Ocula Report ART X Lagos: Nigeria’s Art Renaissance 17 November 201817 Nov 2018 : Jareh Das for Ocula Nigeria's art scene has flourished over the last decade, leading to a renewed interest in cultivating and supporting modern and contemporary art in the country. Ranked Africa's largest economy in 2017, making up 0.8 percent of the world's GDP, a surge in wealth amongst some individuals has led to a developing collector base (not to mention rising...
Ocula Conversation Cao Fei Artist Cao Fei's first large-scale institutional exhibition in Asia, A hollow in a world too full (8 September 2018–4 January 2019), is taking place at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, the city's new non-profit art centre housed in a former colonial police and prison complex in Central. Organised in collaboration with Ullens Center for Contemporary Art...
Ocula Report Shanghai's West Bund and Art021 fairs overlap in 2018 17 November 201817 Nov 2018 : Diana d’Arenberg for Ocula The last time I visited West Bund Art & Design was four years ago, when the fair was in its first year of operation: a small, boutique offering held in a cavernous hangar that seemed too big for it. Much has changed since then. Mirroring the rapid development of the city itself, West Bund has grown from 25 galleries in 2014 to a fair that...
Candida Höfer’s first approach to photography occurred when she worked for newspapers as a portrait photographer. She later enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf to study film in 1973, but transitioned to photography in 1976, becoming Bernd Becher’s student.
Her work –along with the works of Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth—is framed within the tradition of German photographers, direct heirs to the conceptual aesthetic and teachings of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf; along with Thomas Ruff, she was one of the first of Becher’s students to use color, showing her work as slide projections.
The recurrent subject on Candida’s Höfer work, since the 70’s, is the space that human beings produce through architecture and the way they live in it. The artist places herself in the spectator’s point of view that is at the same time the user’s point of view. Her work consists on identifying and perceiving the existence of compositions that existed before she was aware of them and that she leaves unabridged. Photographs of indoor spaces, of public and semi-public buildings where the order and disorder that derives from its communitarian function is revealed. The purpose of this examination is to visualize the architectonic space as a frame of human relations. Each one of the represented spaces belongs to a social space, a space that constitutes or is constituted by social relations.
