Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke was established in Mumbai in 2006 by Usha Mirchandani and Ranjana Steinruecke. It has played a key role in discovering and nurturing new positions in contemporary Indian art ever since and building up a young collectors’ circle. The gallery has been a forerunner in contextualizing international artists within its program, having brought artists such as Leiko Ikemura, Kiki Smith and Jonathan Meese to India for the first time. Projects that led to the opening of the gallery include the showcasing of positions of art historical relevance such as the retrospective of Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003) at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai in 2003. Mirchandani + Steinruecke also put together a sterling collection of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art for the Deutsche Bank and were instrumental in organizing solo exhibitions in Berlin by seminal artists from the subcontinent.
Ocula Report 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life 15 Feb 2019 : Natalie King for Ocula 'Poems are like sentences that have taken their clothes off.' Marlene Dumas' poetic and sensual refrain accompanies her figurative watercolours on view in Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life, the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in the southern state of Kerala, India (12 December 2018–29 March 2019).Dumas' new series...
Ocula Conversation NS Harsha and Tiffany Chung Artists On the occasion of the 21st Biennale of Sydney, SUPERPOSITION: Equilibrium & Engagement (16 March–11 June 2018), the Victorian College of the Arts and University of Melbourne partnered with the Biennale to facilitate the visit of artists Tiffany Chung, NS Harsha and curator David Elliott to Melbourne. The following discussion is an edited...
Ocula Conversation Serge Tiroche Co-founder, the Tiroche DeLeon Collection With an ultra slick website that enables easy navigation of its 400 plus artworks from many of the leading artists of today, the Tiroche DeLeon Collection is unique in its focus and ownership structure. Established in 2011 by Serge Tiroche and Russ DeLeon, the collection is focused on artworks by both recognised masters, and emerging talent from...
Ocula Conversation Melissa Chiu Senior Vice President, Global Arts & Cultural Programs, Asia Society Asia Society recently played host to some of the most significant institutional figures in the art world, including Glenn D. Lowry (Director of The MoMA New York), Caroline Collier (Director, Tate Modern), Yuko Hasegawa (Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo) and Lars Nittve (Executive Director, M+, Hong Kong). These figures...
Related Press Kiki Smith and the Pursuit of Beauty in a Notably Unbeautiful Age New York Times : 26 November 2018 STROLLING WITH THE ARTIST Kiki Smith down the not-entirely-gentrified East Village block where she lives and works, in a townhouse with a cherry-red door, can take a remarkably long time. It's not that she isn't nimble — at 64, she has energy to match her famously prodigious output, able to navigate in a billowing black cotton shift around...
Related Press Feminist artist Kiki Smith: 'Getting older, certain things quiet' The Sydney Morning Herald : 30 August 2018 The female body. Its bones and limbs, its emotions, its animal instinct, its bodily functions, its secrets and anxieties, its sexuality, its illnesses and pain.There is no part of it that has been left unexplored by the fearless American artist Kiki Smith, a pioneer of contemporary feminist art who has grappled with female beauty, shame, mortality...
Related Press Kiki Smith Takes Over the Eldridge Street Synagogue with 50 Artworks Hyperallergic : 5 June 2018 Before the restoration of the Eldridge Street Synagogue, birds flew in through holes in the roof. The animals roosted in the 19th-century structure that was once a haven for Eastern European Jews on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but it had fallen into a decline because of a shrinking membership and its leaking sanctuary was closed off half a century...
Related Press KIKI SMITH: Below the Horizon The Brooklyn Rail : 5 June 2018 Stars are again on Smith’s mind. Her unassuming new show of fifty works at the synagogue, now a museum, is titled Below the Horizon, in recognition, according to the exhibition, of the fact that we only see the stars once the sun has gone down. Sunsets are a fine metaphor for the museum’s extended period of decline.
