Ocula Conversation Bani Abidi: ‘What you see in my films is what I know’ A group of voices accompanies me in the exhibition. They are singing words I cannot comprehend, yet the warm tunes are familiar: folk songs, love songs, songs of longing. There are letters, too. They speak of the quotidian details of a soldier's life: the hardness of the war, sending money to the family, and longing for familiar landscapes, food,...
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 Mark Bradford’s Call for Unity at Shanghai’s Long Museum 16 August 2019 Mark Bradford walks through Mark Bradford: Los Angeles Mark Bradford: Los Angeles at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai (27 July–13 October 2019) is the artist's largest solo exhibition to date in China. In this video for Ocula, Bradford and Diana Nawi, curator of the show, walk through selected works that convey the artist's concerns with...
For three months, Frieze Sculpture (3 July–6 October) transforms Regent's Park, London, into an open gallery with sculptures by artists from all over the world. This year's edition is again curated by Clare Lilley, director of programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park since 1992 and curator of Frieze Sculpture since 2012. This video, created for Ocula's IGTV, takes a close look at eight of the selected works featured in the park.
The first stop is Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura's Usagi Kannon II (2013–2018), which is concerned with the human experience. The patinated bronze sculpture portrays a hybrid figure: a human with rabbit ears, dressed in a bell-shaped skirt. Created in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 and the ensuing birth defects, the work makes a protective gesture by depicting an open space in the figure's skirt.
Usagi Kannon II is followed by American artist Robert Indiana's ONE through ZERO (1980–2002), which consists of ten corten steel sculptures of the Arabic numerals, arranged in an arc. Indiana, a seminal figure in the development of American assemblage art and Pop art, started working with numbers in the 1960s. He was drawn to them from his personal experiences of moving multiple times as a child, as well as for their widespread use towards a variety of meanings.
Barry Flanagan's bronze sculpture Composition (2008) offers a humorous tone, showing the British artist's iconic long-limbed hare dancing on a cylindrical plinth that is supported by three elephants. Flanagan, who became known for his conceptual and post-Minimalist works in the 1960s and 1970s, turned to figurative sculpture—often associated with the hare, but also animals such as horses and elephants—in the late 1970s.
Columbian-born and Paris-based artist Iván Argote's Bridges (We are melting) (2019) is a new work created for this event. Consisting of three steel-and-concrete bridges with poems engraved on their surface, it takes the motif of the bridge as a metaphor for the connections between people.
By contrast, the playground slide in Iranian artist Ghazaleh Avarzamani's Strange Temporalities (2019) is inaccessible, having been deconstructed and its pieces mounted on metal armature. Avarzamani considers the playground as a symbol loaded with cultural codes, where the safe environment for play becomes reflective of the problems of educational systems.
British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové similarly takes the universal icon of the automobile in Autonomous Morris (2018), a roughly three-metre-tall sculpture constructed from decommissioned car parts. The work, which evokes a gigantic metal head or mask, is a continuation of Ové's mask sculptures, which are inspired by the masking rituals of the Trinidadian Carnival—in the 19th century, freed African slaves deployed masks, music, and dance during Carnival as a form of resistance and a means to connect among themselves.
Tracey Emin—A member of the Young British Artists, who garnered critical attention for their often provocative works in Britain in the late 1980s—presents When I Sleep (2018), a four-metre bronze sculpture of a figure lying on its side. While less shocking than the works she's most known for, Emin's recent creation is no less candid, charged with a deeply touching and introspective mien.
Another work that evokes a sense of the personal and meditative is Laura Asia's Dream (2018), a bronze sculpture, slightly over two metres, by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. Depicting the face of a young girl, eyes closed as if dreaming, it is an example of Plensa's characteristic sculptures featuring oversized human faces and bodies, their proportions elongated using 3D modelling.—[O]
Artist Profile Iván Argote 
Artist Profile Tracey Emin Confessional, candid, challenging and poignant. These are some of the words commonly used to describe the works of Tracey Emin. Emin is most celebrated for her visualisation of universal contemporary experiences, drawn from her own personal memories, dreams and body. A modern-day Expressionist, her work encompasses painting, installation, sculpture, photography, embroidery, neon and drawing.
Emin is remembered as one of the Young British Artists (YBAs)—a loose grouping of artists who became known for their nonconformist art and larger-than-life attitudes in the 1990s. Among her YBA contemporaries—including Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman—Emin was close friends with Sarah Lucas, and in 1993 the two young artists opened a shop to sell their artworks. Emin's breakthrough, however, came from the works that, through their stark honesty to the point of provocation, deconstructed the border between life and art, and openly shared her personal experiences. Inside a tent, Emin appliquéd the names of every person she had shared a bed with from the time of her birth to the year 1995, thus creating Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995). Her most iconic work, My Bed (1998), is an installation of her bed from a depressive phase when she did not leave her bed for several days. Surrounding the unmade mattress are empty bottles, used condoms and tissues, which immortalises a particular moment in the artist's life with its loneliness, despair and private suffering intact. Emotionally powerful and outrageously frank, Emin's works redefined the ways in which a female artist could discuss herself—her life, her body—in public.
Often at the centre of Emin's work is the female nude, especially her own—a tendency that has led some critics to regard her oeuvre as feminist. Although the artist herself has somewhat denied association, her blunt exploration of the female body and sexuality reflect the feminist belief that a woman can define her own sexuality. Between 2009 and 2010, Emin collaborated with Louise Bourgeois in the last months of the famously feminist artist's life. In the resulting exhibition Do Not Abandon Me (2011), the autobiographical paintings showed the two artists engaging in different aspects of their lives, from Emin's traumatic memories to Bourgeois' experience as a mother. In relation to the use of the female body in her work, Emin reflected in a conversation with Ocula Magazine that 'I know my body better than anyone else. I am my best model; it makes it really different that I am the woman because I am not viewing my body with a sexual gaze but with an understanding one.'
Emin was born in London in 1963 and grew up in the seaside town of Margate. She was inspired by the expressive qualities of JMW Turner and Egon Schiele from an early age, and she closely studied their styles as a student. Returning to London, she graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in painting. Over her long career, Emin has exhibited in the UK, Holland, Germany, Japan, Australia and the United States. Her work has been subject to several survey exhibitions, including her first major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Hayward Gallery, London (2011) and Turner Contemporary, Margate (2012). Cited as a national treasure by the Guardian in 2015, Emin represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale and Queen Elizabeth II appointed her Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts in 2013. Emin currently lives and works in England and France.
Artist Profile Leiko Ikemura 
Artist Profile Jaume Plensa 
