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.
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Artists Residency in Thailand
Bang Lamung, Thailand
A blue house surrounded by lush green, tropical scenery. Next to it is an even bigger golden house that looks a bit like the Guggenheim museum with lots of round curves and gigantic dimension. Birds are singing their songs in strange voices, people speak with what seems to be 90% vowels and the smell of spicy ingredients comes out poking your nose at every street corner. Where am I and why am I here?
I got invited to come and stay for the year of 2012 at the “Thaillywood Contemporary Artist Residency” which lies 90 minutes outside of Bangkok to live and work as an artist. But also to build the structures for a fruitful partnership between the artist residency and CRE8 Foundation. But let me explain you how i got here…
The story of a “Real Thread”
A piece containing text in combination with material can translate to a kind of associative puzzle that awaits to be deciphered by the viewer. The material I chose for this piece was carefully selected to reveal the story it represents, the story of its nature. Here is the story behind “Real Thread“.
Flying into Bombay over the years has been an astonishing experience for me. Right next to the luxurious skyscrapers and villas of the city lies something that at first seemed to me to be a bright blue ocean. All of similar size, next to massive highways, parks, shopping malls, thousands of interconnected blue squares lie next to each other for miles on end.
Later I realized that this “ocean” actually consists of the plastic tarp roofs of the slums that are interwoven into the urban fabric of the sprawling city.
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.