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...
Ocula Report Independent Growth: Art Dubai 2018 31 Mar 2018 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula It is far too easy to dismiss art fairs, if not the entire commercial art market. By the same token, it is easy to be turned off by Dubai, the most glitzy and commercial of the UAE's emirates. It might take a little longer to appreciate how an art fair staged in a free port like this could benefit artistic production and development—an...
Ocula Photolog Art Dubai 2018 26 March 2018 'The 2018 edition of the fair presents an intimate and diverse line-up of 105 galleries from 48 countries, making this year's edition the fair's largest and most globally diverse to date. Alongside 77 returning galleries, the fair welcomes 28 first-time exhibitors from around the world.' –Art Dubai (21–24 March 2018).
Ocula Photolog Contemporary Istanbul 2017 15 September 2017 'Notable for its unique position both geographically and culturally, the Contemporary Istanbul art fair prides itself on bringing together galleries, artists and collectors from Turkey, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, Russia and the Middle East, as well as from Europe, America and Asia.'–Contemporary Istanbul (14–17 September 2017).
Ocula Insight Recycle Group at Gazelli Art House, London 24 November 2015 How did you first meet and start collaborating as artists?We have known each other since childhood, but did our first project together as "Recycle Group" in 2008. Before that we worked separately but always advised each other, after realising that each of us have a role in creating the work and we started to work as a...
Ocula Report Mad Times: A Report from ArtInternational 2015 18 Sep 2015 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula According to a report by The Art Newspaper, this year's edition of ArtInternational (which opened in Istanbul on 05 September) opened one day later and ran one day shorter because of sustained pressure from the 14th Istanbul Biennial curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. It was reported that Bakargiev had made "no secret of her...
Ocula Report Must-see exhibitions in London over Summer 2015 28 Jul 2015 : Kostas Prapoglou for Ocula The British capital has a fascinating selection of art shows to see this summer. With Gabriel Orozco at Marian Goodman Gallery, Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern, Roni Horn at Hauser & Wirth, John Waters at Sprüth Magers and Yto Barrada at Pace London in full swing until late July/early August, a number of other equally stimulating exhibitions...
Ocula Conversation Phong Bui Curator, 'Bloodflames Revisited' In March 2014, a show opened at Paul Kasmin Gallery titled Alexander the Great: The Iolas Gallery 1955–1987, which celebrated the legendary gallerist Alexander Iolas, who was among the first to introduce American audiences to Surrealism and who gave Andy Warhol his first gallery exhibition (and, coincidentally, also his last in 1987). The...
