Latest news with #Moca
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Video of Husky Getting His Ears Cleaned Is Pure ASMR
It seems like the internet's latest source of dopamine is a Husky's serene ASMR video. Instagram user @mocathehuskyy shared a video of a dog, Moca, treating his viewers to a peaceful scene. He gently lies on his back, enjoying an ear cleaning session. As the caption describes, the video is pure 'Asmr / Relax & Ear Cleaning Therapy with Moca,' and it is guaranteed to calm anyone. Video of dog's ear cleaning session is as relaxing as it gets Moca the Husky's viral ASMR video is all about tranquility and relaxation. The video shows the fur baby lying comfortably as he enjoys an ear cleaning and massage session. With his paws still in the front, Moca undergoes the session without moving at all. He closes his eyes and looks at peace as a gentle chime of a tolling bell sets the atmosphere. The professional uses a series of grooming tools, creating a soothing ritual. Revealing just their hands, the video shows the expert working through a gentle ear cleaning process. They employ different instruments to delicately care for Moca's ears. Moreover, the session incorporates a calming face massage using special rollers. It ends with a soft cleanse using wet wipes and a gentle wave to bid farewell to his caretaker. As the video goes on, the Husky's complete trust and tranquility steal the show. Viewers notice his peaceful demeanor, expressing their awe and envy for the dog in the comment section. One commentator admits, 'I will never know this level of peace,' while another quips, 'Ok the dog is living like roylayity period.' A third user remarks about the sweet wave between Moca and his masseuse, writing, 'The wave at the end got me.' The reactions in the comments prove how the Husky has captivated his viewers in the video. A Husky owner states their desire, 'Wish I could get my husky to stay still like that!' For a breed famous for its boundless energy, Moca's ability to stay still is a rare feat. With viewers agreeing that the vibe is 'as relaxing as it gets,' Moca's video serves as the perfect dose of serenity. The post Video of Husky Getting His Ears Cleaned Is Pure ASMR appeared first on DogTime. Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
15-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Pussy Riot's founder built a ‘police state' in an LA art gallery. Then the national guard arrived
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the co-founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, was sitting in a replica Russian prison cell in downtown Los Angeles when the police started shutting down the streets around the art museum. Police helicopters hovered overhead. Somewhere, through a loudspeaker, an officer delivered a tinny order to disperse. Tolokonnikova was only three and a half days into what was supposed to be a 'durational performance' reenacting her two years as a political prisoner in Vladimir Putin's Russia. But Donald Trump had ordered national guard troops into Los Angeles, over the objections of California's governor, and the protests against immigration raids that Trump wanted to target were happening just a block from the gallery where Tolokonnikova was performing. The Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) hastily decided to shut its doors. But Tolokonnikova, 35, whose political art has left her as a wanted criminal in Russia, chose to continue her performance inside the empty museum. 'Police State Exhibit Closed Today Due to the Police State,' she posted on Instagram. The situation 'felt like I had entered a wormhole,' Tolokonnikova told the Guardian the next day via email. She wanted to be out on the streets, but she decided to finish her performance while live-streaming audio of the protests outside into her prison cell. It felt important, she wrote, 'not to bend to the whims of Ice or the national guard'. Tolokonnikova was in Los Angeles to display a new performance piece called Police State, which includes a replica Russian prison cell like the ones in which she was incarcerated for nearly two years, including in the notorious penal colony IK-14 in Mordovia. Tolokonnikova had been just 22 when she and two other members of Pussy Riot were convicted of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred' for staging an anti-Putin 'Punk Prayer' protest in a Moscow cathedral in early 2012. After her release in late 2013, she kept demonstrating, and kept making art. In 2021, the Russian government labeled her a 'foreign agent'. A recent multimedia performance, Putin's Ashes, which came to Los Angeles in 2023, had landed her on Russia's wanted list, and led to her being arrested in absentia for the crime of 'insulting the religious feelings of believers'. Los Angeles was the latest stop in a series of museum exhibitions that had brought the artist to Berlin and Linz in Austria for a show called Wanted. Police State, which was being performed at the Geffen Contemporary at Moca, had been designed for an audience, with museum visitors peering at her through observation holes in the walls, or following the surveillance video from her cell on gallery screens. It was her first time doing a 'durational' performance, and she had planned to spend hours each day inside the cell creating music, mixing it with leaked audio from Russian prisons, and sewing protest slogans on military shirts, all the while surrounded by a crowd of supportive people outside the fake cell walls. Now, suddenly, she was alone again. A block away, protesters had gathered outside the federal buildings where detained immigrants, including families with small children, were reportedly being held in basements, with little food or water. In her replica cell, Tolokonnikova thought about the Los Angeles mothers and fathers who had just been torn away from their families, people who were 'hard-working breadwinners and caretakers', not violent gang members. She looked at the art decorating her cell's walls, drawings sent by current and former political prisoners in Russia and Belarus, 'people imprisoned for 10, 15, 20 years, simply for being good'. 'I was thinking of dehumanization and scapegoating as a universal mechanism – applied with heartbreaking ruthlessness both back home and here,' she wrote in the email. 'I was thinking how the western idea that history inevitably moves toward progress is a mirage.' When her performance hours were done, she walked out into the Los Angeles streets for comfort. It was early Sunday evening, and the protests downtown had been going on most of the afternoon. 'People were giving out gas masks, water, and protective glasses,' she wrote. What captured her attention was not moments that would be played and replayed on the news, like Waymo automated vehicles set on fire, or protesters streaming on to the 101 highway. It was the way being at a protest feels: 'That spirit of care and solidarity is precious,' she wrote. 'People were being shot with rubber bullets and burned by tear gas, yet they refused to leave.' On Wednesday, the museum announced that the rest of Tolokonnikova's performance would have to be postponed indefinitely, because of 'ongoing demonstrations and military activity'. 'Every single event I did in Russia was shut down by the cops,' she posted on Instagram, 'and now it's starting to feel a lot like Russia.' Tolokonnikova, who faces immediate arrest if she returns to Russia, is not an optimist. In recent months, she has repeatedly compared her art practice to the musicians who kept playing on the Titanic as the ship went down. 'I think we live in a world that doesn't really belong to us any more,' she told me in an interview the week before her Los Angeles performance began. 'If 15 years ago, I wanted to radically change the world, now I just want to comfort people.' 'I mean, I still wouldn't mind changing the world,' she added. But at the moment, the change she's seeing 'goes in the opposite direction'. Still, Tolokonnikova, 35, does not take her ability to keep making big art installations for granted. 'It's awesome,' she told me in our Los Angeles interview, as she and her collaborators were working on the final touches to her replica prison cell. 'I don't know if victory is the right word, but it's rewarding.' When I walked inside the replica cell, it was bigger and far more detailed than I expected, with battered, blue-painted plaster walls etched with graffiti, a desk for Tolokonnikov's music equipment, and a toilet in the corner that she planned to use during her performance shifts, which would last either six or eight hours. The floor of the cell was dirty, and the observation holes fit into the walls had heavy metal covers that could slide open or closed. There were surveillance cameras all over the cell, even one pointed at the toilet. The Russian prisons where she was incarcerated had 'cameras right above the toilet bowl, which makes no sense for us people who live outside of jails', she said. 'But once you're in, you kind of just know, well, that's what it is.' We talked with the noise of construction around us, and the sharp smell of iron in the air, a sign of the metalwork in progress nearby. Partway through our conversation, the metalworker approached, wheeling the massive cell door, to ask Tolokonnikova about the finish she wanted on the metal. Each of these details mattered to Tolokonnikova. One of her inspirations for the durational prison performance is her friend Marina Abramović, known as 'the grandmother of performance art'. Another is the late conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov, who had meticulously replicated an old, deteriorating Soviet public bathroom and displayed it in a European gallery so western audiences could understand the context of his art. 'It's one of the works that changed my life for ever,' she said. For authenticity, the table in her cell was covered with a garish plastic tablecloth printed with lemons, a 'very post-Soviet thing' that people incarcerated in Russia use 'to recreate this idea of comfort of coziness, in jail'. To more directly connect her performance to other political prisoners still incarcerated in Russia, Tolokonnikova had collected drawings they had made to display in the cell. This was a laborious process, she explained, working with the prisoners' family members and lawyers, and some of the art had not yet arrived. But she was hopeful that displaying Russian prisoners' work in a prestigious American museum might help their cases, even help them get on a prisoner exchange list. Tolokonnikova and another jailed member of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, staged hunger strikes and drew international attention to the conditions in their different prisons. When she was incarcerated in prison colony No 14 in the Russian region of Mordovia, Tolokonnikova was forced to work 16-hour days, seven days a week, sewing uniforms for police officers. The sewing machine she had used in prison had constantly broken down, something she believes was not a coincidence: the prison staff wanted to make her life 'completely impossible'. A decade later, in her reenactment of prison life, Tolokonnikova was planning to again sew military-style uniforms on a battered old sewing machine, but this time she would be embellishing them with 'some simple words that mean something to me like exiled or voided, cancelled, expelled, alien – how I feel these days''. She would trim some of the uniforms with lace, she added, 'because I always like to add some cuteness'. The lives of Russian dissidents are not easy, and becoming a prominent Putin critic, as Tolokonnikova has done, is dangerous, even after dissidents have left Russia. One of the art works in Tolokonnikova's Los Angeles exhibit is a candy machine labeled with the different poisons that have been used to murder enemies of the Russian state: Polonium 210 Isotope, Thallium, Sarin. On certain subjects, Tolokonnikovia can be laconic, even dismissive. Asked about how she was preparing to protect her mental health while reenacting her imprisonment in Los Angeles, she said she had not really made any plans. 'Self-care is not my strong suit. I'm just like: I don't have time for this.' When it came to performance, she said, Ambramović had told her several years ago that 'once you commit to an idea, it basically negates all the fear' and that 'if you believe that the particular artistic idea that you chose is good enough, then you just kind of don't care about physical safety, or emotional safety'. 'I'm sure it's gonna be triggering as fuck at some points for me to sit there,' she added. 'But do I care? No. Because I think the work has to be done, and I'll deal with it later.' Tolokonnika's punk aesthetic is not something she adopts for performances. She told me cheerfully about almost getting blown up by pyrotechnics at a recent unauthorized concert, and praised the work of LA's Dead City Punx, a hardcore punk band and one of her planned collaborators in Los Angeles. 'One thing that I just don't vibe with in modern American society – there's an entire thing about safety. And I've lived my life in a way that safety was the last thing that I would care about,' she said. 'This is a thing I think about a lot lately. We need to be less safe, be ready to offend ourselves and other people. Otherwise, Maga people are just going to keep winning, because they're not afraid.' Tolokonnikova told me she had hoped that people would come to her Moca exhibit with their children. 'I've always been obsessed with building a version of Disneyland, but much more radical and grim,' she said. She had worked with Banksy on Dismaland, the artist's 2015 dark Disney satire, but she's still thinking about the possibilities of a more revolutionary theme park. 'It's just a giant waste of time and money the way that Disneyland looks now. It just doesn't accomplish anything,' she said. Imagine, she suggested, if the animatronic characters of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride were instead a way for kids 'to learn the history of the feminist movement'. 'So instead of pirates doing this,' she said, jerking her arms, 'it could be like, you're a suffragette being arrested.' 'Obviously, I don't have a budget to build Disneyland,' she added. 'But it was a dream of mine for ever.' Police State had been scheduled to run through June 13, with a final performance by Pussy Riot Siberia, Tolokonnikova's new performance collective, to close it out. Now, it is postponed to an unknown date in the future. 'I guess the National Guard will be performing POLICE STATE instead of me this week,' Tolokonnikova wrote on Instagram.
The Star
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Moca unveils extension and exhibits
THE Pahang State Museum Corporation (PSMC) officially launched an extension to the exist- ing Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) building on May 18, accompanied by two exciting new exhibitions. The extension is now known as Moca Plus. The launch was graced by the presence of Tengku Ampuan of Pahang Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah and Tengku Permaisuri of Selangor Tengku Permaisuri Hajah Norashikin. Other guests included State Investment, Industries, Science, Technology and Innovation Committee chairman Datuk Mohamad Nizar Najib, who is also the Pahang State Museum Board chairman, and Pahang State Museum director Datuk Ahmad Farid Abdul Jalal. Moca is located at the Sultan Haji Ahmad Shah Royal Museum Complex in Kuantan. Tunku Azizah, Tengku Permaisuri Norashikin and the guests also took time to view the artworks and various other exhi- bitions located throughout the complex. The first exhibition, titled Nik Zainal: Wayang Dunia (Nik Zainal: The World as a Stage), features 40 works of the late artist. While he was primarily remembered for his wayang kulit figures, the current exhibition showcases his lesser-known works such as landscapes and abstracts. The landscape paintings clearly showed his love for Kelantan's culture and its coastal area, which he shared in the many exhibitions he participated in over the years. A showcase of diverse art installations currently exhibited at the Moca Plus building in Kuantan. The paintings on display are courtesy of the late ambassador Datuk N. Parameswaran, who was a prominent art collector. The 40 artworks, arranged in collaboration with his daughter Sharmin Parameswaran, are currently on loan to the Pahang State Museum for this exhibition. Sharmin, who is a media consultant and independent curator, currently manages her late father's art collection and has been actively collaborating with local museums as well as those abroad. Additionally, the exhibition features a Jawi script showcase by Akademi Jawi Malaysia, alongside Tun Teja: A Tapestry of Heritage, Empowerment, and Artistry by Norfazlin Zulkifli. The second exhibition, titled When Craft Becomes Attitude, features eleven new artworks by four of the country's notable contemporary artists — Anniketyni Madian, Faizal Yunus, Saiful Razman and Zulkifli Lee. The four of them have extensively held exhibitions in Malaysia and abroad, and their works have been in the collection of various local and international art institutions. Craft-based exhibitions have been gaining significant recognition globally, especially in the past few years. Exhibitions such as the ones being held at Moca Plus will help the public to understand the philosophy of craft and how it can be interpreted to reflect one's life irrespective of their vocation. The new extension of the Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) building – called Moca Plus – was launched by the Pahang State Museum Corporation. The two exhibitions will run from May 19 till Nov 30 this year. The artists featured are: >Anniketyni Madian (b.1986, Sarawak): Anniketyni's intricate sculptures are inspired by the Pua Kumbu, a unique textile design associated with the women of the Iban tribe. She has been commissioned to create works for the United Nations (Rome), Google, Four Seasons Hotel and WOLO in Kuala Lumpur. She was also shortlisted for the Sovereign Art Prize in Hong Kong for 2017 and 2019. >Faizal Yunus (b.1989, Pahang): Known for his airbrush technique and use of automotive paint, Faizal combines natural and industrial elements to create dream-like, textured landscapes that blend memory and fantasy. He has received several awards including the Malaysian Emerging Artists Award 2019 organised by HOM and Galeri Chandan, Kuala Lumpur, and was the Resident Artist at art centre Rimbun Dahan in 2018. >Saiful Razman (b.1980, Perak): Razman is known for using tissue paper and gauze to create abstract works that explore social issues and landscapes. He has participated in local and international exhibitions, and in 2021, was awarded the South-East Asia 'UOB Painting of the Year', beating contestants from Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. >Zulkifli Lee (b.1978, Pahang): Zulkifli's works primarily involve the use of natural, organic materials, juxtaposing the beauty and paradox of the relationship between humans and nature. He has showcased his works both locally and internationally, and was selected for the SEA Artists Residency at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia, in 2017 and Galeri Khazanah's residency pro- gramme at the ACME Studio in London in 2019.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Noah Davis review – LA painter of everyday black life is a revelation
Noah Davis (1983-2015) was a great painter, a pioneer of free culture in black working-class Los Angeles and a terrible loss to contemporary art. He died of cancer at the age of 32, leaving a young family, a wildly unconventional gallery and several hundred strange and immemorial paintings. In LA he is especially remembered for the Underground Museum, established in a row of shops so remote from the city's hub that wealthy collectors had trouble finding it. It is humorously evoked, at the Barbican, with the 'Jeff Koons' vacuum cleaner Davis bought for $70 on Craigslist, the knock-off Duchamp ready-mades, and the William Kentridge film he blagged off a curator at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) – which is where his own paintings would have their first museum display. Some of Davis's works became classics overnight. And so it seems in this beautiful retrospective, where each painting seems entirely new and yet somehow already passing into memory. That is in their nature, of course, for so much of what he painted was drawn out of the recent past, even though it seems to be happening right now. A solitary man carrying an old leather briefcase walks across the canvas right to left, we do not quite know where. A remote backdrop carries hints of Edinburgh Castle, somehow, as well as the California landscape. Monolithic architectural forms dwarf his distinct profile – Davis is a wonderful shape-maker – around which light plays like St Elmo's fire. The man is unique, and he is alone, as we all are when facing life's journey. Another man sits deep in a bower of jungly foliage. He has a rifle. It ought to be ominous but there are overtones of Manet. And just as you might be thinking of Matisse and Rothko, in the early galleries, comes a swimming pool from the days of segregation (it takes a moment to notice that everyone is black, from the girl with water up her nose to the boy basking below the surface). The pool is full of human beings, drifting, playing, vulnerably bare, who have no civil rights. The scene is disturbing, yet the water is all diaphanous blue and turquoise, somewhere between Richard Diebenkorn and Monet. Davis grew up in Seattle, the son of a lawyer and brother of film-maker Kahlil Joseph, collaborator with Kendrick Lamar. He was educated in New York but left for Los Angeles, where a job at the Moca bookstore allowed for the long study of catalogues. Davis's work is steeped in art history. His oil paint stains or veils the canvas, hovers in soft blurs, occasionally descends in washy drips like fine rain. The face of The Architect – based on the black architect Paul Revere Williams, who perfected the art of drawing upside down, since his white clients didn't like to sit next to him – is almost entirely concealed behind a mist of white paint. Made when Davis was only 25, it is avowedly political. But as TJ Clark writes in the excellent catalogue, the portrait is both reckless and gentle. Honesty and heartfelt sincerity are not uppermost traits of most 21st-century painting but they characterise all of Davis's work. He loves what he is looking at, which may equally be a flea-market trove of photographs of families messing about in LA in the 1970s, the city lights by night beneath the rival glow of the moon, or his own family at different ages. Sisters doze on a white sofa, sunlight casually burnishing their long dark legs. His wife, Karon, appears holding two vast yellow fans at her sides, like golden wings, against the peeling white walls of the stucco house where they lived: a latterday Isis in LA. A haunting painting of Karon as a child shows her black face concealed behind the white mask of the Holly Hobbie doll, a popular toy in 70s America. She looks ancient, even pharaonic, the white stripes of her pyjamas like the bandages of an Egyptian mummy. The Missing Link 4 shows black bathers in a swimming pool overshadowed by a monstrous office block of small rectangles, which may refer to reality but also to the grids of Mark Bradford, another African American painter based in Los Angeles. (It is as if they all live together, bathers and painters alike, in this separate world.) Davis was well loved in the West Coast art scene, included as early as 2008 alongside influential black artists from David Hammons to Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker in a momentous art show. He was the youngest painter. But for all the sophistication of his work, there is always this profound and candid emotion. His father appears by night before a vast starry sky, standing with a lantern on the edge of a rocky precipice. Davis paints him from behind, looking out at this voluminous darkness, into which he will one day disappear. The artist, with absolute empathy, sees and paints it too, even though he cannot (yet) follow. Almost all of the works in this spacious and loving retrospective, with its eloquent wall texts and climactic film of Davis laughing, painting and shyly talking, were made in seven years. Some are necessarily callow. 40 Acres and a Unicorn, from 2007, takes General Sherman's famously unrealised promise of land for freed enslaved people and turns it into a satirical dreamscape, in which a boy rides a mythical mule with a horn in its forehead. But in later years, the world quietens, the art deepens and the paintings approach archetype. Perhaps the most lyrical of all Davis's paintings come from the Pueblo del Rio series, set in Williams's LA housing project for black defence workers in 1941. With low-rise buildings and shared green lawns, it should have been a garden city; but it quickly degenerated. Davis paints it back into beauty. Six black ballet dancers in white gloves and tutus perform arabesques between the houses. Vernon reads his glowing white newspaper against the basketball railings at twilight. And a boy in uniform plays the Last Post beneath a mauve dusk and all the shadows are pearly grey, except his own, which runs at a special angle as if music singled him out. Here they all are in this earthly paradise, but already departing: glimmers held here by the paint through time. Noah Davis is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 11 May
