The works of Iranian performance artist Ghazel can best be characterized by her dry humor. From very early on, she has insouciantly focused on the depiction of Iranian women both in Iran and abroad—her approach to this contested discourse revealing intricacies and tensions surrounding the themes she chooses to engage with.
With a reputation for being less than accommodating to notions of free speech – approaching, at times, a caricature of regimented utilitarianism – Singapore is perhaps not the first place one would look to when seeking an open dialogue. “Between Conversations,” curated by Louis Ho at Yavuz Fine Art—which features the work of 20 Singaporean artists variously engaging the subject of conversational process—therefore acquires greater significance as a timely exploration advocating speaking with one another rather than speaking to.
If you haven’t been to Istanbul in a while—or even just in the past two years—it might not be quite the city you remember. The Gezi Park protest movement that began in May, and the subsequent social unrest across Turkey, followed a decade of economic growth and massive urban transformation. The demonstrations prevented the construction of an Ottoman-style shopping mall in place of the park (at least for now) but the city will proceed with its plans to demolish poorer neighborhoods, relocating their communities to peripheral high-rises. Vast infrastructure projects that threaten the city’s ecology—including a third Bosporus bridge, the world’s largest airport and a new canal—are also in the works
Photos by Yuanyuan Yang for Untitled Selection, a bi-weekly post of photography from ArtAsiaPacific’s areas of coverage. Created by photo editor, Ann Woo.
Founded in 2008, the Hong Kong-based initiative Soundpocket examines the interstices of art, culture and life through the fluid movements of sound. Its projects include the Around Sound art festival and retreat—the third iteration held earlier this year—which invites participants to listen through a series of site-specific installations, performances and dialogues. Pocket is the project’s written corollary begun in 2010—and one of its few physical traces—where artists, and other collaborators reflect upon their encounters during various sonic happenings. This second edition of the journal, a small, tasteful volume of blue-gray, takes a revelatory tone, entreating the reader to step back in silence, allowing sounds to emerge.
Gyun Hur is most known for her compositions of shredded silk flowers, meticulously arranged to mimic the patterns on her mother’s wedding blanket. In recent years, the Korean-born, Atlanta-based artist has moved away from this distinct motif, employing a new palate and turning the flowers—believed in Korea to drive out bad luck—into colorful mounds with objects, such as broken pottery, stone and plants, buried within each. The narrative quality of her installations extends into performance as well. While on residency at Artadia in Dumbo, New York, Hur staged a one day event, in which she and her father set up an optical store modeled after the actual store of the her childhood and invited audiences to peruse and interact with dozens of vintage glasses frames. Hur sat down with ArtAsiaPacific to discuss memories, process and the importance of family.
The Speech Writer by New Delhi and Karachi-based Pakistani artist, Bani Abidi, is a fictional account of a day in the life of a retired political speechwriter, in ten sequential flipbooks. Snugly encased in a rectangular yellow box, each of the palm-sized books, devoid of text, speaks to the fallibility of language.
For over two decades, Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak has been creating art that interprets the human form. Her latest installation was inspired by the severe floods that swept through Thailand in 2011, ravaging more than two thirds of the country and during which Ms. Sanpitak herself was forced to swiftly relocate from her studio and home in Bangkok to just outside the city. Induced by a feeling of uncertainty, and with the limited materials she had access to, the work consists of 18 dangling handmade hammocks expressing the human desire for comfort and the triumph of creativity in the midst of disaster. ArtAsiaPacific sat down with the artist to discuss her projects and the latest iteration of Hanging by a Thread (2012) currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which seems to have found a balance, now that the proverbial dust, or water, has settled.
Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia (MCA), has put in place a new management team in what she described to ArtAsiaPacific in May as a “radical restructure of personnel,” in order to support the museum’s move toward digital technology and e-publications and to promote the MCA as a destination for visitors.
