Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Since its inception in 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has been devoted to collecting works of art that span both history and geography, in addition to representing Los Angeles's uniquely diverse population. Today LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection that includes over 120,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present, encompassing the geographic world and nearly the entire history of art. Among the museum’s strengths are its holdings of Asian art, Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract over a million visitors annually, in addition to serving millions through digital initiatives, such as online collections, scholarly catalogues, and interactive engagement at lacma.org. Situated in Hancock Park on over 20 acres in the heart of Los Angeles, LACMA is located between the ocean and downtown.
In April 2006, Michael Govan became CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of LACMA. Formerly president and director of Dia Art Foundation and deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mr. Govan is the seventh director in LACMA’s 46-year history.
Ocula Report The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka at LACMA 18 Jan 2019 : Perwana Nazif for Ocula The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (9 December 2018–23 June 2019) is billed as the first comprehensive survey of Sri Lankan art organised by a U.S. museum, with around 240 works—including decorative objects, textiles, photographs, and historical works from the museum's own collection of Sri Lankan...
Ocula Report Iranian Art at LACMA: In the Fields of Empty Days 12 Jun 2018 : Perwana Nazif for Ocula In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, 6 May–9 September 2018), explores 'the continuous and inescapable presence of the past in Iranian society.' Curated by Linda Komaroff, curator of Islamic art and head of LACMA's Art of the Middle East department, the...
Related Press At 89, Robert Irwin finds beauty in the benign (and talks about the new artwork that's not for sale — sort of) Los Angeles Times : 7 February 2018 Inside a gleaming San Diego tract home, 89-year-old artist Robert Irwin reclines in his favorite leather lounge chair, snug in his favorite worn baseball cap, sipping a fizzy Coke over ice.Irwin has lived here about 15 years 'because my wife wanted kids on the block for our daughter,' he says of his now 23-year-old. Still, the cozy setting seems...
Related Press The James Turrell cure for election day blues Apollo Magazine : 29 November 2016 Hollywood Boulevard on the eve of the election. A man in a Donald Trump mask is gyrating on the sidewalk with a sign that reads ‘Let me take a Trump dump on America’. Nearby, a rival parades a placard of a naked, handcuffed Hillary Clinton. It’s a consoling thought that in around 32 hours, this weird, year-long pantomime will...
Related Press László Moholy-Nagy at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Art in America : 10 November 2016 László Moholy-Nagy was a young Constructivist in Berlin when, in 1923, he accepted the architect Walter Gropius’s invitation to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Moholy-Nagy’s democratic embrace of new technologies and mediums had a colossal influence on the school’s direction and legacy—and, thus, on modern visual culture. As...
Related Press Disappearing in one of James Turrell's perceptual cells Hyperallergic : 20 October 2016 LOS ANGELES — A couple of months ago, on a press tour visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I had the opportunity to experience one of James Turrell’s Perceptual Cell pieces — built structures designed to have viewers enter and experience a particular sensual cocktail of light and sound — titled Light...
