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...
For some time, artists represented by EIGEN + ART have shown their work in museums and galleries in Beijing, Hong Kong and Hangzhou. This has resulted in a strong relationship with the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where artists have travelled to give lectures, talks and workshops, and most recently were invited to the Interyouth Festival in Hangzhou.
In West Lake: Breaking Open, on view from August 1 until August 31, 2019, Chinese artists will be shown in Galerie EIGEN + ART Berlin for the first time. Five professors of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Jianlian Guo, Qing Li, Shijian Jing, Xuhong Yu and Yangping Jin enter a dialogue with the works of Tim Eitel, Kai Schiemenz and David Schnell.
Space and time, nature, the environment, ecology, as well as socio-political themes are examined and emphasised through the various media used by the artists. In the exhibition space, the discourse and transcultural dialogue raised by the work creates a web of complex formal language.
The title of the exhibition is a clear reference to the West Lake in Hangzhou, which is one of the most popular tourist attractions in China, and one of the most painted scenes in classical Chinese landscape art. The title can be interpreted as an appeal: Breaking open–a call to think the image of the present to draft a possible future without forgetting the past.
