Ole Ukena is a conceptual artist that interweaves a variety of media including text, video, photography, drawing & sculpture. Ukena’s diverse media work takes various forms, bound by a common thread of complex simplicity. This unfolding dance between challenging artistic practice and innocent questioning of the “is-ness” of our world defines the very essence of his works. Ukena’s dance often mesmerizes as the juvenile forms an unlikely yet impactful partnership with the spiritually refined. With a wink and a nudge, youthful, playful enthusiasm confronts buttoned-up “maturity”. Sometimes poetically narrative, and in other moments purposefully reduced, Ukena frequently uses language as a tool to build riddles that await completion in the viewer’s mind. His choice of material and medium becomes a metaphor that challenges the status quo. And as his childlike game continues the underlying message invites the viewer into ongoing personal reflection.
As the founder of CRE8 Foundation, Ole engages professional artists and kids worldwide to create collaborative artworks. The workshops and exhibitions draw on collaborative creativity. This serves to verify the power and richness that lies in valuing diversity and authentic self-expression as opposed to conformity.
Archive for September, 2010
Bathroom Installation in Paris
I got invited to take part in a group show in Paris during the FIAC by Laurence Dreyfus. Bigger names like Olafur Eliasson, Louise Burgeois and von Trier also had their works on display. I was quite excited I have to admit.
Naturally the younger generation had to make space. I went around the exhibition space and saw the bathrooms. I have had my own history with bathrooms (watch BAD from 2006) and proposed to do a site-specific installation in there. This is how it turned out.
Waitaminute.tv is online !
Waitaminute.tv is a window on life. It is also a way of life if you but let it be. And if you let it be, you may just find the magical in the seemingly mundane.
“Every place is a gold mine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passersby, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread–a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you just met–and soon the most insipid, most insiginficant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theater of humanity.”
–TIZIANO TERZANI
How often do we race past this minute onto the next? But…hold on a sec, hang for a moment, waitaminute. That is life we are racing past and wishing away. Minutes may be grains of sand in an hour glass but they have a way of adding up. Maybe they add up annoyingly like parking tickets or maybe they add up magnificently like bricks in the Great Wall of China.
As Terzani suggests, let the “insignificant” transform before your very eyes. Yes, roses have a fragrance.