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...
Office Baroque is a contemporary art gallery in Brussels that represents established, mid-career as well as emerging artists with strong institutional support. The gallery was incorporated in 2007 in Antwerp and has relocated to downtown Brussels in 2013 where it occupies the ground floor of a 1909 cast-iron Art Nouveau building. The gallery is owned by Marie Denkens and Wim Peeters who also founded the non for profit Extra City in 2004. Office Baroque represents 22 artists from Europe, America and Asia, focusing on primary market positions. The gallery has participated in Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze London and New York, Fiac Paris, Independent New York and Brussels, Art Brussels, Liste Basel, Miart Milan, Artissima Turin.
Ocula Insight Artist Insight: David Diao By Robert Ayers In a career spanning more than half a century David Diao has conducted a many-faceted exploration of the assumptions and comprehension of contemporary painting, which has been underpinned by vast erudition, a sharp critical intelligence, and a sustained sense of humour. Not surprisingly he enjoys a reputation as an insightful and stimulating...
Related Press Dear diary: photographers get personal at Fondazione Prada’s new space Wallpaper* : 24 January 2017 Critic and curator Francesco Zanot has organised an exhibition exploring photography as the new diary. Give Me Yesterday includes 14 artists born between 1976 and 1993, whose practices document the peaks and troughs of the personal, alongside names names familiar in the art world and popular on Instagram – Ryan McGinley, Melanie Bonajo, Leigh...
Related Press 'What we do for money' Manifesta 11 / Zurich Flash Art : 8 July 2016 Manifesta 11, the latest edition of the roving European biennial, seeks to explore what makes its current host city, Zurich, tick: work. It’s a reductive idea that the curator, artist Christian Jankowski, has chosen for an exhibition titled What People Do for Money.One assumes the curator knows that people everywhere work to financially...
Related Press Manifesta 11 prepares to open Christian Jankowski curated biennial ArtLyst : 2 June 2016 Manifesta 11, opening in Zurich on the 11th of June, with theme curated by Christian Jankowski, What People Do for Money: Some Joint Ventures promises to be the highlight of the Spring/Summer European art season. 30 new artworks have been produced, and they will be contextualised by a historical exhibition co-curated by Jankowski and Francesca...
