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...
Ocula Conversation RoseLee Goldberg: Performance Then and Now RoseLee Goldberg had long been invested in contemporary performance art before her founding of the inter-disciplinary arts organisation Performa in New York in 2004. Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied political science and fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and then art history at the Courtauld Institute...
Ocula Report The lucky eight: Unmissable Hong Kong exhibitions 23 Mar 2017 : Diana d'Arenberg for Ocula Hot on the heels of the Hong Kong International Arts Festival, Hong Kong this week welcomed the fifth edition of Art Basel. You've flown thousands of miles, endured over eight hours of screaming spawn on a long haul flight, paralysing jetlag, and visual and social overload at the Art Basel preview. And now you want to experience more than Hong...
Ocula Conversation Song Dong Artist, China At the height of its heady sprint towards modernity in the 1990s, Beijing’s urban landscape transformed rapidly, rendering it almost unrecognisable to the generation before. The horizon was crammed with cranes and skeletons of buildings, either in the process of being built, or being destroyed. To make way for a new modern landscape,...
