Ocula Report ‘An Opera for Animals’ at Rockbund Art Museum 19 Jul 2019 : Penny Liu for Ocula An Opera for Animals was first staged at Para Site in Hong Kong between 23 March and 2 June 2019, with works by over 48 artists and collectives that use opera as a metaphor for modes of contemporary, cross-disciplinary art-making. The exhibition's second iteration takes up a large portion of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai (22 June–25...
Ocula Conversation Mandy El-Sayegh: Productive Ambiguity Moving across installation, painting, drawing, and writing, Malaysia-born and London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh explores the political, social, and economic complexities of humanity, using a mosaic of information—from advertising slogans and pornographic imagery to newspaper articles—that she subjects to processes of layering,...
Ocula Report Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers at Somerset House 5 Jul 2019 : Jareh Das for Ocula Get Up Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers at Somerset House in London (12 June–15 September 2019) surveys more than half a century of black creativity in Britain and beyond across the fields of art, film, photography, music, design, fashion, and literature.Curated by Zak Ové, works by approximately 100 intergenerational black...
Experimenter was co-founded by Prateek & Priyanka Raja in 2009. With a multidisciplinary approach, the gallery is an incubator for an ambitious and challenging contemporary practice. The program represents some of the most critical contemporary artists worldwide. Considered to be a ‘pace-setter’ for its region, the program extends from exhibition-making, to knowledge creation, through regular talks, performances, workshops and most importantly, through it’s much acclaimed, annual curatorial intensive, Experimenter Curators’ Hub. In 2016, its artist-book publishing wing, Experimenter Books was launched. Experimenter’s program is rooted in dialogue and dissent. In 2018, the Experimenter Learning Program (ELP) was launched. ELP enables discussion, debate and learning in fields of contemporary and performing arts, curatorship, film, writing, language and social culture.
Ocula Photolog Frieze New York 2019 6 May 2019 'Building on Frieze's history as a platform for discovery and challenging the traditional art fair format, the eighth edition introduces new curators and collaborations with leading museum directors; including two exhibitions exploring virtual reality and the significance of self-taught artists, and two new sections celebrating Latin American art...
Ocula Photolog Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019 31 March 2019 'Art Basel reinforces its ongoing commitment to showcasing exceptional art from Asia and the Asia Pacific, with over half of the participating galleries having exhibition spaces in the region. The main sector of the show features 196 of the world's leading galleries presenting the highest quality of painting, sculpture, drawings, installation,...
Ocula Conversation Samson Young Artist, Hong Kong Since receiving his PhD in Music Composition at Princeton University in 2013, Samson Young has set up a Hong Kong-based practice predominantly focused on sonic works. These are presented in a wide range of formats including video, drawing, neon, books, and installation, and often involve Young performing in some capacity. For instance, Young...
Ocula Report New propositions on curatorial practice: the making of the 11th Shanghai Biennale 18 May 2017 The 11th Shanghai Biennale (SHB11): Why Not Ask Again: Arguments, Counter-arguments, and Stories was an exhibition staged at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai from 12 November 2016 to 12 March 2017. The exhibition was curated by the artist and curatorial collective Raqs Media Collective, and featured 92 artists from 40 countries, with a strong...
Related Press Raqs Media Collective’s 'Still More World' Art Agenda : 25 June 2019 In recent years, the route from India to Qatar has been heavily and not uncontroversially travelled by hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. Almost a quarter of Qatar's estimated 2.6 million population is Indian; there are more newspapers printed in Malayalam (the principal language of the South Indian state of Kerala) than in Arabic or...
Related Press Naeem Mohaiemen at SALT Beyoğlu Art in America : 1 March 2019 Naeem Mohaiemen, a filmmaker and writer of Bangladeshi extraction, was born in London in 1969, graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, and is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at Columbia University. For his deconstruction of radical leftist movements, particularly those that germinated in the 1970s, he delves into various archives,...
Related Press Naeem Mohaiemen: ‘I wanted to take the documentary form and jar it’ The Guardian : 21 January 2019 Naeem Mohaiemen was born in London in 1969 to Bengali parents and grew up in newly independent Bangladesh. As a visual artist and writer he returns often to the political struggles of the 1970s and the decline of leftist movements in east Asia. One recent video work, Two Meetings and a Funeral, focuses on a key moment in Bangladesh's ideological...
Related Press One Word: The Meaning of ‘Hegemony’ Frieze : 1 November 2018 Nineteen years after I first watched it, two scenes from Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) have stayed with me. An early sequence, in which a teenager explains her death urges to a bewildered member of hospital staff: 'Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.' And the film's closing lines, when the narrator recounts his...
Related Video & Audio Naeem Mohaiemen | Turner Prize Nominee 2018 | TateShots Tate : 7 September 2018 Naeem Mohaiemen works with film, installation and essays. His practice investigates transnational socialist politics after the Second World War. This period was framed by decolonisation and the erasing of political utopias.
