Latest Ocula Conversation Artist Taloi Havini and Ruth McDougall, curator of Pacific art at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, discuss Havini's first Australian solo exhibition, Reclamation .
Ocula Report Sydney Biennale Connects Here with Everywhere By Soo-Min Shim, Sydney 'This year's Biennale of Sydney seems like a corrective,' writes Soo-Min Shim, 'prioritising autonomy in an international exhibition format that has all too often omitted or sidelined First Nations artists.'
Ocula Insight Hell is a Place on Earth: P·P·O·W Looks to History in Context of Covid-19 By Stephanie Bailey, London In the United States, parallels have been drawn between the HIV/AIDS crisis and what is unfolding with Covid-19. These connections feed into P·P·O·W's online exhibition, Hell is a Place on Earth. Heaven is a Place in Your Head .
Founded in Singapore in 2010, Yavuz Gallery showcases riveting examples of contemporary art with a particular focus on artists and art from the Asia-Pacific region. In 2019, the gallery opened its second exhibition space in Sydney, becoming the first gallery of its kind from Southeast Asia to establish a permanent location in Australia.
Read MoreYavuz Gallery represents prominent artists from Southeast Asia, including Isabel & Alfredo Aquilizan, the husband-and-wife team from the Philippines who often create interactive projects that engage with the ideas of home, community, displacement, and belonging; and Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak, whose relational and conceptual practice has centred around the human body and form as a vessel of experience and sensorial perception.
Also populating the gallery roster are younger generations of artists, born in or after 1980. Yeo Kaa creates vividly coloured paintings and sculptures that depict cartoonish characters trapped in scenes of violence; Alvin Ong’s paintings playfully combine diverse visual vocabularies, culminating in surreal bodily configurations suspended between moments of pleasure and pain; Khairullah Rahim presents assemblages highlighting Singapore’s marginalised communities in overlooked spaces; and Zico Albaiquni’s vibrant figurative and landscape paintings play with aspects of Indonesian art history and notions of painterly representation.
Yavuz Gallery is equally dedicated to representing leading Antipodean artists, among them Abdul Abdullah, known for his embroidered works, photographs, and large-scale paintings that consider marginalised narratives and stories of diaspora, displacement, and migration; and André Hemer, whose characteristically bright, abstract paintings examine the relationship between the digital and painting in the contemporary age.
Yavuz Gallery’s programme offers curated exhibitions and collaborative projects. Notable group shows surveying art from the Asia-Pacific region include Working Animals Seabound (2019), curated by Ruel Caasi and showcasing the works of Filipino artist collective The Working Animals Art Projects; Antipodean Inquiry (2016), curated by Owen Craven and featuring the work of leading contemporary artists from Australia and New Zealand; and And That Which Was Always Known (2015), curated by Roger Nelson and presenting six artists of international renown based in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Yavuz Gallery represents a diverse group of Southeast Asian and Antipodean artists at international art fairs, among them Art Basel in Hong Kong; Art Dubai; Art Fair Philippines; Art Jakarta; S.E.A. Focus, Singapore; Sydney Contemporary; and Taipei Dangdai.
Ocula Report Singapore Lowdown: Shows to See By Tessa Moldan, Singapore Singapore Art Week returns from 11 to 19 January 2020 with a host of island-wide events, at the centre of which is the second edition of S.E.A. Focus (16–19 January 2020) at Gillman Barracks, showcasing the best of contemporary art in Southeast Asia.
Ocula Photolog Asia Now 2019 'Asia Now is expanding and this year will welcome over 50 of the most prominent and cutting-edge galleries presenting over 250 established and emerging artists from China, Korea, Japan, Central and Southeast Asia, who push the boundaries of contemporary art.' –Asia Now, Paris (16–20 October 2019).
Ocula Report Art Jakarta Drops Anchor in a Stormy Southeast Asian Art Market By Sam Gaskin, Jakarta Jakarta may be sinking, prompting the announcement last month that Indonesia will create a new capital on the island of Borneo, but the city's longest-running art fair is on the rise. Founded by the license holder of Harper's Bazaar Indonesia , the fair began as Bazaar Art Jakarta in 2008. While it's still owned by the same holding company, MRA...
Ocula Report Singapore Art Week: Exhibitions to See By Tessa Moldan, Singapore S.E.A. Focus , the new boutique art fair by STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, will take centre stage during this year's Singapore Art Week (19–27 January 2019). Running between 24 and 27 January 2019, 26 galleries will participate in the inaugural edition, showcasing modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art within a pop-up structure...
Related Press Between celebration and commemoration: Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak on the significance of the N-Peace trophies 17 September 2018, Pinaree Sanpitak Since 2016, I have gifted prints of my Malai collection as trophies for the N-Peace Award winners. Recently I realised how truly fitting these artworks are for the initiative, not to mention the real gravity of the awards' significance.
Related Press 2018 Sydney Contemporary Art Fair: five artists to watch 13 September 2018, The Australian Financial Review The Sydney Contemporary Art Fair has gone from baby to behemoth in just three editions, generating $40 million in sales and attracting 75,000 local and international visitors since it launched (initially as a biennale) in 2013. "It's a tremendous shot in the arm for artists and galleries," says its director, Barry Keldoulis.
Related Press What to see and expect from Sydney Contemporary 2018 28 August 2018, Vogue As Australia's leading art fair, Sydney Contemporary manages to make art critics into art lovers and the unanointed into worshippers, all within the space of three days.
Related Press Jakarta Biennale: A new understanding of contemporary Indonesian art 2 November 2017, The Jakarta Post This year's Jakarta Biennale will diverge from many of the curatorial practices of its predecessors. The Jakarta Biennale, which is set to open on Saturday at Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem in South Jakarta, will this year adopt Jiwa as its artistic concept. Jiwa is a concept that is almost impossible to translate into English, but for this...
Related Video & Audio Collection+: Pinaree Sanpitak 9 November 2014, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation presents works by acclaimed Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak, curated by Jasmin Stephens. In this film, Gene Sherman, Executive Director of SCAF, discusses the third iteration of the Collection+ series. SCAF Project 23. Exhibition dates: 17 October - 13 December 2014.
