Ocula Conversation Sandrine Colard on the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the largest Francophone nation in Africa with vast resources and nearly 80 million inhabitants, is a place where commodities play a vital role in the national economy and the country's significance on the world stage. This is the context from which the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale (24 October–24 November...
Ocula Report From 20 to 21 July 2019, Artspace Sydney held a two-day symposium that brought artists in conversation with leading curators, writers, activists, academics, diplomats, and journalists from across Asia. The symposium was the final chapter of the 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS exhibition, publication, website, and Instagram project. Instigated and...
Ocula News We Are Our Infrastructure, Argues Newly Announced Shanghai Biennale Chief Curator 13 December 2019 The Power Station of Art will make a fitting location for Andrés Jaque, whose past projects expose the politics concealed by buried pipes and managed cables. Spanish architect, writer, and curator Andrés Jaque has been named the chief curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, which will take place at the Power Station of Art (PSA) from 13 November...
Ocula Insight 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...
The work of Gary Simmons (b. 1964, New York, NY) explores racial, social and cultural politics, interrogating the ways in which we attempt to reconstruct the past via personal and collective memory. Central to his practice is the act of erasure. In his erasure drawings, the artist uses his hands to blur white chalk on pigmented panels or in situ wall installations, leaving a spectral residue that evokes a sense of loss while simultaneously conveying the power of memory. By expunging only fragments of images or text, the artist demonstrates the impossibility of eradicating racial and cultural stereotypes from our shared conscience. Inaugurated in the early 1990s, the series has expanded to include works on paper, painted canvas and murals, all of which mimic the effect of smudged chalk.
Read MoreMining the iconography of American popular culture, Simmons’ work often takes its subject from cartoons, films, pedagogical settings or musical sources that identify with the legacy of racial hierarchies. His early sculpture powerfully invoked symbols of racial oppression, including the white hoods and nooses associated with the Ku Klux Klan. The politics of racial identity are a principal focus of the artist’s practice; his work is fundamentally occupied by the unfixed nature of a past that remains open to the vagaries of memory, and its role in the construction of the character of contemporary America. He notes, ‘I am concerned with figuring absence, with negotiating between the static vocabulary of race, gender and class stereotype and the invisibility of the dimension of human history in the objects I create’.
Text courtesy Simon Lee Gallery.
Related Press His art centers on African American actors whose film titles 'Fade to Black' Los Angeles Times : 12 July 2017 The California African American Museum is teeming with ghosts. They haunt its lobby atrium, which is airy and still, bleached out from sunlight seeping in through a canopy of skylights onto stark white walls.
Related Press Here's the Artist List for the 2015 Venice Biennale Art News : 6 March 2015 Yes! After months and months of speculation, prayers, and rumors, the Venice Biennale has released the artist list for its 56th edition, “All the World’s Futures,” which is being curated by Okwui Enwezor. At a quick glance, it looks like a thrillingly eclectic list, counting among its participants giants like Bruce Nauman, Adrian...
