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 Mark Bradford’s Call for Unity at Shanghai’s Long Museum 16 August 2019 Mark Bradford walks through Mark Bradford: Los Angeles Mark Bradford: Los Angeles at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai (27 July–13 October 2019) is the artist's largest solo exhibition to date in China. In this video for Ocula, Bradford and Diana Nawi, curator of the show, walk through selected works that convey the artist's concerns with...
In 1987, and according to American artist Gretchen Bender, it took no more than ten minutes for an image to become neutralised and fed into an all-consuming flow of data–a 'cannibalistic river'.2 Some 30 years later, that lag has contracted to a point of near simultaneity. Clipping the Din bridges two generations of artists who examine power as it is exercised through the mediated, neutralised and overproduced image.
In the 1980s, technological innovations in video and television enabled home editing, tape recording, projecting and local network broadcasting. Many artists–some using DIY strategies, others working in commercial production studios–were given to mimicking media to subvert dominant discourses. The appeal: watching the 'détourned' image reenter the stream.
Today, the instantaneous absorption of meaning into content renders modes of détournement, mimicry, mirroring and acceleration inherently anticipated. The truant image inevitably feeds back into the very structure it criticises; racialised and gendered overproductions of representation amass to a point of nonvisibility; signification gives way to ambivalence.
The artworks in this exhibition redirect the noise of this feedback, non-visibility, and ambivalence. Some operate surreptitiously–in the guise of dominant media–others more candidly. If there is a shared methodology here, it is in they way these works isolate, suspend and recontextualise not only images, text and sound, but the networks of value, desire, exchange and representation through which those materials perform.
