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...
In the early 90's Rirkrit Tiravanija and his contemporaries were described in Nicholas Bourriard's Relational Aesthetics. Rejecting the art object and any material forms of production, these artist's began to investigate shared activity and collective action as a social model.Since then the artist has become well known for his Pad Thai kitchens and social happenings that seek to frame relations within aesthetic form.
A co-founder of the Land Foundation, Tiravanija's practice has also investigated artistic intervention upon agricultural traditions, and the role of modernist architecture in social housing. He has received the Gordon Matta Clark Foundation Award, the Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2004) and the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian Museum (2003). He has also exhibited extensively around the America, Europe and Asia.
Ocula Report A Change of Scene: Art Stage Singapore 2018 9 Feb 2018 : Diana d'Arenberg for Ocula This year marked the eighth edition of Art Stage Singapore (26–28 January 2018), founded with the goal of bringing together galleries and art from Southeast Asia under the roof of the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre. The fair was, in its initial years, seen as Singapore's answer to Art Basel, but with a distinct regional...
Ocula Insight Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tobias Rehberger at STPI, Singapore By Elliat Albrecht A familiar childhood activity to many, the game of 'exquisite corpse' was invented by the Surrealists as a means of assembling disparate images—usually of bodies—to create an unusual and often humorous result. To play, one player draws part of an image, then folds the paper so as to hide their work and reveal only a hint of what the...
Ocula Report Berlin, Boners and Brecht 7 Jun 2016 : Diana d'Arenberg for Ocula Apparently my timing sucks. One week too late for Berlin Gallery Weekend, and one month too early for the Berlin Biennale. ‘You should have been here last weekend for Berlin Gallery Weekend!’ a Berliner friend exclaimed. ‘Everyone was having orgies at Soho House! It was the best art world networking!’ I shifted...
Ocula Report Basel Tov! Art Basel 2015 10 Jul 2015 : Diana d'Arenberg for Ocula Another month, another art fair. With over 200 fairs held every year, I feel like a hamster stuck on an ever-spinning wheel. I just can’t seem to hop off, and after several years of this it has all become a bit of a blur. There isn’t a city to be visited that hasn’t already created its own art fair or biennale; there’s...
Related Press What Happens When Artists Run Restaurants? Frieze : 5 July 2019 Last month, a new sake bar opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts: a softly lit tunnel of booze that promises the kind of entrancing conversation one can never quite remember the next morning. A permanent installation designed by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) is furnished...
Related Press Singapore Art Week art agenda : 23 February 2018 Developed by the Singapore government in 2013 in an attempt to create hype around the fair Art Stage Singapore, Singapore Art Week (SAW) is a loose collection of events organized by museums, art spaces, and cultural producers. This year’s edition featured a series of festivals that turned the Civic District’s museums into glowing canvases for art...
Related Press Ugo Rondinone 'I ♥ John Giorno' at Various venues, New York Mousse Magazine : 27 July 2017 Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno—the first major U.S. exhibition about the American poet, artist, activist and muse John Giorno—has opened simultaneously across 13 locations in New York City. I ♥ John Giorno is a work of art by Giorno's husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. The exhibition is a celebration of the life and work of John...
Related Press John Giorno artforum.com : 25 July 2017 I learned early on from the eats, such as Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs—and the Pop artists too—that archives were very important. This was around the late 1950s, or the beginning of the '60s. So, I just saved all of my work. My parents had a house in Roslyn Heights, Long Island, and for fifty years I brought everything I made...
