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...
Krakow Witkin Gallery features contemporary art of all media by emerging and established regional, national and international artists as well as representing several estates. The overall focus is on Minimal, reductivist and conceptually-driven works that have been made from 1950 to the present. Barbara Krakow first opened a gallery in 1959, exhibiting Ellsworth Kelly as early as 1965, Sol LeWitt in 1971 and being the first gallery in the US to show Joseph Beuys. Since 2004, Krakow has partnered with Andrew Witkin and in 2017, the gallery’s name changed to Krakow Witkin Gallery. The gallery co-represents the estates of Sol LeWitt and Fred Sandback. Since the 1980’s, it has published catalogue raisonnés of numerous artists’ prints, such as those by Kiki Smith, Sol LeWitt and most recently, Mel Bochner.
Located on Boston’s Newbury Street, Krakow Witkin Gallery presents two exhibitions simultaneously, one in the larger gallery and one in the smaller space. These shows change every six weeks. Along with this programming, the gallery has an ongoing project, One Wall, One Work, where a single work is exhibited on an isolated wall, thus providing artists and viewers the experience of seeing an isolated work (often-times some form of installation), as well as the smaller and larger exhibitions in the other two spaces. This spectrum of viewing opportunities is a key part of the gallery’s mission to not only present and promote artists and artworks it believes in, but to help provide enlightening experiences for those of varying knowledge- and experience-bases.
Ocula Conversation RoseLee Goldberg: Performance Then and Now RoseLee Goldberg had long been invested in contemporary performance art before her founding of the inter-disciplinary arts organisation Performa in New York in 2004. Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied political science and fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and then art history at the Courtauld Institute...
Ocula Report Art Basel in Hong Kong 2019: A Post-mortem 6 Apr 2019 : Diana d’Arenberg for Ocula Although Art Basel in Hong Kong is the youngest of the Art Basel fairs, and a relative newcomer to the international art fair circuit, it has now become a major attraction for collectors and galleries from around the world. The seventh edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong saw thousands of art courtesans and benefactors kick off the week with a string...
Ocula Photolog ADAA | The Art Show 2019 4 March 2019 'Organized annually by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), The Art Show offers intimately scaled and thoughtfully curated presentations of the highest quality—fostering active conversations with gallerists, new relationships, and close looking at works by artists from a variety of genres, practices, and national and international...
Ocula Report A Journey That Wasn’t at The Broad, Los Angeles 29 Sep 2018 : Jareh Das for Ocula A Journey That Wasn't showcases 55 artworks from the permanent collection of The Broad in Los Angeles, some of which are on view for the first time (30 June 2018–10 February 2019). Located in the museum's first-floor galleries and curated by Ed Schad and Sarah Loyer (both curators at The Broad), the show explores how artists have dealt with...
Related Press Kara Walker at Tate Modern Review: Venus, Sharks and the Sadism of Empire Frieze : 4 October 2019 At the pinnacle of Kara Walker's 13-metre-high fountain in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, a Black woman's breasts and slashed jugular spurt water. It is horrifying. Maybe not so when you perceive the water as emerging only from her breasts, although the supposed excess layered onto Black femininity might jump out, but it chills to locate the source of...
Related Press William Kentridge’s Indictment of Colonial and Apartheid Injustice Frieze : 26 September 2019 What does it mean to speak? To speak in a way that not only broaches the moral ambiguities of silence, but also probes the limits of speech's capacity to make sense of the world. William Kentridge, the Johannesburg artist and theatre director, addresses this question in a 2018 essay titled 'Let Us Try for Once'. The text forms part of a dispersed...
Related Press Hilton Als on the Films of Kara Walker Frieze : 26 September 2019 By the late 1980s, I had pretty much stopped looking at contemporary art. I no longer trusted my eyes to see what the art world had to offer, in part because I couldn't see the forest for the trees. Back then, the trees glistened with so much gold and so many pendants celebrating boy achievement, amen, that the product of their fame and riches –...
Related Press Jenny Holzer Hits Her Mark in a Major, Largely Unnoticed Retrospective Hyperallergic : 29 August 2019 BILBAO, Spain — One of the strangest things about this exhibition is how invisible it is beyond Bilbao. How does it happen that a major artist like Jenny Holzer gets a major retrospective — the largest survey of her work to date — at a major museum like the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao but no catalogue is produced, and there is almost...
Related Video & Audio Sarah Sze – ‘You Mark Time Through Objects’ | TateShots Tate : 11 January 2019 Sarah Sze discusses her installation Seamless as it is installed at Tate Modern, London, 2018.
Related Video & Audio Philip Guston exhibition at Hauser reviewed by Caroline Chiu Caroline Chiu Studio Art Reviews : 19 June 2018 Caroline Chiu is a Hong Kong based art critic and collector who has been presenting Caroline Chiu Studio Art Reviews with Hong Kong radio station RTHK4 since 2005.In this podcast episode, published in a collaboration between Chiu and Ocula, the Hong Kong based critic reviews the exhibition Philip Guston: A Painter's Forms, 1950–1979 at Hauser...
Related Video & Audio Sarah Sze: ‘Afterimage’ Victoria Miro : 11 June 2018 'You're having this filmic way of reading images as they move, and you move, through space.' In this film, the artist discusses the process of creating the new site-specific works in her exhibition at Victoria Miro: Images in Debris, an installation of images, light, sound, film, and objects, that seeks to transform the visitor's perception and...
Related Video & Audio Sarah Sze: 'Measuring Stick' art21 : 7 April 2016 Sarah Sze discusses her sculpture Measuring Stick (2015), which explores the "measurement of time and space through the moving image." Sze remembers watching Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten as a young student in the 1970s, and cites the film as an inspiration for her work. "That was something I always looked forward to...
