Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
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...
Born into a Palestinian family in Beirut, Mona Hatoum was forced into exile due to the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. She has lived in London ever since. Through her poetic and radical oeuvre, Hatoum explores themes of home and displacement, gender and differences, and exposes the contradictions and conflicts of our world.
Hatoum started her career in the 1980s making performance and video works. These early works are ostensibly political, often with direct references to the political turmoil in Palestine and her own background. In some performance pieces, she made political statements by putting the vulnerable human body in confrontation with violent institutional power structures. One of the most iconic works from this period is Measures of Distance (1988): a video constructed from intimate images of Hatoum's mother showering. In the video, Hatoum overlaid these images with handwritten Arabic letters from her mother—who was living in Beirut while she was living in London—and Hatoum also reads the letters aloud in English. This autobiographical work speaks of the displacement and tremendous sense of loss that results from the separation caused by war.
Since the late 1980s, Hatoum's practice has shifted increasingly towards large-scale installations and sculptures that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. She has created a number of works by transforming everyday domestic objects into things with uncanny and threatening qualities. Metal grid structures, geometrical forms and wires are repeatedly used as motifs to recall a sense of oppression and containment brought about by systems of control within a society.
Hatoum has participated in numerous important prizes and events, including the Turner Prize (1995), the Venice Biennale (1995, 2005 and 2013), documenta11 and documenta14 (2002 and 2017), the Biennale of Sydney (2006), the Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011), the Sharjah Biennial (2007) and the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013). In 2015, a major retrospective of Hatoum's work was organised and presented by the Centre Pompidou, Paris. This retrospective also travelled to Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.
Ocula Conversation Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Founder, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo started collecting contemporary art in 1992, after graduating from Torino University, where she studied business and economics. She began her collection with four works from the late-1950s and early-1960s by Italian artists: Carla Accardi, Tano Festa, Mario Merz and Salvatore Scarpitta. 'I enjoyed the idea of...
Ocula Conversation Bob Rennie Collector In Vancouver's Chinatown, an area wedged between the gleaming office towers of the city's affluent West End and the city’s poorest neighbourhood, Downtown Eastside, is a gallery showcasing work from one of the world’s leading private collections.Housed in a restored iteration of Chinatown’s oldest building, the...
Ocula Conversation Jens Faurschou Co-founder, Faurschou Foundation When American artist Robert Rauschenberg opened his first and last gallery exhibition in China, (he died shortly thereafter), it was with Galleri Faurschou in Beijing, owned by Danish collectors Jens Faurschou, and his now former wife, Luise. Jens Faurschou took Ai Weiwei to see the show and the acclaimed Chinese artist, impressed by both the...
Related Press The Must-See Exhibitions in Paris During FIAC Frieze Magazine : 16 October 2019 Known for her politically charged works that explore themes like exile, mass-migration and displacement, British-Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum is experiencing renewed and timely interest today, particularly since her remarkable show at the Tate Modern in 2016.
Related Press Mona Hatoum’s Psychological Surgery Hyperallergic : 9 August 2018 ST. LOUIS — A floating cube of barbed wire. A circle of sand combed by steel teeth. A food mill with a shredder scaled to the size of a human body. In Mona Hatoum’s Terra Infirma, on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation through August 11, form colludes with a violent function; the domestic menaces, materiality imperils. From a glass bassinet that...
Related Press The Exquisite Torture of Mona Hatoum’s Heavy Metal Sculptures Frieze : 16 May 2018 Had her family not fled Lebanon during the country's civil war in the 1970s for the relative safety of London, Mona Hatoum might have become a designer of exquisite torture devices for the Mukhabarat, or secret police, based on the evidence of the 30 sculptures and installations on view in Terra Infirma, her exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts...
Related Press London exhibitions: black rights on both sides of the Atlantic and Middle Eastern spaceship diners The Art Newspaper : 1 September 2017 What a show! Each section and, indeed, pretty much each individual in this rich but rigorous celebration of black artists working in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, could spin off into a separate exhibition in its own right. The various responses to the black civil rights movement and what it meant to be a black artist in this turbulent time range...
