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...
Ocula Report Daido Moriyama: The Erotics of Photography 11 Oct 2019 : Tianyuan Deng for Ocula In a documentary video published by Tate Modern to accompany its exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama in 2013, Moriyama, one of the most influential avantgarde photographers to emerge out of postwar Japan, roams the urban streets of Shinjuku equipped with a compact digital camera. Dressed in a low-key black jacket, his gait is relaxed but...
Ocula Report Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection 5 Jun 2015 : Jane O’Sullivan for Ocula Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible is both unyieldingly monumental and humble. In the latest presentation of the work in Sydney, all 3,000 of the diaries he has collected from Beijing’s fleamarkets are placed in neat rows on a large, rectangular plinth. Dated from 1949 to 1999 they record 50 turbulent years in China’s...
Ocula Conversation Gene Sherman & Suhanya Raffel Collector and Curator When Australian collectors and philanthropists Gene and Brian Sherman moved from South Africa to Australia in 1976, Gene says they instantly recognised a “buzz about Asia” that they weren’t expecting.As an academic teaching French literature, the push towards Asian languages also put her out of a job. “I went into...
