Ocula Conversation Hito Steyerl: How To Build a Sustainable Art World 'A Picture of War is Not War', we read in Hito Steyerl's iconic film November (2004), an essayistic Super 8 film tackling the definition of terrorism constructed around the figure of the artist's best friend Andrea Wolf, who was killed as a terrorist in 1998 in Eastern Anatolia after she joined the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). Mixing documentary...
Ocula Report Aichi to Okayama: Art in Japan Looks to the Future 11 Oct 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula There has been a flurry of triennial and biennial art activity in Japan this year. The Aichi Triennale opened in Nagoya this August, sparking a national debate about the shutting down of a display of formerly censored works—the result of public backlash against a burnt image of Emperor Hirohito and a statue commemorating the women forced into...
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...
Tacita Dean studied art at the Falmouth School of Art in England, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1998 she was nominated for a Turner Prize and was awarded a DAAD scholarship for Berlin, Germany, in 2000. She has received the following prizes: Aachen Art Prize (2002); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2004); the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2006) and the Kurt Schwitters Prize (2009). Dean has also participated in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2005 and Documenta 13 (2012). Her work has been shown internationally at such institutions as the Schaulager, Basel (2006), New Museum, New York (2008), Tate Modern, London (2011), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Spain (2010), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2001).
Ocula Insight Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 27 April 2016 Tacita Dean’s most recent show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, … my English breath in foreign clouds, featured new drawings, photos, and films. It was presented in three rooms all cleverly linked throughout the exhibition. Upon entering visitors were welcomed to the main gallery with lithographs, and drawings on blackboards,...
Ocula Report On Film: The Sydney Biennale Report Part Iii 9 May 2014 : Stella Rosa McDonald for Ocula Tacita Dean’s commission for the 19th Biennale of Sydney and Carriageworks, Event for a Stage, sits at the apex of a Biennale whose greatest successes have been in its film, video and performance works. Dean is an artist who courts chance and she described this, her first live work, as being based on a “series of profound...
Ocula Report MMCA Seoul's First Steps 12 Nov 2013 : Ines Min for Ocula South Korea’s most anticipated event of the year, the opening of MMCA Seoul, is a milestone for the national museum and local art scene. The new outpost of South Korea’s singular, national contemporary art museum is situated on a minefield of historic structures, set within a zoning law nightmare, and sandwiched between...
Ocula Report Notes On Desire: The 19Th Biennale Of Sydney 12 Nov 2013 : Stella Rosa McDonald for Ocula "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will."George Bernard ShawIn 1879, a French postman named Ferdinand Cheval began building an esoteric homage to the beauty of sandstone. On one of his postal rounds, Cheval came across small pieces of the...
Related Press Tacita Dean Landscape review – a total eclipse of the senses The Guardian : 14 May 2018 Clouds and stones and clods of light. Mountains in Austria and an ant on a rock in Mexico. Best of all, a long, slow eclipse. The final exhibition in Tacita Dean’s three-part meditation on the portrait (at the National Portrait Gallery), the still life (at the National Gallery) and now Landscape (in three rooms of the new galleries at the Royal...
Related Press Tacita Dean’s meditations on a medium Apollo Magazine : 24 March 2018 Film–proper, old-fashioned analogue film, screened using one of those hulking projectors that generate nearly as much heat and sound as light–is Tacita Dean’s medium and, in many ways, her subject. Her current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London, the institution claims, holds the distinction of being its first ever show ‘to...
Related Press Tacita Dean on her three major London shows The Art Newspaper : 13 March 2018 Now, the full scope and richness of Dean’s work is to be revealed in three exhibitions, which mark a unique collaboration between three London museums. In its first exhibition devoted to the moving image, the National Portrait Gallery is showing her film portraits; the Royal Academy of Arts is inaugurating its new galleries in Burlington Gardens by...
Related Press Tacita Dean: the acclaimed British artist poised to make history The Guardian : 11 March 2018 It is tempting to think of Tacita Dean as a witchy presence in the world, a diviner of hidden forces. Her chosen medium is an antique one: spooled film. Waiting is a big part of her method, and watching; there is also an alertness to chance and coincidence. She is a lifelong collector of four-leaf clovers; a sometime chaser of solar eclipses. One...
