the bright green TANAH (land), white LANGIT (sky) and bright orange BUMI (earth) evoke emblematic and often minimalistic contours of megaliths, urns, headstones and traditional crockery. These iconic sculptural forms reflect contained truths earned through experience and profound understanding of journeys with our encounters in life and living. Ahmad Abu Bakar graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts with a Diploma in Fine Arts (Ceramics) and received his Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) from the University of Tasmania (Australia). He pursued his Master of Fine Arts with RMIT/ LASALLE. Ahmad has participated in exhibitions in Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand, The Philippines, Korea, Australia, and Indonesia. He was featured in Secret Archipelago at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France (2015); the Singapore Biennale (2013) and held his first solo exhibition, Ini Tanah Aku Punya at the Jendela Gallery, Esplanade, in Singapore (2012).
—Khai Hori
