Ocula Conversation Hito Steyerl: How To Build a Sustainable Art World 'A Picture of War is Not War', we read in Hito Steyerl's iconic film November (2004), an essayistic Super 8 film tackling the definition of terrorism constructed around the figure of the artist's best friend Andrea Wolf, who was killed as a terrorist in 1998 in Eastern Anatolia after she joined the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). Mixing documentary...
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...
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, Brigitte studied at Zurich University and received her MA in Social and Photo History in 1996. In the following years she established herself as a fine art photographer. She moved to New York and received her MFA in Fine Art Photography and Related Media at Parsons The New School of Design in 2007. The main issues in her works lie in her interest in the study of the gaze, the interplay between absence and presence in a photographic image, and the fact that the reading of a photograph is most often triggered by a collective memory. She explores the media itself and its close connection to themes like decay, memory, death and transitoriness.
Brigitte Lustenberger has shown nationally and internationally in both solo and group shows. She had Solo Shows at the Museée de l’Elysée in Lausanne/Switzerland, at Walter Keller’s Scalo Gallery in Zurich and New York, at Le Maillon in Strasbourg/France, Kunstkeller Gallery in Bern, Photoforum PasquArt in Bienne. Her works have been part of group shows in the Kunsthalle Bern, Kunsthalle Luzern, Art Cologne, Centro Internationale de Fotografia in Milan. She was awarded the Grand Prize Winner PDNedu, the Golden Light Award, Shots/Corbis Student Photographer of the Year, Prix de Photoforum PasquArt, The Photo Review Comeptition, Selection Voies Off at Arles, and others. She received fellowships for Cairo and Maloja and was awarded with the prestigious swiss Landis&Gyr Residency in 2013. In the same year she was awarded for the second time (after 2002) the Photo Award of the Canton Bern.
Brigitte Lustenberger creates a modern and yet baroque universe by following a baroque still life tradition to evoke meaning by showing and choosing certain objects, facial expressions and gestures. The images are very much about the transitoriness of being and the constant human involvement in it–and its resulting changes of fates.The artist goes back literally to the meaning of the word Portrait which descends from the latin word protahere which can be translated as to pull out something, to bring something forward, to bring something to light. The black spaces from where the faces or the sill lifes appear leave room for the viewer’s interpretation. Most of the lighting in the photographs is natural daylight coming in through a window.
