Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
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...
By the late 1980s Mao Xuhui found his most significant imagery, depicting the power relations in social structure in what he called his Parent series. The seated 'parent' gradually cedes his corporeal presence to the increasingly overwhelming presence of the seat, to the degree that the artist eventually depicted a pair of scissors as a figure sitting on a throne: a surrealistic representation of paternal power. As his iconography developed, the image of the scissors was released from its throne to become a surreal presence making rude intrusions into domestic interiors and urban landscapes. By 1997 the scissors had become a completely distilled figure, purified of its background, almost resembling a tantric dorje: it emerged as one of the most convincing iconic images to have evolved from the pictorial work of this era. In this singular iconic form is concentrated the innuendos of power, worship and exorcism.
