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...
KEWENIG was founded in 1986 as Jule Kewenig Galerie, based in Haus Bitz in Frechen near Cologne. After more than 25 years in the Rhineland the gallery is now located in Berlin. In September 2013, KEWENIG inaugurated the new gallery building in Brüderstrasse 10, the second oldest town house of Berlin on the south side of the museum island. The building’s late baroque style is complimented by the gallery’s display rooms and warehouse–an historic electric power transformation substation in Berlin-Moabit. In 2004, a second gallery was opened in a 13th century chapel in Palma de Mallorca. KEWENIG focuses on international contemporary art since the 1960s, in which the artistic dialogue between various generations and cultures plays a significant role.
Bernardí RoigAbsent Father, 2018 Wood, aluminium , fluorescent lights and rubber on laid paper
Ocula Insight Wim Delvoye on his art, censorship and the future 7 February 2019 At 53, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye continues to employ the shock factor with abandon. Moving between the sacred and the profane, inflections of gothic drama and high technology imbue the artist's drawings, sculptures, and installations. He frequently swings from fine art to the decorative, applying Belgian ornamental elements such as coats of arms...
Ocula Photolog Art Basel in Miami Beach 2018 6 December 2018 'This year, over 200 of the world's leading international Modern and contemporary art galleries display artworks by over 4,000 artists, including paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, film, video, and digital art.' –Art Basel in Miami Beach (6–9 December 2018).
Ocula Photolog Art Basel 2018 15 June 2018 'The anchor of Art Basel's show is its Galleries sector. Art Basel 2018 edition welcomes 16 galleries that join the fair for the first time, further rejuvenating the show and giving younger galleries the opportunity to present their program alongside today's leading established galleries.' –Art Basel (14–17 June 2018).
Ocula Conversation William Kentridge Artist For over 20 years, the legacies of colonialism have been recurring themes in William Kentridge's work. In 2018, he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Pretoria in South Africa in recognition of a practice that has consistently charted 'a universal history of war and revolution, evoking the complexities and tensions of...
Related Press Sean Scully’s Figurative Leap Hyperallergic : 9 March 2019 When I became an art critic in 1981 one of the first artists I met and wrote about was Sean Scully. At that time I was teaching philosophy in Pittsburgh and he, having recently moved to New York, was as yet without a dealer. We are almost the same age, and to some extent we grew up together. When we first met, he had just made the transition from...
Related Press Ilya Kabakov Harnesses His Inner Misanthrope to Maintain Artistic Independence Hyperallergic : 22 February 2019 On Art, a new collection of essays by Ilya Kabakov, recently translated and edited into English by Matthew Jesse Jackson, begs a closer look at the life of an artist in permanent flux.One reason Ilya Kabakov's decades-long career is so interesting is that it maps with cartographic intensity life under a broken Soviet system, later transformed by...
Related Press NAN GOLDIN AND P.A.I.N. GROUP PROTEST SACKLER FAMILY AT THE GUGGENHEIM ArtForum : 10 February 2019 Photographer Nan Goldin, her group P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), and dozens of activists flooded the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York on Saturday night in protest of the institution's history with the Sackler family. The action, which began as a surprise demonstration in the museum's rotunda, culminated at the steps of...
Related Press William Kentridge’s Real and Metaphorical Cages Illuminate a Protest on Deportation Hyperallergic : 16 August 2018 MILWAUKEE—The current William Kentridge exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum, More Sweetly Play the Dance, is an immersive 2015 installation: a 14-minute video loop projected on a series of eight screens, 130 feet long in total. The screens unfold like an accordion book, not quite aligning, leaving small gaps that create page breaks in the...
Related Video & Audio Wim Delvoye: This Shit is Art Louisiana Channel : 15 February 2018 Wim Delvoye was interviewed by Rasmus Quistgaard at Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Herning, Denmark in April 2017.
Related Video & Audio Kimsooja on 'Brilliant Ideas' Bloomberg : 26 January 2017 Born in 1957 in Daegu, South Korea, Kimsooja started attracting the attention of the international art community when she began constructing Korean bottaris in her art – a gesture and motif that continues to appear in her work till today. Her art centers on the work and labor of women –beginning with her early sewn works, to her films and video...
