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ARTISTS

LIDA ABDUL A fg h a n is t a n CHANTAL AKERMAN Be l g iu m VYACHESLAV AKHUNOV Uzb ek is t a n w ith SERGEY TICHINA Uz b ek is t a n EVE ARMSTRONG n ew Ze a l a n d THE ATLAS GROUP/WALID RAAD l e b a n o n / u s a CARLOS CAPELAN u r u g u a y /SWEDEN PHIL COLLINS UNITED k in g d o m DONNA CONLON u s a / p a n a m a n g a p u h i/ n ew Ze a l a n d CHRISTINA DIMITRIADIS g r e e c e / g e r m a n y WILLIE DOHERTY n o r t h e r n Ir e l a n d REGINA JOSE GALINDO Gu a t e m a l a CARLOS GARAICOA Cu b a ALEXANDROS GEORGIOU GREECE MONICA GIRON A r g e n t in a GEORGE GITTOES Au s t r a l ia FIONA HALL Au s t r a l ia MONA HATOUM Pa l e s t in e / u n it e d k in g d o m JULIAN HOOPER n ew Ze a l a n d ALFREDO JAAR Ch il e / u s a ISAAC JULIEN UNITED KINGDOM LUCIA MADRIZ c o s t a r ic a OSCAR MUNOZ Co l o m b ia JOHN PULE /NEW ZEALAND R E A GAMILARAAY/ WAILWAN PEOPLE OF NSW, AUSTRALIA

MICHAL ROVNER i s r a e l / u s a JULIE RRAP AUSTRALIA LAZARO A. SAAVEDRA GONZALEZ Cu b a SRIWHANA SPONG n ew Ze a l a n d YUK KING TAN n ew z e a l a n d / h o n g ko n g LAURA WADDINGTON u n it e d kin g d o m LYNETTE WALLWORTH Au s t r a l ia ARETA WILKINSON kai t a h u / n ew Ze a l a n d

MULTI-ARTIST PROJECT

LONG MARCH PROJECT p e o p l e 's r e p u b l ic OF c h in a KAH BEE CHOW Ma l a y s i a / n ew Ze a l a n d DANIEL MALONE n ew Ze a l a n d

THE 3RD AUCKLAND TRIENNIAL COULD NOT HAVE BEEN REALISED WITHOUT THE ASSISTANCE AND COOPERATION OF: I EXHIBITION PARTNERS ARTSPACE

SUE FISHER ere at ive PATRONS OF ART TRUST 'n z AUCKLAND FESTIVALS THE TRIENNIAL

PATRONS OF THE TRIENNIAL: JENNY GIBBS/ADRIAN BURR AND PETER TATHAM/ERIKA AND ROBIN CONGREVE/ROSE AND JOHN DUNN/GRAEME EDWARDS/ FRIEDLANDER FOUNDATION/DAYLE AND CHRIS MACE/BEVERLEY MCCONNELL/THANKSGIVING FOUNDATION

ga|TH E u n iv e r s it y C it y L if e 1 V OF AUCKLAND EEXQSI NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BRITISH AIRWAYS I C O L O U B [ CREATIVE ARTS AND INDUSTRIES IElam School of Fine Arts

The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki is provided by 4$y c o c r LU

£ X X LU

AUCKLAND ART GALLERY TOI 0 TAMAKI THE ACADEMY CINEMAS NEW Gallery Kenneth Myers Centre Auckland Central Library Building Cnr Lome and Wellesley Streets The 44 Lom e Street A uckla nd 74 Shortland Street ph +64 9 373 2761 ph + 64 9 307 7700 A uckla nd www.academycinemas.co.nz www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz ph +64 9 373 7599 ext 86646 www.gusfishergallery.auckland.ac.nz

9 March to 4 June 2007 9 M arch to 28 A pril 2007 Screenings weekends 9 March to 4 June 2007

ARTSPACE ST PAUL ST Level 1 Level 1 WM Building 300 AUT University A uckla nd School of Art and Design ph +64 9 303 4965 34 St P au l Street www.artspace.org.nz Auckland ph +64 9 921 9999 ext 8313 www.stpaulst.aut.ac.nz

9 March to 14 April 2007 9 March to 21 April 2007 cover: CARLOS CAPELAN Published by Auckland Art Gallery This book is copyright. Except for Always There 2 (detail) 2006 Toi o Tamaki on the occasion of reasonable purposes of fair review, Indian ink on wall and turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic digital photography www.aucklandtriennial.com installed in onlyyou, Museo or mechanical, including recording or de Arte y Diseno Contemporaneo Commissioning editor: Victoria Lynn storage in any information retrieval (MADC). San Jose Managing editor: Jane Davidson systems, without permission in writing courtesy of the artist and MADC from the publishers. No reproductions Artist biographies compiled by Jane photo: Carlos Murillo Hernandez may be made, whether by photocopying Davidson and Winsome Wild, with or other means, unless a license has assistance from Caroline McBride been obtained from the publishers or Copy editor: Nic McCloy their agent. Gallery photographers: ©Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, John Mclver and Jennifer French Victoria Lynn, the artists and in d ivid u a l authors, 2007 Catalogue design: www.inhousedesign.co.nz Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki PO Box 5449 Printers: Cnr Wellesley and Kitchener Streets Spectrum Print, Christchurch Auckland ISBN 0-86463-272-X New Zealand www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz CO I—

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-10 DIRECTOR'S FOREWORD - CHRIS SAINES -12 CURATOR'S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS - VICTORIA LYNN

ESSAYS -19 WE LIVE IN TURBULENT TIMES... - VICTORIA LYNN -32 ANITPODEAN ANTI-TURBULENCE IN ART AND POLITICAL ECONOMY - DAVID CRAIG —40 SPHERES. CITIES. TRANSITIONS: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON ART AND CULTURE - GERARDO MOSQUERA

ARTISTS -46 LIDA ABDUL - NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS -48 CHANTAL AKERMAN - KAIRA CABANAS -50 VYACHESLAV AKHUNOV with SERGEY TICHINA - VIKTOR MISIANO -52 EVE ARMSTRONG - VICTORIA LYNN -54 THE ATLAS GROUP / WALID RAAD - ALAN GILBERT -56 CARLOS CAPELAN - NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS -58 PHIL COLLINS - EDGAR SCHMITZ -60 DONNA CONLON - VIRIGINIA PEREZ-RATTON -62 SHANE COTTON - VICTORIA LYNN -64 CHRISTINA DIMITRIADIS - MARINA FOKIDIS -66 WILLIE DOHERTY-JE A N FISHER -68 REGINA JOSE GALINDO - VIRIGINIA PEREZ-RATTON -70 CARLOS GARAICOA - VIRIGINIA PEREZ-RATTON -72 ALEXANDROS GEORGIOU - MARINA FOKIDIS -74 MONICA GIRON - VIRIGINIA PEREZ-RATTON -76 GEORGE GITTOES - RUSSELL STORER -78 FIONA HALL - DAVID HANSEN -80 MONA HATOUM - ALIX OHLIN -82 JULIAN HOOPER - LINDA TYLER -84 ALFREDO JAAR - ALFREDO JAAR -86 ISAAC JULIEN - LEONHARD EMMERLING AND VICTORIA LYNN -88 LUCIA MADRIZ - VIRIGINIA PEREZ-RATTON -90 OSCAR MUNOZ - VIRIGINIA PEREZ-RATTON -92 JOHN PULE - RON BROWNSON -94 REA- CHRISTINE NICHOLLS -96 MICHAL ROVNER - MICHAEL RUSH -98 JULIE R R A P -VICTORIA LYNN -100 LAZARO A. SAAVEDRA GONZALEZ - VIRIGINIA PEREZ-RATTON -102 SRIWHANA SPONG - LAURA PRESTON -104 YUK KING TAN - JANE DAVIDSON -106 LAURA WADDINGTON - FIONA TRIGG -108 LYNETTE WALLWORTH - VICTORIA LYNN -110 ARETA WILKINSON - HANNA SCOTT

MULTI-ARTIST PROJECT -113 LONG MARCH PROJECT - LU JIE -116 KAH BEE CHOW - TZE MING MOK -118 DANIEL MALONE - JON BYWATER -120 LONG MARCH - CHINATOWN, NO CHINATOWN - LONG MARCH PROJECT with KAH BEE CHOW and DANIEL MALONE

-124 LIST OF WORKS □ oc r

LU world. She does so in a way that is critically informed q : and astute but not theoretically prescriptive, less o paradigm more passion. Consistent with the Triennial's Li_ raison d'etre she joins New Zealand to the world, drawing the work of local artists, writers and curators CO into her task. Through turbulence, she makes an important contribution to the ideas, experiences, memories, provocations and conversations the Auckland Triennial seeks to generate.

For recurring contemporary art projects of this kind to achieve their uncommon reach they require a complex architecture of support - first and funda­ mentally from the artists themselves, then from those who lend their baseline organisational resources, through to those who provide structural funding, and those whose in-kind support helps to keep The Auckland Art Gallery has a long history of artistic and curatorial ambitions aloft. While such presenting and collaborating on exhibitions of diverse systems are inherently a challenge to build, contemporary New Zealand and international art, they hold together more readily when the project's seen either independently or in play. Less long is its conceptual and curatorial direction is sound, as history of recurrent projects like this one, built around it is here. Victoria has ted the artistic development a consistent and increasingly more integrated of turbulence with a remarkable degree of good exhibition-making structure. The launch of the 1st judgment and professionalism, adroitly gathering Auckland Triennial (presented across three venues and binding disparate artists and others into her in 2001) and the development of the 2nd Auckland enterprise. Triennial (presented across four venues in 2004) signalled a determinedly new direction for the An independent curator and writer based in Gallery. Conceived as a major multi-venue contem­ Melbourne, she curated the inaugural 2006 porary art project that would engage a new curator TarraW arra Museum of Art Biennial. From 2001-4 she or curators on each successive occasion, the held the positions of curatorial manager and then Auckland Triennial aimed to connect contemporary director of creative development at the Australian art to the host city itself. Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and chaired the /Craft Board of the Australia Now in its third iteration, turbulence: the 3rd Council. Before that, she worked for over ten years Auckland Triennial (presented across five venues) as curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery is endeavouring to build its nascent relationship of New South Wales, organising more than forty with Auckland. Since its inception the Triennial has exhibitions. A commissioner of the Australian created opportunities for Aucklanders to experience pavilion at the 2003 and co-curator the work of some of the world's most influential and for at Brisbane's Asia-Pacific Triennial of formative contemporary artists, as well as introducing Contemporary Art in 1996, she brings wide experience them to emerging artists of note. Not only does that to Auckland. endeavour expand on this occasion, through the agency of our leading public galleries and an art- Once again, the Triennial reaches out across an house cinema, but also much more of the event increasing number of inner-city venues and co­ takes place on the streets. All of this is working to opted sites - some fixed and others more intrepidly increase the public's access to new and innovative ephemeral - signalling exciting growth for what is work, and to increase the potential for contemporary becoming a major Auckland event. Our exhibition artists to reach new audiences beyond those with partners ARTSPACE and The Gus Fisher Gallery, an existing commitment to their cause. central from the beginning, have this time been joined by ST PAUL ST and the Academy Cinemas. To keep that always volatile exchange between the Together with the New Gallery, it is a highly engaged experience of art and the construction of meaning coalition of local public galleries and private enter­ as legible as possible, each Triennial is structured prise, supported variously and generously by around a galvanising theme. Here, curator Victoria Auckland City Council, the ARTSPACE board, the Lynn speculates on the idea of 'turbulence' as a University of Auckland and AUT University. This cultural and political condition, as a prevailing atmo­ Triennial would be much less without their manifest sphere and as a metaphor of the contemporary commitments of programme space and resources.

For that, I am deeply indebted to the leadership of Brian Butler, director of ARTSPACE; Linda Tyler, —11

director of the Centre for New Zealand Art Research My warm thanks go to them as they do to those and Discovery at The Gus Fisher Gallery and Prof. international cultural agencies that have also Sharman Pretty, dean, National Institute of Creative played key roles in this project, including the Arts and Industries at the University of Auckland; Australian Government through the Australia Dr Leonhard Emmerling, director of ST PAUL ST and Council, its arts funding and advisory body, the Desna Jury, head of School of Art and Design at AUT British Council and Asia New Zealand Foundation. University; and John Davies and Gina Dellabarca, directors of Academy Cinemas. Each has had a I never tire of thanking organisations and individuals direct hand in either the programming, production or who make positive things happen for artists and for resourcing of turbulence in their respective venues the curators and galleries who work with them. and each has made a great contribution to its Without their support, we simply could not present success. I am similarly grateful to Derrick Cherrie major contemporary art events of this ambitious Head of the and Ron Left kind. Key players in the Gallery's contemporary art Associate Head of AUT University's School of Art and support base are the Patrons of the Gallery, a group Design for their facilitation of related residencies. formed under Jenny Gibbs in 1987 and chaired by Dayle Mace since 2003. As patrons of the Triennial Indeed, Auckland Triennial partner AUT University, they have again lifted their support to a gratifying through vice-chancellor Derek McCormack, are new level, led by Jenny Gibbs and joined by Adrian deserving of especial gratitude for the way in which Burr and Peter Tatham; Erika and Robin Congreve; they have so comprehensively embraced this project, Rose and John Dunn; Graeme Edwards; the committing to more than generous support of the Friedlander Foundation; Dayle and Chris Mace; 2007, 2010 and 2013 Triennials in 'growth adjusted' Beverley McConnell; the Thanksgiving Foundation; amounts! It is a bold gesture that perfectly aligns and Vicki and Scott St John. with the aspirations of the organising gallery and its owner and principal funder Auckland City Taken together, the patrons have created opportu­ Council. At the same time, it complements the nities for many of the artists in the Triennial to either similarly generous contribution made to this Triennial be included or to otherwise extend the nature of by second-time principal sponsor Simpson Grierson, their contributions. I wish to warmly thank Dayle whose chairman Rob Fisher and marketing director Mace for her input, and to thank each of them for Glenda Macdonald are champions of the Gallery's their unstinting generosity. They have been joined role in fostering contemporary art. A business and by a similarly motivated group of supporters in-kind, the arts sponsorship award, rightly acknowledging including Trethewey Stone, British Airways, and their bravery, honoured their support of the 2nd Gallery sustaining sponsors CityLife Hotel and Aalto Auckland Triennial. Colour. Can I also thank, respectively, Nick Hall, Chris Lucas, Susan Gibson, Prue Cook and Rachel Lacey What has become apparent about this project is the for their provision of materials, international more it grows the more support is drawn to it. That airfares, accommodation for participating artists would not have been possible without the formative and other guests, and paint-out of the galleries. roles played by its three major supporters, namely the Sue Fisher Art Trust, the Chartwell Trust and In closing, let me also add to the curator's own Creative New Zealand, all of whom have been acknowledgements, which generously recognise contributors to all three Triennials. In retrospect, all of the participating artists, their dealers, and far-sighted might seem too easy a term to apply the Gallery team that has directly assisted this to their roles, but none of us really knew how the Triennial's development - be it the exhibition itself, Triennial would evolve. To Sue Fisher, to Rob and its publication, symposium, public and education Sue Gardiner and to the CNZ board I offer my programmes or website. To all of those who have profound thanks for staying the course. You have contributed so manifestly to research, technical resolutely expanded the platform for contemporary services and production, and marketing and artjn Auckland and New Zealand. communications, I want to also record my sincere thanks. And can I finally join Victoria Lynn in Another major supporter has joined us whose own acknowledging the work of the core team; manager of biennial lifecycle more or less parallels the Triennial's art and access programmes Louise Pether, project and whose timing, this time around, happily coincides coordinator Sonya Korohina, assistant curator Jane - the Auckland Festival AK07. Through festival Davidson and exhibition designer Philip Burns. director David Malacari and visual arts and public They have lent brilliant support and energy to this programmes coordinator Natasha Beckman, I am 3rd Auckland Triennial. pleased that turbulence is the key visual arts event of AK07, among a rapidly expanding visual arts CHRIS SAINES/DIRECTOR/AUCKLAND ART GALLERY TOI 0 TAMAKI programme in which the Gallery has played a part in 2003, 2005 and now 2007. it is a superb festival of local and global theatre, dance, music and events. CO

Ll I Lu Jie and David Tung, from the Long March Project, China, visited New Zealand in December. Many LU individuals gave their valuable time in order for O the Long March Project to be born in New Zealand: O Daniel Malone, Kah Bee Chow, Alistair Kwun, Tze Ming Mok, Natalie Robertson, Albert Refiti, Jim Vivieaere CO and Ruth DeSouza. During the course of my travels z in Australia, New Zealand, Berlin, Costa Rica and z> cn o Havana, and my research, I discussed the project cr< 1— with numerous individuals. My thanks are extended C s l O to Nicholas Baume, Natasha Conland, Catherine u < C£ David, Heather Galbraith, Dorita Hannah, Mark z>u Hughes, Marilyn Kohlhase, Geert Lovink, Ngahiraka CJ< Mason, Charles Mereweather, Suhunya Raffel, Albert Refiti, Andreas Schleger, Britta Schmitz, Lynne Seer, Russell Storer, Lane West-Newman, Jenny Todd, James Pinker and Linda Wallace. I met with many This exhibition has been organised with the advice inspiring artists and their dealers, and thank each and support of two consulting curators: Marina of them for their time and good will. Fokidis and Virginia Perez-Ratton. Based in Greece and Costa Rica respectively, Marina and Virginia The Auckland Triennial is an initiative of Chris provided independent curatorial expertise, access Saines, director of the Auckland Art Gallery. His to a number of international artists and intellectual entire team has shown exceptional leadership and input of the highest order. Two leading figures in management, and have been a joy to work with. New Zealand, and Jim Vivieaere, both This exhibition would not have eventuated were it of whom I have worked with on previous occasions, not for the tireless and professional work of the provided a warm welcome, and an unofficial, but small but efficient core Triennial team: Louise nevertheless vital, 'sounding board' for my ideas. Pether, Sonya Korohina, Jane Davidson and Philip Burns. Appreciation is also warmly extended to our turbulence has been expanded and consolidated Triennial intern: Winsome Wild; photographers: John through its exhibition across Auckland's city art Mclver and Jennifer French; registrars: Laura Jocic, organisations. This would not be possible without David Reeves and Penny Hacking; the wonderful the keen participation of our exhibition partners team of preparators: Rod MacLeod, Glen Campbell, ARTSPACE, The Gus Fisher Gallery, ST PAUL ST and Darren Sheehan and Scott Everson; conservators: Academy Cinemas. Particular gratitude is extended Sarah Hillary and Becky Cameron; research to the boards of management, the directors - Brian librarians: Catherine Hammond and Caroline Butler, Linda Tyler, Leonhard Emmerling, John Davies McBride; public programmes: Kim O'Loughlin; and Gina Dellabarca - and their staff for their willing­ education: Roger Taberner, Kirsty Glengarry and ness to allow the project to reside in their spaces. Kate Sellar; marketing and communications: Tina This year, the Triennial is proud to be part of the Norris, Jennifer Dann and Sarah Eades and of Auckland Festival AK07, and I have developed a course: administration and finance - Lissa Crook wonderful working relationship with Natasha Beckman, and Gloria Smith. Warm thanks also go to Alan Deare visual arts and public programmes coordinator, and and the team at Inhouse Design. extend my thanks to her, the festival director, David Malacari and the rest of their team. The artists in this exhibition have each been an inspiration to work with. I honour their contribution David Craig and I met on one of my first visits to New and thank them for their generosity of spirit and Zealand. Inspired by the ideas behind turbulence, participation in turbulence, and also extend my he organised a platform - a.one-day symposium in . gratitude to their galleries, and the private lenders November 2006 where a number of thinkers from to the exhibition. In addition, thanks are due to the New Zealand and Australia discussed contemporary many speakers involved in the talks and symposium economies of culture. This was a formative day for for the exhibition. all of us, and the beginning of a very exciting longer- term intellectual cluster. David Craig has written a key This exhibition was generated and organised from text for this publication, as has Gerardo Mosquera, my home in Melbourne, Australia. My love and who is also the Triennial keynote presenter. I am thanks to Nikos Papastergiadis for his support and grateful to each of them for their contribution. All of inspiration, our daughter Maya, and our family for the writers have provided exceptional insights into helping turbulence come to fruition. the work of the Triennial artists. VICTORIA LYNN /CURATOR OF TURBULENCE: THE 3RD AUCKLAND TRIENNIAL/INDEPENDENT CURATOR AND WRITER/MELBOURNE CO > - < CO CO Ll I

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TURBULENCE 1. The link between The 3rd Auckland Triennial addresses a prevailing A sense of home, space and movement are affected the term 'turbulence' condition of our times: tu rb u le n c e Throughout the in turbulent times. Even if we are not the ones who and cultural practice was first forged by twentieth and twenty-first centuries artists, writers are moving, it is quite likely that we are living in a Nikos Papastergiadis and filmmakers have responded in a variety of ways turbulent zone. in The Turbulence of Migration: to extraordinary and diverse levels of turmoil. Such is Globalization, the power of turbulence, that it can create disturbing The title of this exhibition is intended to be both Deterritorialization and serendipitous experiences. Turbulence gives and Hybridity, metaphoric and evocative. Turbulence is not posited (Cambridge: Polity rise to passion, and passion can produce fantasy, as a 'condition' in the same sense of modernism or Press, 2000). desire, anxiety and enjoyment, all of which underpin postmodernism; it is not the description of an era, such the arts. as 'imperial' or 'postcolonial'; nor is it a description of a style of politics such as 'neoliberal'. Turbulence is Turbulence describes a condition of unsettledness, something that is sensed. A work of art starts as turmoil, surprise, rupture, dissensus and unpredict­ much with an image, gesture and feeling, as it does ability through which 'mutual transformation' can with an idea. But, the questions for artists in this be achieved. Turbulence has several dimensions: exhibition are not the same as they were for the modernists or the postmodernists. At the beginning - a condition that is characterised by unpredict­ of the twentieth century, modernists were responding ability and uncontrolled change; to the turmoil in their midst: the rise of the industrial - an instability in the atmosphere that disrupts the world, periods of revolution and political change. flow of the wind, causing gusty, unpredictable They believed in the invention of a new formalism. air currents: They tried to control turbulent times for the good. - a form of flow in which particles of fluid move At the end of the twentieth century, artists were and interact with irregular local velocities and no longer concerned to build on or react against pressures, producing mutual transformation. a priori artistic movements. Rather, there was a The term suggests a condition that is always renewed sense of freedom to literally roam across changing, and this is a process that is built upon all periods of art for inspiration and context. Art so that new formulations are created. It is not was at a key juncture and was labelled, variously, a theoretical construct. It can be a metaphor, 'transavantgarde', 'postmodernist' and 'neo­ a description of a state of mind, or being. It is a expressionist'. The postmodernists believed that condition that is not specific to a person's identity, change could not be controlled. They greeted PREVIOUS PAGES class or gender or a nation's borders, and yet it political, artistic and digital change with a discourse p14. D em onstrators, ^Iheir ha nd s painted white to symbolise their also arises from such. In this sense, it is nowhere of despair, defeatism and irony. opposition to violence, protest against the G8 summit, Genoa. and everywhere. It is ambient. It is not one thing, Italy. 19 Ju ly 2001. photo: Darko Bandic. AP Images but multifarious. It is both within us, in our psyches, Today, responses are not singular. We do not live p15-16. A K ashm iri re fu g e e p ra ys and it is outside us. in a period of total revolution, though some artists at the graveyard of earthquake victims, with the ruins of the do protest. Nor are we in the midst of total despair, village mosque in the back­ ground. Chella Bandi refugee Turbulence can arise from a multitude of places, though some artists present work that is circulatory camp. Neelum Walley. Pakistan. 23 October 2005. events and experiences, be they small and personal; in its meanings. The artists in this exhibition act locally photo: Burhan Ozbilici, AP Images or public and historic. In the latter category, the in relation to the global condition of turbulence. When p17-18. V e h icle s clo g th e M a sn a a border between Lebanon and turbulence of our times has to do with the age of they protest, they draw together the ambiguities Syria, east of Beirut. The majority of the license plates were terrorism, the age of the refugee, the age of ethnic and contradictions around them into critique, humour, Lebanese, suggesting that some of Lebanon's 4 million inhabitants cleansing, the age of globalisation and the age of were fleeing. 13 July 2006. photo: Samer Husseini, AP Images media saturation that generates these pithy slogans. 20-

satire and, above all, in a gesture of aesthetic helps us perceive it. Emotions are not the same as 2. For a discussion of the trickster in art, defiance. They do not have one answer. When they sentiment, but range from a sense of anticipation, see Jean Fisher, resist, they explore moments of survival and resilience. through to stronger passions. Perhaps one of the "Towards a Metaethic They create images of the human body in a state of crucial elements of the emotional is memory. of Shit", in Nikos Papastergiadis, ed., endurance, mutation, triumph and absence. When Complex Entangle­ they are in transit, they do so as a kind of trickster, On my first visit to New Zealand, someone said to ments: Art, Globalisation and creating new and innovative journeys into the past me, "I think it is great you are doing an exhibition Cultural Difference, and future, which bypass the conventional routes of that is not about here". Yet, turbulence finds its way (London, Sydney, colonisation and globalisation.2 to all shores and arises within many people, even Chicago: Rivers Oram Press. 2003), 69-84. though it is experienced in different w ays and to 3. M aruska Svasek. I began this project with an idea that turbulence was differing degrees. David Craig's essay in this "Introduction: the crucial metaphor for our time, and with the view publication speaks to some of the ways in which Emotions in Anthro­ pology", in Kay Milton that artists throughout the world were addressing it. turbulence has been 'embedded' and 'disembedded' and Maruska Svasek, After conducting twelve months of research, along in New Zealand's cultural and political economy, the eds.. Mixed Emotions: Anthropological with studio visits in New Zealand, Australia, Cuba, methods by which governments have tried to control Studies of Feeling, Costa Rica and , it is now my observation the vicissitudes of the global market, and its tendency (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 13. that this concept is also reflected in the fact that to break out of those controls through successive feelings have once again arisen in art. Such periods along with the innovative ways in which expressions of emotion are not nostalgic, sentimental New Zealand's artists have absorbed and resisted or angst-ridden. They are not necessarily so personal imported styles from abroad. and, as such, do not have a relationship with the expressive and emotive qualities evident in German ARTISTS expressionism or abstract expressionism. In The artists in this exhibition offer a range of turbulent times, the feelings of loss, fear, anguish, approaches to the turbulence of our times. The grief and anger, along with the notions of hope, exhibition is organised as an interrelated set of sustenance, the capacity to dream and find refuge experiences. It is not a procession of individual rise to the surface. works, but a sequence of relationships. As a curatorial proposition, the political can be sensed Many of the works in this exhibition are motivated by between the works, as well as in the selection of such feelings. Once we perceive turbulence, we are work that has overt political content. Correspondingly, captured by it. It begs a response. It is too simplistic turbulence is experienced both within certain works, to just turn aw ay from it, as if it were a purely negative and in the atmosphere that is implied by the condition; too simplistic to bury one's head in the conjunction of others. It is both within and between. sand. Nor can we simply think of ourselves as outside I divide the works into three loose categories - turbulence, looking in. Rather, as curators, writers, protest, survival, transit - but there are links thinkers and artists 'we' can mobilise it (this 'we' is between each of the categories, and stories that by no means a unified or equivalent force). These perm eate all three. might be small gestures - and artworks are small gestures - that do not change the world. Yet, art Protest has a sensory dimension: it can capture audiences Drawing on the powers of both creativity and emotionally and aesthetically. It can catch us 'off critique, a group of artists located on the ground guard' as it were, and thereby create a small, but floor of the New Gallery create actions, performance, significant gesture in this landscape of turbulence. , installation, video, film and as Aft has the capacity to provide a point of difference, a form of protest. Each of these works reveals a sense of the absurd, the magical, the humorous, and intervenes in the injustices and absurdity the deeply personal and, of course, pain. of globalisation and its affect on the economies, cultures and identities of various nations and This is not to make a false opposition between groups. The increase in global flows of trade, reason and emotion, nor is it to suggest that capital and information has had the effect of emotions are either universal or culturally-specific. both destabilising an overall sense of identity As Maruska Svasek has said, "emotional acts are and providing the justification by which a number simultaneously bodily movements, symbolic vehicles of nations have increased their border security. that reproduce and affect social relations, and practices that reveal the effects of power''.3 In other The exhibition at the New Gallery opens with Lucia words, emotions are bodily and cultural. Emotions Madriz's floor piece entitled Alerta Roja (Red Alert). are not singular. They are processes that are Composed of beans, corn and rice, modelled into shaped by the events that surround us and are the shape of a skull and stars, Madriz's installation within us. Emotions are not separate from our refers to the pirate ships that used to sail the South environment; they are what links us to it and what American seas, white also wryly protesting at the contemporary 'pirates' that come to Costa Rica. Beans, corn and rice are arriving in Central and REA maang (still) 2006-7 three-channel DVD installation courtesy of the artist CHANTAL AKERMAN De I'autre cote (From the Other Side) (still) 2002 documentary, video and 16mm film courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. New York a n d P aris LUCIA MADRIZ Hispanic (stills) 2006 DVD courtesy of the artist LAURA WADDINGTON Border (still) 2004 Digibeta PAL co u rte sy o f th e artist

4. Lu cia M adriz, in Latin America in the form of genetically modified Postcapital, appropriates imagery from the banknotes conversation with the crops and there are no controls. She says, "there of a similar group of nations. Buildings, animals and author, March 2006. 5. C arlos G ara ico a , are still pirates, they just come in a different guise portraits are remodelled in three dimensions and artist's statement for these days".4 Her amusing animation Hispanic refers placed on a table. Global capital becomes one turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial, to the reverse movement of Mexicans to the United global 'market' place. National identities are eroded. www.auckland States and the fears of invasion that have contributed It is, he says, an "imaginary theme park city, that triennial.com. to the building of a wall between the two countries. guides us through an economical utopia.... An This is also the subject of Chantal Akerman's film, invisible City that we long for, that we manipulate De I’autre cote (From the Other Side), a documentary and that in some way inhabits us, both physically screening at Academy Cinemas. It chronicles some and metaphorically. A City that lives in our pockets of the stories that have emerged on the US/Mexico and in our wallets."5 The characters from Garaicoa's border. Their stories are embedded in the landscape banknotes are echoed in Fiona Hall's work, When in both real and poetic ways. my boat com es in, a sequence of tender and intricate gouaches of native botany on banknotes depicting A procession of leafcutter ants carrying small flags voyages at sea. Juxtaposing national species with of the 191 members of the United Nations are the a symbol of global capital, Hall quietly unravels the subject of Donna Conlon's video, Coexistence. The turbulence of trade, colonisation and the long-term entire action took place in the Panamanian forest, effects of exploitation of the environment. Implicit and lasted one hour. The video documentation was in her work is a defence of indigenous rights - the then edited in such a way that only the flags of subject of the work of r e a who is from the Gamila- countries that have been involved in military conflicts raay nation in Australia. Her recent video is entitled in recent history are seen. This ant performance is maang, which means message stick. The three- an amusing work, replete with critique, and a sense channel video explores the loss and resurrection of both the futility of war and hope for the re-building of traumatised nations. Carlos Garaicoa's sculpture, 22-

d o n n a CONLON Coexistence (still) 2003 DVD courtesy of the artist FIONA HALL When my boat comes in (detail) 2002-ongoing Agathis australis/ New Zealand kauri pine gouache on banknotes courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. Sydney CARLOS GARAICOA Postcapital (detail) 2006 wood, metal, polychromed plaster, PVC, cardboard courtesy of the artist. Galleria Continua, San Gimignano-Beijing, and Galena Elba Benitez. Madrid

of the Gamilaraay language. Like Akerman, r e a carries within its leafy patterns traces of figures uses seductive imagery of the landscape as a with guns. His interweaving of Niuean symbols with metaphor for both loss and belonging, r e a overlays references to the increasing ways in which contem­ richly evocative im ages with indigenous words and porary society is influenced by the media (allusions phrases, signalling a renaissance of the Gamilaraay to images from television for example) invokes an language. abiding concern with global hegemony. There is a tremulous emotional touch in these works, a softness, Michal Rovner travelled across Central Asia in 2004 that belies their deeply felt protestations. and, as a result, has produced a sequence of small LCD screens inspired by the flash of flames that Both Lida Abdul and Walid Raad explore the shoot from the oil rigs populating this landscape. Oil contemporary ruins of warfare. Their imagery is so is, of course, not only the mainstay of art in the form transfixing, and strange, that one is not sure if it is of paint, it is also the key commodity around which truth, fiction, intervention or imagination at work. economic and political conflict ensues. Black oil This is partly their point. Through their elegiac pumps form silhouettes against the stark white impulses, they reveal the impossibility of straight­ background. Through a calligraphic minimalism, forward responses to war. Lida Abdul's War Games Rovner transforms the spectre of global economies (What I Saw) shuttles between a sense of futility and into jewel-like imagery that carries the relentless the potential for restoration as horsemen attempt to repetition of production within its animations. pull down an abandoned building. Walid Raad's Rovner's oil,flames resonate with Yuk King Tan's performances (presented on the opening weekend) drawings. Tan responds to an early Chinese are chillingly witty excavations of bomb plots in propaganda painting Oil City in the South and the Lebanon. Archival in nature, the performances forge enormous oil platforms that dot the globe. Her oil a fine line between a form of authoritative rhetoric rigs are 'drawn' with firecrackers, casting a volatile and an intriguing investigative journey into the and potentially explosive image on the wall. The causes, perpetrators and outcomes of Lebanon's lyrical nature of Rovner and Yuk King Tan's works turmoil. The subjects of Laura W addington's film resound with the linear of John Pule. In his Border (screening at Academy Cinemas) are on their work, a natural phenomenon can transform into the way to the West. Working with the Afghan and Iraqi machinery of war: a cloud becomes a bomb; a vine refugees at Sangatte Red Cross camp, France, Waddington's film expresses and, by implication, rails against the fear, terror and sense of limbo felt by the refugees at the border of escape and arrival. - 2 3

YUK KING TAN Boomtown (detail) 2006 firecrackers installed in Local Transit. A rtists Space, New York, 2006 co u rte sy of th e artist a n d Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland JOHN PULE Kehe Tau Hauga Foou (To All New Arrivals) (detail) 2007 enamel, oil, pencil, pastel, oil stick and ink on canvas c o u rte sy o f the a rtist a n d Gow Langsford Gallery. Auckland MICHAL ROVNER Site C2006 metal-framed LCD screens, metal shelf, computers and digital video © M ichal Rovner, lice n se d by VISCOPY, Australia. 2007 co u rte sy of th e artist, PaceWildenstein, New York and Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland WALID RAAD Untitled p h o to g ra p h co u rte sy of The A tla s G roup, Beirut and New York, Sfier-Semler Galerie, Hamburg and Beirut and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London LIDA ABDUL War Games (What I Saw) (still) 2006 16mm film transferred to DVD cou rtesy o f the artist an d G iorgio P e rsa n o G a lle ry, Turin

Survival 6. R eg in a G alindo, The group of artists located on the first floor of the Monica Giron creates large-scale drawings of artist's statement New Gallery forge an aesthetic of survival. What humanoid forms - infants that have been tormented for turbulence. www.auckland does it take to survive turbulence? What forms of or haunted in some ways. Their enlarged eyes, and triennial.com. resistance and resilience are at work? Many of foreshortened figures refer to the vulnerability of the 7. Monica Giron, these works represent the body in performance, human body. She comments, "They are in a way a correspondence with the author, video, painting, installation, drawing, photography, commentary on the possibility we have, in contem­ March 2006. sculpture and film. This is a body fragmented, and porary life, to physically disappear instantly and physically or psychologically damaged, at times quite totally, without having time to prepare".7 absent, and yet it is also an ethical body. These Lazaro A. Saavedra Gonzalez's single channel bodies come to represent, as Regina Jose Galindo projection El Sindrome de la Sospecha (The Syndrome has said, "many bodies".6 of Suspicion) is a self-portrait, broken into four images. It focuses on the artist's eyes, which shift from left to 24—

REGINA JOSE GALINDO Limpieza Social (Social Cleansing) (still) 2006 DVD courtesy of the artist and Prometeo Gallery, Milan MONA HATOUM Undercurrent (detail) 2004 electrical cable, light bulbs and computerised dimmer unit courtesy of the artist and Alexander and Bonin. New York photo: Mattias Givell. courtesy Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall

OSCAR MUNOZ Aliento (Breath) 1996-2002 grease photoserigraph on steel disks courtesy of the artist and Daros-Latinamerica Collection, Zurich photo: FBM studio, Franziska Bodmer, Zurich

MONICA GIRON MED "Miedo Existencial Democratico" (Democratic Existential Fear) 4 2004 pencil and watercolour on paper c o u rte sy o f th e artist CARLO S CAPELAN Back to the horizon (de ta il) 2006 Indian ink on wall, framed drawings, stones and plates installed in onlyyou at M useo de Antropologia y Arte Contemporaneo (MAAC), G u a y a q u il courtesy of the artist and MAAC ALFREDO JAAR Muxima (still) 2005 digital film with sound on Mac Mini computer © Alfredo Jaar courtesy of Galerie Lelong, N ew York —25

PHIL COLLINS they shoot horses (still) 2004 synchronised two-channel video projection courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York GEORGE GITTOES Soundtrack to War (still) 2004 - Iraqi Heavy Metal band Acrassicruda, performing their composition Massacre, in a Bagdad basement. May 2004 film courtesy of the artist photo: George Gittoes LAZARO A. SAAVEDRA GONZALEZ El Sindrome de la Sospecha (The Syndrome of Suspicion) (still) 2004 DVD courtesy of the artist

right, top to bottom. They are in a process of country music on both the soldiers and the inhabitants greeting and departing - exchanging information of contemporary Iraq. Music is the means by which like a game of secret whispers. The video doubles these unlikely neighbours endure, tolerate, connect as both the spy and the interloper, invoking and disconnect in a time of war. Alfredo Jaar's film suspicion, complicity and secrecy. By contrast, the Muxima is equally redolent with music. The film is eyes in Carlos C apelan's figures are missing. His centred around five different recordings of 'Muxima', large-scale site-specific wall drawing contains which means 'heart' in Kimbundu, an indigenous images of figures in exile. They are in a nether world, language of Angola. Like Gittoes' Soundtrack to suffering the continual trauma of materialisation and War, Muxima reveals the contradictions of a place dematerialisation, the two words that are engraved colonised by the Portuguese. With a very formal into the surfaces of local basalt stones at the base of structure, and an elegiac mood, Jaar's film meditates the drawing. What form does the body have to take on the vast differences between an oil-rich elite and to travel these routes? What masks does it have to the 80 per cent who live in poverty and lack access wear? Regina Jose Galindo performs on the streets to basic health and social services. Both filmmakers of Guatemala, and in other sites around the world, recognise that within spaces of contradiction lies in an expression of the real pain experienced by the potential for intervention and invention; for women in her home country, but also as an expres­ creativity (both are screened at Academy Cinemas). sion of survival. In one of her most recent videos, Limpieza Social (Social Cleansing), she is hosed with Mona Hatoum's Undercurrent presents a chilling high-pressure water, the method used to calm sense of the electric danger that lies just beneath demonstrators down or to wash people about to go the surface. While the body is absent in this work, into prison. its presence is implied by the atmosphere of torture and imprisonment and by the fact that it can be 8. see text in this volume While very different in tone and location, Phil Collins' read as a large carpet. It is composed of electric by a iix ohim, 78. video, they shoot horses, expresses a similar sense cable and pulsing light bulbs that fluctuate at the of physical, psychological and emotional endurance. pace, Hatoum has said, of "slow breathing”.8 There This seven hour, two-channel work depicts young is nothing homely about this site. Its mood is Palestinians dancing to the sounds of 1980s disco menacing. Rather than being an invitation to sit in Ramallah. Trapped by the camera and the frame upon its matted centre, the work is instead isolated of their dance floor, their gradual exhaustion is a and isolating. Breath is also at work in Oscar Munoz's metaphor for survival under duress. George Gittoes' film Soundtrack to War is, he says, a musical. It charts the influence of hip-hop, heavy metal, gospel and 26-

CHRISTINA DIMITRIADIS Ubungen Um Zu Vergessen (Obitvion's Exercises - Bedded) 2005 Lambda print, colour photograph courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens

SHANE COTTON Free Fall (detail) 2006 acrylic on canvas Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki VYACHESLAV AKHUNOV w ith S ER G EY TICHINA Corner (still) 2004 DVD courtesy of the artists and Kurama Gallery, Kyrgyzstan

WILLIE DOHERTY Closure (still) 2005 DVD courtesy of the artist, Alexander and Bonin. New York and Galena Pepe Cobo, Madrid LYNETTE WALLWORTH Evolution of Fearlessness (still) 2006 single-channel interactive video installation produced by Forma, commissioned by New Crowned Hope Festival. V ie n n a courtesy of the artist and Forma

Aliento, which is a literal translation of the word in Within this context Shane Cotton's powerful paintings Spanish. Viewers are presented with steel disks, in take on a new dimension. Beyond focusing on the which they see their own image reflected. A mirror , paintings as an act of asserting his Maori identity, to the self. A metaphor for self-centredness. It is turbulence provides an opportunity to highlight the only when they breathe on the metal surface that mood inherent in Cotton's work. Representing the work is activated and photographic portraits of shared experiences of Maori and Pakeha within New missing persons fleetingly appear, before the Zealand, these works are mournful, and yet contain surface returns to a mirror. It is a relay between the the resilience of a Galindo performance. The blank self and the other. By this means, the artist poignantly exilic faces in Capelan's Always There are answered, implicates viewers in both the giving and taking perhaps welcomed, by the blue and black faces in aw ay of life. Cotton's work. Like r e a, his work resurrects the dissolution of tribal knowledge, while acknowledging that contemporary pathways are endlessly fraught. Life and death punctuate Christina Dimitriadis' photographs Spaziergang (Promenade). Almost -2 7

completely white, these images of a lone figure forge and counter turbulence through their explora­ on a beach under the mist of the sea in Greece tion of the very condition of transit, and by extension, are accompanied by Obungen Um Zu Vergessen transition. But they are also very clever, improvisatory (Oblivion's Exercises - Bedded) that depicts an and witty works, that use turbulence to outmanoeuvre entombed figure beneath a sheet. On the one hand itself. Each of the artists deals with the notion of we are presented with an image that seems to arise a journey of some kind, cutting across cultural from memory, from a state of longing. On the other difference, and giving rise to new forms of coexist­ hand, such sentiments are disrupted by the image ence through transitory states, whether it be in the of death. imagination, in real terms or through ancestral stories.

Lynette Wallworth's Evolution of Fearlessness The Long March is a curatorial project involving includes a procession of ten women behind a Chinese artists and curators who work in collabora­ filtered pane of glass, each, in turn, responding to tion with artists from other countries in order to the viewer's touch. Through friends, Lynette realise art works that consider the relationship Wallworth has located women residing in Australia between the individual and the collective; tradition who have lived through wars, survived concentration and the avant-garde; mobility and immobility. Under camps or extreme acts of violence. The stories are Lu Jie's direction, the 'journey' is used as a mode of horrific. Some of these women are in their eighties visual creation and display. Including the work of and nineties: what is it about their spirit and their Daniel Malone and Kah Bee Chow, the Long March humanity that enables them to survive? They do not Project will stretch across all three exhibition sites. tell their stories through words, nor is there any Unlike many other major cities in the world, Auckland sound with this piece. Rather, the emotional states has no officially sanctioned Chinatown, and yet has of longing and a passion for life are communicated a large Chinese population. This project promises to through the lines on their faces and the look in their unravel our preconceptions about territory, commu­ eyes. The issue of how hope is maintained in a nity, and shared global and local histories, creating country that is going through rapid change - a new cluster of relationships. Uzbekistan - is explored in the video work by Vyacheslav Akhunov and Sergey Tichina. Corner Eve Armstrong literally creates new communities by depicts a man literally cornered by architecture, locating her Trading Table in different environments both Muslim and secular, as the work ponders the in Auckland's CBD. The project invites visitors to relationship between prayer and entrapment. A 'trade' for anything they see on the table. The artist similar tension between a sense of release and monitors the 'trade', and makes decisions about the confinem ent is also evident in the new video by equivalence of goods. At times, it is not just objects Willie Doherty entitled Closure in which a woman that are traded, but also offers of help and promises paces an enclosure in preparation for an unnamed of skills. These tables are encountered as workers torment. The metaphors slip between psychological run errands or shoppers wander past. They may and architectural registers. She says: never know it is an art work. The challenge for the artist is to keep the table sustainable, and the My mission is unending. challenge for the visitor is to imagine what comprises My anger is undiminished. a transaction. No trade is free, not even a 'free The street is ablaze. trade agreement' and in the age of such 'agree­ The steel is twisted. ments', Armstrong's work provides a local riposte. The surface is melting. Located at ST PAUL ST, Julie Rrap's Body Double My ardour is fervent. installation projects images onto the floor of two My passion is unbowed. bodies, male and female, in a continual state of arrival and departure. They roll seamlessly between Transit two three-dimensional rubber forms - casts of the Much of the work discussed so far is located in the artist's body. As they shuffle to occupy these rubber New Gallery and Academy Cinemas. The exhibition 'hosts', the come alive with hermaphroditic partners of ARTSPACE, The Gus Fisher Gallery and qualities. The male and female disappear into one ST PAUL ST offer an opportunity for the exhibition to another. The viewer is implicated in this as their explore and enact a third, but interrelated, set of presence triggers the transition. The piece comes concerns around the idea of transit. The journey of to generate a consideration of what it means to the audience between these venues will intersect 'receive' the 'other'. Isaac Julien's True North is also with the journeys at play in the art works. Mobility is at ST PAUL ST and, in resonance with Rrap's work, a key theme in the twenty-first century. The ways in follows the pathways of a female subject as she which we move from one space to another, between traverses ice, snow and the water's edge. Three cultures, and the issue of who enables mobility and synchronised screens create a set of formal who suppresses it, are central questions of our time and of diverse inherited histories. These works both 28-

relationships between her multiple journeys. The in the form of an installation, so that the dialogue EVE ARMSTRONG Trading Table held as part between these small colourful images suggests the o f Roam at ARTSPACE. 2005 conventional protagonist of colonisation takes a courtesy of the artist, ARTSPACE fulsome co-existence of many stories within one. and Michael Lett, Auckland singular view and a singular direction. By splitting photo: Conor Clarke this journey into three, Julien provides us with a The turbulence of displacement is transformed into LONG MARCH PROJECT retracing the historical Long metaphor for alternative ways of understanding the a serendipitous wonderland. March, site 4 - Kunming courtesy of Long March Project act of traversing. KAH BEE CHOW At ARTSPACE, Sriwhana Spong uses the lens of a Goodbye Emotional Snack B a r (still) 2006 At The Gus Fisher Gallery, Areta Wilkinson's portable Super 8 camera to cast faux Balinese offerings in DVD courtesy of the artist and cases are positioned beneath the spectacular a film-noir light. Using Auckland's suburban back A n n a M iles G allery, A u ck la n d DANIEL MALONE dome. These cases are created in response to the gardens as the location for her flowery fictions, Window Shopping in Brick City 2006 museum cases from the 1940s which took parts of Spong films at night under torchlight, almost photograph documenting W in do w Project. The the Maori collection to schools and teaching centres parodying the search for cultural difference. Time- University of Auckland courtesy of the artist, throughout New Zealand. This representation of lapse techniques, the use of found footage, the the Window Project and Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland Maori life was static, preserved in time. Reversing film's grainy black and white quality, and the totem photo: Stephen Cleland the diorama logic of the teaching tool, Wilkinson hint at the anthropological territory that Spong's inserts her own identity as a jeweller into newly poetics resist and reverse. Alexandras Georgiou made cases. By representing herself as a 'maker', takes public transport, constructing images, she privileges process and creativity over the postcards, letters and the like along the way, anthropological image of Maori. The case becomes posting them to the site of the exhibition, ARTSPACE. dynamic and travels with the artist as she visits For this exhibition, Georgiou travels from India's holy different Maori communities in New Zealand. Rather city of Varanasi to Auckland, living and working in a than following the turbulent flows of colonisation, in spirit of hope. By travelling "without his own vehicle", Wilkinson's hands, it becomes a device for interven­ he forges a new kind of future, an alternative way tion, self-understanding and communication. Julian of experiencing the world. This is not one based on Hooper has been making hundreds of watercolours internet search engines, super fast travel, nor one based on his ancestral heritage, which has the that relies on media reports about the so called complexity of a fictional story, transitting from clash of cultures. Georgiou outmanoeuvres the Transylvania to Tonga, Fiji to Sydney, and finally turbulence of our times by finding a way across to New Zealand. Also located at The Gus Fisher borders through the art of conversation, gesture, Gallery, Hooper's drawings are pinned to the wall gift and connection. His artwork as a journey is a ’gift' to New Zealand. —29

ALEXANDROS GEORGIOU SRIWHANA SPONG Without my own vehicle - Found Footage (stills) 2006-7 part //(d e ta il) 2006 S u p e r 8 tra n sfe rre d postcard and marker pen to digital video courtesy of the artist and courtesy the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland JULIAN HOOPER ARETA WILKINSON Litiu (d e ta il) 2006 Ki Mua Ki Muri 2005 watercolour on paper Monel 400, 9ct gold, d im e n sio n s va ria b le brass, paint, wood, glass courtesy of the artist and courtesy of the artist and Ivan Anthony Gallery. Auckland Anna Bibby Gallery. Auckland ISAAC JULIEN JULIE RRAP True North Series 2004 Body Double (still) 2007 triptych of digital prints on rub ber, DVD, so u n d Epson Premium Photo Glossy c o u rte sy of th e artist, courtesy of the artist. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Victoria Miro Gallery, London and a n d A rc One, M e lb o u rn e Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 3 0 -

TRIENNIALS Periodic exhibitions of international contemporary and an array of regional art worlds that are defined 9. M an ray Hsu, more or less in terms of nation-state or the Cold War "Networked art have burgeoned in the last decade. Biennials Cosmopolitanism on and triennials can now be found in Asia, the Pacific, structure of area studies...".9 Manray Hsu also high­ Cultural Exchange Europe, North America, South America, Africa and the lights the many international exhibitions that include and International Exhibition" in Middle East. In my view, the role of these exhibitions work from the regions on the basis of their ethnicity. N ich o las Tsoutas, is to make a strong statement in the context of the He identifies this as "a kind of multiculturalist ed., Knowledge * Dialogue + Exchange: art scene; to find common ideas and tendencies in parallelism that underlines coevality, radical Remapping Cultural contemporary art; and to invite audiences to consider incommensurability of cultures, and equal distance Globalisms from the art in new ways, or to reappraise what they may and difference as the supreme strategy of curator- South, (Sydney: ship".10 Citing the work of Arjun Appadurai, Manray Artspace Visual Art have seen before. These exhibitions often comprise Centre. 2005), 76. intense activity. They invariably involve ancillary Hsu calls, instead, for a "grassroots globalisation" or 10. Ibid., 76. exhibitions, symposia, films, performances and the "globalisation from below", that is, an acknowledge­ 11. Ibid., 76. opportunity for artistic exchange, aesthetic risk and ment that the work being made by loose collectives above all, the opportunity for hospitality. A biennial of artists from different parts of the world has the or triennial is a time to welcome visitors, to accept potential to form connections that are distinct from their 'offerings', and to explore mutually transforma­ the globalising forces of the West. He calls this a tive ways of understanding each other. In this sense, "decentralising cosmopolitanism".11 the event is an opportunity to negotiate a strategic relationship between localism and globalisation. As Manray Hsu and others have noted, the issues of centre/periphery, immigration, diverse identities, The 'Biennale phenomenon' is an advent of racial difference and refugees have been at the globalisation itself, and represents a complex forefront of international exhibitions for a number of ecology of relationships. These exhibitions do not years. Most famously, Magiciens de la Terre, at the sit outside of a market place; rather they create it. Centre Pompidou, 1989, was groundbreaking in its More often than not, such exhibitions are established scope, if problem atic in its categorisations. There is in order to draw new audiences to a venue, a city and a history of exhibition-making from Rene Block's a country; to highlight the imaginative work that is 1990 The Readymade Boomerang, Biennale of taking place in the host country; and to unabashedly Sydney, through to the Red Army Faction exhibition declare the host city to be part of an international in Berlin in 2005 that provide a 'backdrop' for the contemporary art circuit. The spectacle can often 3rd Auckland Triennial. In Brisbane, Australia, the attract sponsors, media, international guests, artists, Queensland Art Gallery's Asia Pacific Triennials, speakers and collectors. The growing number of 1993-ongoing, present works that look to the past, periodic exhibitions is an indication of how successful present and future of cultural identity and modernism these events have become and, indeed, how they in the region. In 1999, the Art Gallery of New South have begun to supersede other methods of art Wales, Sydney, presented its last Australian exchange, collection and critique. Their influence on Perspecta. Entitled Art S, Politics, the event raised the market has been greeted with a degree of cynicism the question of how artists respond to social and in some quarters. Ultimately, though, the debate political change. The exhibitions Documenta 11, 2002; about capital crushing art is an old one, and is largely Cordially Invited, Utrecht, 2004; Terminal Frontiers, unhelpful. The ecology of interdependencies between Manchester, 2004; Emergencies. Lyon, 2005; Instant the global marketplace, the Biennale phenomenon Europe, Udine, 2005; and The Government, Vienna, and art are very complex, turbulent even. There is not 2005, have all dealt with the politics of the moment a simple equivalence between art on the one hand, in one way or another. Equally, exhibitions of New and money on the other. Rather, there is an uneasy Zealand art have explored these ideas, for example: relationship as one continually seeks to outdo the Purangiaho: Seeing Clearly, Auckland, 2001; Paradise other. Art and capital, or we could say art and Now?, New York, 2004 and IKI and thanks for all the globalisation, are in a constant and entangled flow. IKA, Auckland, 2005. While each of these exhibitions There are multiple sets of systems interacting with has differed in scope and impulse, all of them have each other. The overall sense of this ecology is one been underpinned by a sense of urgency and that is fragmented, rather than systematic. agency for artists, turbulence: the 3rd Auckland Triennial both arises from and develops the themes The curator Manray Hsu has identified two kinds of of such exhibitions with several differences. periodic exhibitions that have dominated in the last decade or more, contending that these international This Triennial does not repeat the analyses of the exhibitions "sway between two poles of the global various modernisms at play in the global art world, cultural map, that is, between an overall platform of or focus on the identity, origins or destinations of 'international art world' that is constantly projected particular contemporary artists. Rather, turbulence and assumed in most blockbusters and biennials. establishes a strong thematic journey that both challenges and reconsiders the biennial/triennial as an advent of globalisation. While acknowledging —31

12. Jacques Ranciere, that one is inevitably part of the unwieldy ecology of Jacques Ranciere encourages us to look at the "Aesthetics and the global art exhibition, the 3rd Auckland Triennial relationship between art and politics in a different way Politics: Rethinking the Link", unpub­ aims to be a site of riposte, agency, dialogue and from how it has been formulated in the past. He says; lished paper, 2002. dynamic representation for artists. It is a place in ...art is not political owing to the messages and 13. Ibid. which artists can make aesthetic and ethical feelings that it carries on the state of social and interventions both within and against the Biennale political issues. It is not political owing to the phenomenon. As such, the Triennial can have agency way it represents social structures, conflicts and can thereby sit outside the normal programming or identities. It is political by virtue of the very of any art institution. The theme, then, is structured distance that it takes with regard to those in a w ay that it can also work both within and against functions. It is political as it frames a specific such a phenomenon. It embraces international ideas space-time sensorium, as it redefines on this and tendencies, but also provides a platform through stage the power of speech or the coordinates which the works of art can express a position against of perception, shifts the places of the actor the standardisation of art and ideas - indeed, there and the spectator...12 is nothing standard about turbulence. When artists work from positions other than the Perhaps the single most important factor in making standard ones we find in the halts of political this exhibition was to connect local work with global governance, or in the media, they have the capacity art in a way that goes beyond - rather than bypasses to 'shift' the ways in which we understand aesthetics, - the old arguments about provincialism, identity ethics and politics. Ranciere continues; politics, the importation of style from abroad and In this [aesthetic] regime, the identification of art that old Antipodean obsession, the tyranny of forms as such involve political - I would rather say distance. There are many instances of local art meta-political - potentials whose full actualisation practices contributing importantly to global emergent cannot be achieved without suppressing either trends. Distance has been virtually elided by the art or politics or even both of them. Aesthetics internet, as has the notion that 'style' has to 'arrive'. promises a political accomplishment that it cannot Often the most interesting work is occurring in satisfy and it thrives on that ambiguity. As the regions that are framed as being 'outside' the awareness of that ambiguity grows, it enhances international centres of art production and marketing two attitudes: one of melancholy with respect to (possibly because artists gravitate to less expensive the failure of the promise, another of play with its cities), from Athens to , Derry to Sydney, Havana very uncertainty. But, just as art becomes aware to Guatemala, Beijing to Auckland. As such, this of the limits of its power, it is pushed toward a new exhibition treads some of these pathways. Further­ political commitment by the weakening of politics more, we can think through the relationship of the itself. It transpires as though the narrowing of the global with the local in a more profound way, by public space and the lack of political invention gave unravelling them as static, polarised and definable to the performances and installations of the artists concepts. Instead, it is useful to think of the global a new capacity of framing scenes of dissensus.13 and local as moveable feasts, where conceptual and actual interactions and interventions take The artists in this exhibition create aesthetic place; where new localisms are found from place interventions - active, vital and alternative ways to place; where international routes are forged by of looking at the world around us - in the very spirit artists' projects, rather than by centre/periphery of dissensus that Ranciere describes. They protest, models of understanding, and where the notions of survive, and transition through the contemporary international homogenisation or globalisation are condition. Indeed, the works in turbulence are not not answered by regional ethnicities, but by works so much about where one is from or where one is that reflect upon and indeed enact the complexity, going, but the real, imagined, poignant and or turbulence, of global/local terrains. ambiguous transformations that occur 'on the way'. Rather than focusing on the places of conflict, the The artists in this exhibition engage with the exhibition presents the gestures of restoration, emotional flux of their daily reality, responding renewal, unease and lament that accompany those to the ambient hopes and fears in our midst. They locations. While underpinning some of the work is a do so with aesthetic and formal means. Take, for loss of community, turbulence presents new clusters instance, the abject tenor and arrangement of of collaboration; new juxtapositions of art works and objects on Eve Armstrong's table; the balance creative impulses that artists have the unending and fusion of face and landscape in Shane Cotton's capacity to enact.

paintings; the powerful intensity of line in Carlos VICTORIA LYNN Capelan's matrix of figures. Such aesthetic decisions are made within the fabric of turbulence. The political is at times overt, at other times implied; it can be appropriated and it can be ambiguous. o

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This essay considers both artistic and political/ A number of sapient observers have picked 1. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: economic responses to the condition of turbulence, turbulence, not equilibrium, as the underlying The Political and from a New Zealand perspective. In particular, it political economic condition of modernity. For Karl Economic Transfor­ uses the work of Karl Polanyi, a political economist Marx, capitalism endlessly created its own internal mations of Our Time. (New York: Beacon working in the 1940s, to explain the social, political contradictions, and the conditions of its own (and Press, 1944), 3, 76. and economic context in which artists find them­ societies') recurrent crises. Joseph Schumpeter's 2. Ibid., 166. selves. It focuses on Polanyi's notion of the 'double capitalism enacted an endless churning of creative 3. Ibid., 155. movement', a historical progression within which, in destruction, while John Maynard Keynes' attempts the first part of the movement, markets disrupt social to stabilise demand were set against bipolar 'animal orders, 'disembedding' economic transactions from spirits' of irrational exuberance and deflation. Polanyi their social settings, and causing social, cultural and saw markets and societies enacting an eternal tug political economic turbulence. In the second part of of war; markets disembedding and disrupting social the movement, parts of society react against markets, orders, and societies generating compound counter and seek to 're-embed' them in the social order, movements he called "enlightened reaction".2 using formal regulations, conventions and institutions, alongside territorial (national, regional) framings. Polanyi's enlightened reactionaries were diverse; Artists, this essay argues, are irrevocably caught up "pedestrians, commuters, sportsmen, hikers, garden­ in these disembedding and re-embedding processes. ers, patients, mothers or lovers."3 And, we might say, But while formal aesthetic conventions might offer artists. The ways these actors reacted to market ways of temporarily resolving turbulence, they just turbulence were plural too: factory laws and financial as often function to evoke it. Such turbulence, and regulation, forms of organisation like the nation artists' reaction to it, is further considered through state and its institutions, along with other social and the filter of New Zealand - a nation whose situation political movements, such as socialism, organised has conventionally and problematically been labour, and ethnic nationalism. The net effect of this defined in terms of the receipt of aesthetic, political reaction is to try to control markets by situating them and economic institutions from abroad. in social and cultural structures, mitigating their turbulence, building a regularised market-society Our thesis is that a self-adjusting market... could relationship. But these re-embeddings are only not exist for any length of time without annihilat­ partial and temporary: markets break out again, ing the human and natural substance of society; more reaction ensues, in a seesaw dialectic Polanyi it would have physically destroyed man and called a 'double movement'. transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.... While on the one hand markets spread all over Polanyi was active in the 1940s, at the end of a the face of the globe and the amount of goods double movement phase that had given the world involved grew to unbelievable proportions, on the the collapse of the old liberal order: the World Wars other hand a network of measures and policies and the Great Depression. Polanyi thought he had was integrated into powerful institutions designed witnessed the end of the free market. Indeed, he to check the market relative to labour, land and was right: the following thirty years saw market money.... Society protected itself against the liberalism 'embedded' in national and international perils inherent in a self regulating market system security structures. This involved the establishment - this was the one comprehensive feature in the of international institutions such as the North Atlantic history of the age.1 Treaty Organisation (NATO), United Nations (UN), -Karl Polanyi, 1944 the gold standard, and the World Bank and International M onetary Fund (IMF), and national —33

4. Fredric Jameson, policies such as the Keynesian welfare state, and focusing on what might, in the broadest terms, be Postmodernism, Or, called landscape. For a range of reasons, such The Cultural Logic of Muldoon-style national economic management. But Late Capitalism, by the end of the 1970s turbulence w as back, in a issues have compounded within the landscape (Durham: Duke new round of market-driven 'disembedding' and tradition. 1 discuss three periods of turbulence and University Press, disruption we call neoliberalism and globalisation. reaction in New Zealand's political/economic and 1991). 5. David Craig, cultural history: "Taranaki Gothic and Polanyian perspective, then, sees economic, social, the Political Economy - Early colonial hybrid attempts to govern and and cultural history as a series of lurch progressions, of New Zealand represent capitalist adventurism and reaction to it. Narrative and wherein institutional and territorial frames are - Post-World War Two provincial Fordism and national­ Sensibility", New endlessly reconstituted through relations with Zealand Sociology ist modernism after the collapse of liberalism. turbulence-inducing markets. Political economists 20, no. 2, (2005), 18-40. - The current post-postmodernist/post-neoliberal regard such macro movements as a bottom line. As period. such, they resonate through other fields, including the cultural production we call art. Art movements, no doubt, move to logics and conventions of COLONIAL TURBULENCE: 1800-1930 their own. However, I want to show how broader The New Zealand experience of colonial turbulence Polanyian double movement parameters powerfully was, in the first instance, generated from Europe, by shape the situations artists find themselves in. the massive transformations in the political economy arising from the dual (political and industrial) As Fredric Jameson showed, postmodernism had revolution. British imperialism arose from liberal plural affinities with wider contemporary consumer capitalism's gentlemen traders, scientific and capitalism.4 This essay argues we can see similar aesthetic adventurers ranging out ahead of official affinities between what has come after postmodern­ empire, quarrying resources, disrupting local ism and moves to reframe ’after' neoliberalism. political and cultural economies, and dragging Today, contemporary art practices like installation reluctant regulators behind them. and critical assemblage, institutional programmes and temporary platforms (including triennials) The export of liberal framing rules, and the estab­ resonate with the plural, partial and specialised lishment of a liberal/monarchical/territorial hybrid orders and hybridisations in contemporary institu­ colonial governance, happened in fraught and tional and political economy. turbulent conditions generated by resource quarrying. Colonial governance amalgams like This essay also explores how this has been compli­ the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi reflected all of the cated by New Zealand's position as a small country unresolved tensions between liberal and monarchical at the edge of the earth. New Zealand sits in a rule in the United Kingdom itself, creating hybrid structurally similar (semi-peripheral) situation to cross-sovereignties representing people as, the other part of the world widely represented in variously: property owning, sovereign individual turbulence; notably, Central and Latin America. subjects; ethnic groups with sovereignty over Polanyian double movements seem especially territory; and as imperial subjects of Queen Victoria. magnified in this semi-periphery, where over a long Such quasi-constitutional instruments were intended period, governance and institutional arrangements to stabilise, embed and settle: but they fudged and and cultural sensibilities have swung, almost extended fraught, unresolved questions as to where bipolar, to a range of extreme positions.5 In New true sovereignty/tino rangatiratanga lay. Nonethe­ Zealand and Central and Latin America regulatory less, globally, this and similar hybrid overreaches framings and governing conventions that create would see the fraught triumph of both classical normative orders elsewhere can themselves be liberalism and monarchical/territorial rule. destabilising on arrival. British landscape painting in the same period was As this essay will argue, artists in different periods also a rapidly evolving hybrid of numerous pictorial have always taken different, diverse positions in conventions: Claudean plane/colour composition, such contexts. For example, artists have at times romantic/ideal/sublime affections, topographical emerged in the middle of instability, seeking to and military documentation for utilitarian purpose, resolve travelling modernist forms with local content and later pre-Raphaelite realist romantic grief. The through a hybrid practice, or they have used resulting images constituted and contested shifting aesthetic convention to register complexity itself. notions of the picturesque and the beautiful, at the Others create alternative resolutions. The premise same time as they framed the landscape for a of this essay is that an assessment of how artists in range of audiences, including the new settlers in other periods registered or resolved these tensions colonial outposts and the potential emigrants they might enable more specificity around the salient were seeking to attract. The unresolved tensions aspects of current arts engagement with political economy and the conventions that travel from 'elsewhere'. This essay is necessarily selective. 34—

between these elements (and, to a lesser extent, that of the central figure depicted: he becomes 6. Fra n cis Pound, Frames on the Land: between them and the 'realities' of local territorial an agent of the governmental implications of this Early Landscape form and content) are written through the practice, perspective, assuming authority, stabilising, and Painting in New economy and institutions of colonial art. The artists using imported convention to reinforce this. Zealand, (Auckland: Collins. 1983), 40-1. had to produce conventionally recognisable 7. Ibid., 12. resolutions of these tensions if they were going to WJT Mitchell proposes an alternative reading, 8. WJT Mitchell, make their art pay in the colonial aesthetic economy. suggesting that the image both refers to the frailty "Imperial Land­ scape", in WJT Hybrids they were, and hybridise they did: Alfred of the travelling convention of landscape painting, Mitchell, ed., Sharpe, the architectural draughtsman and realist in and the political positions it suggests.8 His interpre­ Landscape and tation actually points up wider turbulence, and the Power, 2nd ed., the pre-Raphaelite tradition, and Charles Blomfield, (Chicago: University the landscape painter in oils, cum decorator, house artist's fraught position in relation to these factors. of Chicago Press, and sign painter, for example, produced both In Mitchell's reading, the shaded idyllic view from 2002), 5-34. 9. Ibid., 27. fascinating and fraught imagery. the repoussoir is displaced by other more fearful, confrontational and territorial gazes along the It is possible, as Francis Pound did in Frames on the foreground path, the shape of which recalls a Maori Land, to read Augustus Earle's, Distant View of the canoe. Continuing this line, we can remark upon the Bay of Islands, 1827[?], as the triumph of European anxious surveillance of territory by the figure picturesque convention in composition and colouring.6 carrying a taiaha, the erect gaze of the Maori Here, "landscape, the pictorial attitude to the land, musket bearer, and the boundary marker as a stark stopping still just to look at it, is purely an imported warlike figure gazing back hard from the landscape, convention."7 According to this interpretation, Earle signalling both potential opposition to European has used the carved boundary marker to the right traditions and intertribal disturbance. The overall of the painting as a 'repoussoir' - a framing device effect of the work, then, is unsettling, registering the intended tQ draw the viewer's eye into the picture, disturbance of fluid Maori tribal territorialities and a function traditionally performed in Western art by the musket wars that arose from ungoverned, pre- a shady tree. The European figure with the gun takes Treaty frontier interactions. Mitchell concludes with the pre-eminent position, surveying and perhaps in his view that Earle recognised Maori culture was surveillance of the serpentine path beyond, which "not simply a passive field for colonization but a follows the conventional 'line of beauty'. His solitary vital, expansive form of life that had its own imperial European gaze over the New Zealand landscape is ambitions, its own sense of place and landscape."9 the ultimately privileged perspective. The musket­ bearing Maori fellow travellers are supporting cast: Here, then we see colonial convention running into their gazes do not register, politically or aestheti­ difficult, turbulent contexts. Its framings only partially cally. Here, Earle's pictorial position merges with resolve things, because the formal aspects are at various odds with the content, which finally signifies wider turbulences and complexities beyond the frame. —35

TURBULENCE AND MODERNIST NATIONALISM: 1936-84 The period between World Wars was especially culture: public broadcasting, a national orchestra turbulent in New Zealand, as elsewhere, generating and ballet, a film unit, museums and art galleries, extraordinary reaction. As Minister of Finance, and, support structures for a specialist class of Walter Nash described in 1936: writers and critics. The struggle to attain all of this, and the wider national underpinnings of educational, Not only has the Dominion, in common with the social and foreign policy, industrial and architectural rest of the world, suffered such devastation of design, and much more, was recorded in the pages unparalleled depression, but economic changes of the journal Landfall (established 1947), which of such magnitude have taken place so that the explicitly subtitled itself "a New Zealand journal". very psychological outlook of the people has This accommodation between aspirant national changed also. Today the common conviction in modernisation and ambitious provincial modernism New Zealand and in other countries too, is that I will call here 'Landfall modernism'. economic forces cannot be allowed to operate without restraint or regulation. There is a determi­ Landfall modernism is recognisable as an attempt nation that such forces must be rationally control­ to stabilise the problem, the tyranny, the turbulence led as far as is humanly possible to control them of distance, and to overcome all of the anxieties and that the sole aim and object of such control and adolescent traumas of this awkward national should be the provision of the highest possible position. For the fairly small, overwhelmingly masculine, standard of living consistent with a nation's elite of poets cum historians cum cultural and social natural resources and its ability to utilise them com m entators who published in Landfall, New efficiently. I feel certain that the realisation of this Zealand's problems were twofold: culture and its objective in so far as it can be realised within the institutions were both immature, and shamelessly bounds of individual national economies will be derivative. The inclusive, amateur vehicles for artists a big step towards a more ordered, just and and writers were much too indulgent of sentimental 10. Walter Nash, Speech, peaceful economic system in the wider sphere Victorian tradition, and not rigorous enough about 21 July 1936. of international relations.10 fostering narrow. New Zealand-specific excellence. 11. G. Ruggie, "International What was needed was a smarter engagement with Regimes, Transactions This post-war settlement between the state and travelling conventions: a trimming away of decadent and Change: national economic interests would be dubbed forms, and building institutions that would support a Embedded Liberalism in the Post-War 'Fordism'. This is a reference to the scale of mass range of cultural production based on a much more Economic Order", production and consumption that was seen in the robust sense of what was specific to New Zealand. International Organization 36, USA in the 1950s, along with the systemic modern (1982), 379-415. imagination and rational regulatory framings, in For a number of the key players in Landfall modern­ 12. David Craig. "(Post) which the liberalism of the nineteenth century was ism, including, Allen Curnow, this was achieved Fordism, (Neo) Trekkaism ", in now considered embedded.11 While provincial through adapting some of the more pragmatic Michael Stevenson, Fordism ultimately failed here, for a time it was - modernist conventions to the New Zealand situation, This is the Trekka, a golden period for economic, institutional and especially landscape. Here, modernism's economical, (Wellington: Creative New Zea la nd, 2003): cultural growth and stability.12 regional and socially responsible formalism dealt a n d Revolver Archiv directly to indulgent Victoriana, while easily fur Aktuelle Kunst, (2003), 42-61. This attempt to stabilise territory through embracing articulating the recognisable properties of New 13. Allen Curnow, "New modernism, was not restricted to political economy. Zealand landscape and light. But more generally, Zealand Literature: Allen Curnow, one of the architects of New Zealand's in the arts as in wider political economic contexts, The Case for a Working Definition", post-war national modernism, reflecting on this creating a coherent national modernity proved in Wystan Curnow, period, wrote, "New Zealand is a nation, culturally fraught. Painter Toss Woollaston writing in Landfall ed., Essays on , as well as politically".13 Further this "condition of in 1961 about the value of "Locality in Art”, noted that (Auckland: nationhood" entailed "a degree of cultural self- "Ours is not a simple situation of applying and Heinemann, 1973), reliance, along with some moral and imaginative developing our own sensibility with the material of 140. 14. Ibid., 141. > identification of a people (unitarily regarded) with the country and the ideas of our forebears. If we 15. Allen Curnow, Look their country."14 As Curnow had previously noted in would paint we must choose from a bewildering Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935-1984, 1945, however, the difficulty was territorial shakiness, array of international styles or modes if we wish to Peter Simpson, ed., or the realisation that "strictly speaking, New be modern.... Confusion seems characteristic, where (Auckland: Auckland Zealand doesn't exist yet, though some possible one would wish to see an unselfconscious national University Press, 1987), 77. New Zealands glimmer in some poems and on some or local spirit informing it all, and making for 16. Toss Woollaston, canvases. It remains to be created - should I say harmony among variety."16 "Locality in Art", invented - by writers, musicians, artists, architects, Landfall, no. 57, (1961), 73. publishers; even a politician might help".15

And they did. During this period, a whole cohort of cultural producers and elites set out to build the institutional infrastructure for a modern, national 3 6 -

COLIN McCAHON French S a y 1957 oil on canvas on board Chartwell Collection, Auckland Landscape painters were recognised as especially Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki reproduced courtesy of the relevant to Landfall modernist aspirations, and Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust events like The Group shows in Christchurch had national significance. Landfall editor Charles Brasch reproduced Colin McCahon's early work in the first volume of the journal, and was among the first a hybrid cubism, but also, for a short period, a 17. Charles Brasch. "A to review his work, noticing both the national sublimation of these and other potentially disruptive Note on the Work of Colin McCahon", resonances and signs of what would later become elements through mystical application of them to Landfall, no. 16. fundamental disturbances in McCahon's work. He painterly plays of light in the Titirangi bush. Gordon (1950), 338. 18. Gordon H. Brown, noted McCahon's primitive technique: asking did it Brown recognised the paintings of the mid 1950s as, Colin McCahon: Artist, reflect a national weakness in our art schools? "the most joyous, yet tranquil of McCahon's output"; (Auckland: Reed. Brasch was unsettled too by McCahon's representa­ that is, the least turbulent. He explains that they 1984), 60. E m p h a sis a d ded . tion of the New Zealand landscape disturbed as it arose from a short period where McCahon would get was by angels, biblical text, and iconic figures out of bed immediately upon waking at dawn, rush drawn from Renaissance paintings. But the author outside, and not allow his eyes to focus on anything reflected that McCahon was doing us a "bold and until he was deep in the Titirangi bush. As Brown momentous favour in helping us to relate the relates, "he would then contemplate the bush with experience behind such paintings to our own lives all the intensity he could muster so that the forms of and to New^ealand conditions", and assisting us to the trees would dematerialize while his sense of avoid the fate of "living out our lives in terms foreign spatial depth diminished."18 to our environment".17 What McCahon achieved here could be considered All this greatly overstates the extent McCahon a complete sublimation of both the form and content resolves, rather than accentuates turbulence of his practice into the joyous immediacy of specifi­ around landscape, convention and text here. cally located light and bush. But the extent to which Indeed, anxiety and turmoil would dominate his forms are dematerialised here should not be work, in form and image accentuated by text. overstated. Rather, this output represents some of But there were temporary resolutions. These often the most obviously cubist pictures ever painted in involved appropriations of travelling conventions: New Zealand. Here, conventional travelling modern­ ist forms ironically reassert themselves in the depths of sensual sublimation. Turbulence is thus displaced - 3 7

19. Keynesianism refers by both the sensual local and, importantly, at Now, analysts mapping current terrains want to hold to the national the same time sublimated through the totality of together global regulatory moves, turbulent (human, economic manage­ ment approach, modernist form. For a moment, there is resolution, cultural, physical) capital flows, with particular based loosely on the and McCahon's anxieties over national territoriality (regional, national, local) sites and platforms of theories of John May­ nard Keynes, which and imported modernism forms dissipate. But this governance and intervention. In particular, they dominated economic particularly narrow, interstitial resolution was short­ want to look at the ways institutional orders at thinking in the post­ lived, bounded by McCahon's 1958 trip to the United different levels of scale have shifted to embed war period. 20. Jam eson, Postmod­ States and intensified by his 1960 departure from and sustain what was otherwise an unsustainable, ernism-, David Harvey. Titirangi into the central Auckland suburb of Grey unregulated market turbulence.23 Especially important The Condition of Postmodernity: An Lynn, after which metropolitan themes assert their here are the ways neoliberal institutional reforms, Enquiry into the influence, and forced a new round of violent formal/ such as new public management, competitive Origins of Cultural landscape transmogrifications. contracting and fragmentation, have been Change, (Oxford: Blackw ell. 1990). transmogrified by a range of 'new institutional' 21. Wendy Larner and In McCahon's work, as more widely, international modes of governance and organisation, involving David Craig, "After turbulence would get the better of territorial- hybrid mixes of markets, networks and hierarchies, Neoliberalism? Community Activism modernist traditions, from provincial Fordism to within relativised scale and territoriality.24 Here and Loca l regionalist realism. By the early 1980s, with the in New Zealand, the kinds of complex partnerships Partnerships in economy reeling in the apocalypse of Keynesianism government engages in around big public health Aotearoa New Z e a la n d ". Antipode and Prime Minister Rob Muldoon's heavy-handed issues like obesity, or major cultural events for that 37, no. 3. (2005), 402- intervention in the New Zealand economy, art too matter, are one example. As these new institutional 24. 22. Michael Hardt and had become enormously laboured, camped and modes mix public and private, competitive contracts Antonio Negri, grotesqued/9 But now, anxious landscape and with partnership, local with central or global scales, Empire, (Cambridge: figurative artists would be confronted by a new they enact and embody new interstitial positions Harvard University Press, 2000). The wave of radical formal turbulence, super-informed between raw market and solid state institutional 'Washington by travelling theories with postmodern affinities: formations. Critics note their frailty in this: the Consensus' denotes post-structuralism, deconstructionism, postcolonial resolutions they offer to the various social and other the neoliberal macroeconomic and second wave feminist theory. problems they are often deployed to solve are only consensus between partial. But they have certainly added new layers the US Treasury, the World Bank and the of complexity, as a number of partial orders are IMF, which RELATIONAL CRITICAL ASSEMBLAGE: Reaction and temporarily put together, but not within predomi­ dom inated Re-embedding after Postmodernism and Commodity nantly national frames. Rather, as Saskia Sassen international development through Capitalism/Postmodernism 1984-2007 notes, "The multiplication of partial, specialized and the late 1980s and After Frederic Jameson and David Harvey, the applied normative orders is unsettling, and produces 1990s: see David affinities between neoliberalism and postmodernism distinct normative challenges in the context of a still Craig and Doug Porter, Development are commonplace.20 Here, I want to extend the prevalent world of nation states."25 Beyond Neoliberal­ Polanyian analysis advanced so far into the current ism?, (London: R outledge, 2006). period, venturing beyond Jameson and Harvey to These formations have a range of strong, isomorphic 23. See for example Bob explore the extent to which current aesthetic affinities with both contemporary art institutions, and Jesso p, The Future of the Capitalist State, production can be understood in terms of wider with aspects of art practice itself. More than this, (Cambridge: Polity (especially institutional) reaction to neoliberalism. they imitate and populate the interstitial spaces Press, 2002); Jam ie artists and cultural producers have long occupied, Peck and Adam First, we need to describe the current order, which and as they do, they implicate cultural producers Tickell, "Neo- liberalizing Space", has been labelled "after-neoliberal".21 A number of into their frames generating a range of secondary Antipode 34, no. 3, commentators currently argue that we are seeing reactions which again shape practice. (2002), 380-404. 24. M ark Bevir and R. A. elements of reaction to the fragmentation of the W. Rhodes, market engendered by neoliberalism in several Artists' reaction beyond postmodernism have been Interpreting British Governance, contexts. They cite both an emerging international expectedly plural, but have variously involved a (London: Routledge, neoliberal imperial/regulatory order and rising return to considering politics and political economy, 2003). nationalism, not least in neoconservatism, and often right alongside re-imagining and producing a 25. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, in capital accumulation strategies beyond the series of relational qualities, partial orderings and Rights: From neoliberal "Washington Consensus".22 At the same Medieval to Global time, they stress the differences between this em­ Assemblages, (Princeton: Princeton bedding period and previous ones: this is not simply University Press, the extension of nineteenth-century imperialist 2006), 423. hybrid governance over turbulent quarry capitalism. Nor is there a grand nationalist narrative or Fordist national economics on the horizon. .... 3 8— - 3 9

MICHAEL STEVENSON This is the Trekka 2003 installation New Z e a la n d a t the Venice Biennale 2003 courtesy of the artist and Hamish McKay Gallery. Wellington photo: Jens Ziehe

26. See Okwui Enw ezor, affinities.26 Hence a plausible meta-sensibility in means categories like landscape are no longer ed., Documenta 11, all that mappable in two dimensions. Landscape Platform 5: Exhibition contemporary practices enabling: assemblage; site Catalogue, (Kassel: and scale specific installation often involving critical representation as a single image is displaced for Hatje Cantz engagement of institutions; contingent relationality, example by deployment of travelling machinery or Publishers, 2002): including both the personal and various notions of interventions set, like the boundary marker in Earle's Scott McQuire and Nikos Papastergiadis, the real; and mining the modernist archive for its 1827 landscape, 'in place'. Sculpture and installation Empires, Ruins + abject redundancies and foolish overreaches.27 that refer to landscape today, record unresolved, Networks: The Transcultural Agenda ironically ambitious venturing across fraught in Art, (Melbourne: In terms of the wider political economy, Sassen territories. For example, Michael Stevenson's false Melbourne University argues it is a plurality of "mixed spatio-temporal 4WD Trekka in Venice or Moniac in Guatem ala, or Press. 2005). 27. 27. See Nicolas assemblages" and "embedded bordering capabilities" 's Kapa Haka, a fibreglass Bourriaud, Relational that matter these days; Auckland Triennial artist sculpture of a Maori security guard watching over Aesthetics, (Paris: Les Eve Armstrong calls them "adaptable support the lost territories of the historic New Zealand presses du reel, 2002). structures".28 For practical culture producers, these collection at the Auckland Art Gallery. Equally, 28. Sassen, Territory, involve the formation of mutually desirable accom­ landscape might become marvellously unresolved Authority, Rights, 378f. modations and temporary resolutions between in the transnational transit through the intermediacy 29. Sverker Sorlin, artists and institutions, including access to temporary of Sriwhana Spong's camera. Rich composite "Can Places Travel?" alcoves, platforms and assemblages, residencies, representations of different aspects of territory can in Enwezor, ed., Documenta 11,139. international art journals, and even biennials and become what Sverker Sorlin called an "interventional triennials. Here both artists and institutions are on carpeting" of historical topographies.29 the same page; institutions need to engage at multi­ scales (the Auckland Triennial positioned within a So far, then, turbulence shows no signs of abating. wider economy of such events), and to temporarily Ultimately, Polanyi was right: neither governments, border a range of artists' international practices institutions nor artists have ever been able to really and wide-ranging critical preoccupations. At the stabilise political economy, and the turbulence same time, artists too need embedded/enabling it routinely engenders. But now as ever, artists institutional engagements up and down multi-level can both enact and show the limits of travelling hierarchies of place and scale, as they hop from universal stabilisation. They can create fantastic temporary economic platform to platform. works to point up the dissonance and the reso­ nance, and find a million ways of sublimating In Polanyian terms, everyone's well and truly and accentuating it. Furthermore, in wider hybrid disembedded now, and most of the re-embeddings institutional contexts like the exhibition turbulence, available are shallow, and highly contingent. their composite works and temporary enabling Nonetheless, artists seem determined to engage, assemblages can generate some sharper sense of to intervene, to be critical. Within this tricky territory, where the major irresolutions and turbulences lie, antipodean and Central and Latin American semi­ and what affinities can together give us perspective, peripheral artists might have a kind of competitive perhaps scope, in relation to these.

advantage in a field requiring various insider/out- DAVID CRAIG/SENIOR LECTURER/DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY/ sider play with past, present and other conventions. THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND That said, in the face of the com plexity and turbulence now characterising both international political economy and art institutions, it is no surprise that artists' interventions seem partial, perversely plural, even feeble.

But here, any plausible positioning seems to require as much referencing of failure as of resolution. What helps this is the ways form (or rather knowing, post­ postmodernism) has become open slather, which LU CO > LU too OO< (J zCOor orLU 1 OL=)lJ -olu z> OCO co •— LlJ t <3 o□ 00 00 o on< LU Z vr OLlJ X < Q_ co CO h-t r O

I The Sphere, a 15-foot, 45,000-pound steel and Dragons are now back in the twenty-first century. This essay was bronze sculpture by Fritz Koenig, used to be one The sphere has been violently destroyed, and a new previously published in ArtNexus 54, (O ctober more piece standing in front of a icon did not substitute it. Its ruins were put back on 2004), 84-9. skyscraper. Only that it was placed at the World the pedestal, as a symbol of the sphere's own blatant Reproduced with permission of the author. Trade Center plaza "as a monument to fostering pretension to resume - and grab - the world. Is this peace through world trade", and suffered consider­ post-sphere an icon for post-globalisation? In any 1. Elissa Gootman, able damage by the terrorist attack.' On 11 March case, the sculpture's pristine, detached, self- "A Quiet and Under­ stated Ceremony 2002, the ruined sculpture was reinstalled at Battery contained character was brutally violated. The Punctuated by Two Park, close to its previous location at Ground Zero, much-mentioned gap between art and life was Moments of Silence", overcome in a most unexpected way, by the formal in The New York Times, to serve as a memorial, its initial meaning drastically 11 M arch 2002, A-13. transformed by the events. and conceptual transformation of an artwork, as a result of its invasion by harsh reality. This invasion The sphere is the ultimate 'gute Form', a basic was a real attack, but also a forced entrance of new shape of perfection. It also expresses the idea of content into the piece. wholeness, referring to the world, or rather to the Renaissance's newly acquired capacity of repre­ senting the entire planet by means of a globe, thus ii transcending medieval conceptions that depicted it Contemporary art is being affected, to a consider­ as a flat surface full of uncertainties, abysses and able extent, by lack of meaning, by extreme dragons. The very acceptance of the roundness of professionalism ('smart-art-scene' production, Earth implied the possibility of global navigation - marketing of works skillfully executed to fit demands and domination - and the reduction of the world to and expectations, etc.), by flat cosmopolitanism, or a sphere closed in upon itself. Scientific knowledge by repetition and boredom, among other problems. helped reduce all genres of enigmas, dangers and But at the same time we are going through a complexities, to a dragon-free icon of a world-in-the- fascinating period of transition and reshaping of hand that could be touched, held, and controlled - the whole system of art creation, distribution and as-represented in statues of Christopher Columbus - evaluation at a global scale. Even if this process or even played with, as Charlie Chaplin does in The is happening slowly and in a 'silent' way, its scope Great Dictator. has no precedents.

Travelling through Portugal, it is amazing to see Regional and international art circulation has the great number of monuments that include globes dramatically expanded through a variety of spaces, made of rock or bronze, or as a recurring decorative events, circuits and electronic communications. Many Renaissance and Baroque element. At times we see of them have propitiated some of the problems just a great globe on a pedestal: the monument mentioned. A good example is the proliferation of commemorates the very capacity to travel through, unfocused small biennials all over the world, or the know, use, and dominate a world synthesised in spectacle-oriented, mall-like big ones. The art a geometric figure. This shows us that the idea of biennial is the amazing case of a nineteenth-century globalisation already appears symbolically in the institution that is not only still alive almost in its original European imaginary at the beginning of the format, but blooming all over the world. This institution sixteenth century. is part of a cosmopolitan, apologetic, exhibitionist, and mainly commercial spirit. In artistic and cultural terms biennials are often considered a failure, mainly in connection with their ambitious scale, their —41

In addition, more and more new cultural and artistic agents have been appearing in the newly expanded international art circulation. No doubt, the fact that a certain number of artists coming from every corner of the world are now exhibiting internationally only means, in itself, a quantitative internationalisation. But number is not the issue. The question for these new subjects is agency: the challenge of mutating a restrictive and hegemonic situation towards active and enriching plurality, instead of being digested by mainstream or non-mainstream establishments. It is necessary to cut the global pie not only with a variety of knives, but also with a variety of hands, and then share it accordingly.

In a process full of contradictions, new generations of artists are beginning to transform the status quo. They are doing so without manifestos or conscious agendas; just by creating refreshing work, by introducing new issues and meanings coming out Fritz Koenig’s The Sphere. of their diverse experiences, and by infiltrating their amongst the rubble of the Twin Tow ers, 24 S e p te m b e r 2001. cultural difference in broader, somewhat more truly photo: Ted Warren, AP Images globalised art circuits. Naturally, this is not a smooth path, and many challenges and contradictions cost, and the invested effort. Anyway, more remain. Is the situation turning more rich and complex important than the art field's expansion is its or is it being simplified by the necessary degree of tendency to go beyond its own boundaries toward, standardisation that a transcultural, international on the one hand, personal and daily life, and, on communication requires? Is difference being the other, toward society and urban interaction. communicated and negotiated or just converted into a self-complacent taxonomy? Who exerts the cultural 2. See Guillermo Bonfil Together with the increase of international art decisions, and for whose benefit are they taken?2 Batalla, "Lo propio networks there is new energy and activity going y lo ajeno: Una aproximacion al on locally in areas where, for historical, economic A crucial tendency is the internal broadening of problema del control and social reasons one would not expect to see the so-called international art and art language cultural", in Adolfo interesting art. Working in such places as Central through the intervention of a multiplicity of actors. Colombres, ed„ La cultura popular, America, India, Palestine or Paraguay made me If still instituted by mainstream orientations to an (Mexico City: Premia, witness not only vigorous and plausible artistic ample extent, this language is being increasingly 1987), 79-86; and "La teoria del control practices, but also the foundation of alternative modified and actively constructed by artists from • cultural en el estudio spaces and a notable array of anti- or non­ the 'peripheries'. This is crucially important because de procesos etnicos", Anuario Antropologico establishment actions. controlling language also conveys the power to 86. (1988), 13-53. See control meaning. Therefore, more than a mosaic of also Ticio Escobar, Much of this activity is 'local': the result of artists' multiple artistic expressions, what tends to prevail "Issues in Popular Art", in Gerardo personal and subjective reactions to their contexts, is a diversified construction of an 'international art' Mosquera. ed.. or of their intention to make an impact - cultural, by diverse subjects from diverse locations. This Beyond the Fantastic: social, or even political - in their milieus. But these propensity opens a different perspective that Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin artists are frequently well informed about other opposes the cliches of a 'universal' art in the centres, America, (London: contexts, about mainstream art, or are also looking derivative expressions in the peripheries, and the INIVA and MIT Press. for an international projection. Sometimes they move multiple, 'authentic' realm of 'otherness' in tradi­ 1995), 91-113. in, out and about local, regional and global spaces. tional culture. Obviously, the very notion of centre Usually their art is not anchored in nationalistic and periphery has been strongly contested in modernism or traditional languages even when these porous times of migrations, communications, based on vernacular culture or specific backgrounds. transcultural chemistries and rearticulating of power. Even in the midst of war, as in Palestine, one discovers engaging works that challenge our preconceptions and ratify to what extent artistic dynamics are increasingly decentralised. 42—

In all corners of the planet we are witnessing However, antropofagia as a programme is not as 3. The term w as co in ed fluid as it seems, since it is not carried on in neutral by Brazilian writer signs of change in the epistemological ground Oswald de Andrade of contemporary artistic discourses based not in territory but one that is subdued, with a praxis that in his Manifesto difference but from difference. This transition could tacitly assumes the contradictions of dependence Antropofagico, p u b lish ed in 1928. be epitomised as the gradual turn of direction in and the postcolonial situation. Thus, the tension of U. Nelly Richard, cultural processes that used to go mainly from who eats whom is always present. Latin American "Latinoamerica y artists have complicated to the extreme the la postmodernidad: the 'global' to the 'local'. In this sense, notions of la crisis de los hybridity and ’anthropophagy' are beginning to implications enveloped in transcultural quotation originales y la be surpassed. and seizure. Some, like Juan Davila and Flavio revancha de la co p ia ", La Garciandia, dedicate their works to cynically estratificacion de los The Brazilian modernists used the figure of 'antro- exploring such implications. margenes, (Santiago pofagia', anthropophagy, in order to legitimate their de Chile: Francisco Zegers, Editor S.A., critical apprehension of European artistic and cultural Another problem is that the flow cannot always be 1989), 55. elements, a procedure peculiar to postcolonial culture in the same north-south direction, as the power 5. Nelly Richard. structure commands. Regardless of how plausible "Latinoamerica y in general.3 Antropofagia is not only a cultural strategy la postmodernidad", but also a metaphor that indicates the tendency to the appropriating and transcultural strategies are, Revista de Critica creatively appropriate alien cultural elements, which they imply a rebound action that reproduces the Cultural 3, (April 1991), hegemonic structure, even when contesting it and 18. we find in Latin America since the early days of 6. W ole Soyinka, European colonisation. The very multi-syncretic taking advantage of its possibilities. It is necessary quoted in Janheinz as well to invert the current - not by reversing a Jahn, Las literaturas character of Latin American culture facilitates this neoafricanas, operation, since it turns out that the elements binary scheme of transference, challenging its (Madrid: Guadarrama, embraced are not totally alien. We could even say power, but for the sake of enriching and transforming 1971), 310. that Latin America is the epitome of these processes, the existing situation. A horizontal volley would also given its problematic relationship of identity- be welcome, one that could promote a truly global difference with the West and its centres, by virtue network of interactions toward all sides. of the specificity of its colonial history. Our 'con­ sanguinity' with hegemonic Western culture has Today, the antropofagia paradigm is increasingly been at the same time close (we are the 'common- being displaced by what we could call the 'from law offspring' of this cultural lineage) and distant here' paradigm. Rather than critically devouring the (we are also the hybrid, poor, and subordinate international culture imposed by the West, artists offspring). The practice of antropofagia has enabled from around the world are actively producing their us to enact and enhance our complexities and plural versions of that culture. The difference is in contradictions. Only Japan beats Latin America the shift from an operation of creative incorporation as transcultural cannibal. to one of direct international construction from a variety of subjects, experiences and cultures. Latin American anthropologists and critics have emphasised the creative and subversive aspects From Turkey to China, the work of many young of these strategies of resignification, transformation, artists, more than naming, depicting, analysing, and syncretism, and how they became a paradoxical expressing or constructing contexts, is done from manner of constructing difference and identity. their contexts in 'international terms'. Identities, as 'Cannibals' are not passive by definition: they always well as physical, cultural, and social environments transform, resignify, and employ according to their are performed, ratheF than merely shown, thus visions and interests. Appropriation, and especially contradicting expectations of exoticism. The notion one that is 'incorrect,' is usually a process of of 'tigritude', invented by Wole Soyinka in the 1960s originality, understood as a new creation of to oppose that of 'negritude', is now more pertinent meaning. The peripheries, due to their location than ever: "A tiger does not shout its tigritude: it on the maps of economic, political, cultural, and pounces. A tiger in the jungle does not say: I am symbolic power, have developed a "culture of a tiger. Only on passing the tiger's hunting ground resignificatiqn" out of the repertoires imposed by the and finding the skeleton of a gazelle do we feel centres.4 It is a transgressive strategy from positions the place abound with tigritude."6 The metaphor of dependence. Besides the act of confiscating for emphasises identity by action toward the outside, one's own use, it functions by questioning the not identity by representation or internal assertion, canons and authority of central paradigms. It is not as has often been the case in postcolonial art. only a question of a dismantling of totalisations in a postmodern spirit; it also carries an anti-Eurocentric Today, more and more identities and contexts concur deconstruction of the self-reference of dominant in the artistic 'international language' and in the models and, more generally, of all cultural models.5 discussion of current 'global' themes. From, and not so much in, is a key word for contemporary cultural practice. All over the world, art is being produced more from particular contexts, cultures and experi­ ences than 'inside' them, more from here than here. - 4 3

Sao Paulo. Brazil - with a population of 11 million people, it is th e m ost p o p u lo u s city in the By this operation artists are slowly and silently Southern Hemisphere and one of the fastest growing, democratising the dominant canons and power photo: Alexandre Meneghihi, A P Im ages relations established in the international networks and markets. This new situation carries new problems, but points toward a very plausible Art from Latin America has strongly contributed direction for culture in a globalised postcolonial to this dynamic. Its identity neurosis is now less world. It propitiates a polysemic and actively plural serious, something that facilitates a more focused international environment. approach to art-making. Contrary to Latin American art cliches, contemporary artists tend less to represent historical, cultural and vernacular Ill elements, in favour of letting their backgrounds The impact of contemporary migrations, with their work from within their poetics. It is not that they cultural displacements and heterogenisation, and have lost interest in what happens outside art. On the rising of a more dynamic and relational notion of the contrary: art from Latin America continues to be identity, have been thoroughly discussed, especially quite engaged with its surroundings, but context by diasporic artists and scholars. The impact on the tends to appear less as raw material and more as (richer) country of reception and its culture by the an internalised agent that constructs the text. immigrant, and, moreover, its action on a global Difference is thus increasingly constructed through scale within a post-national projection, which includes plural, specific ways of creating the artistic texts the expansion of transnational communities, all have within a set of 'international' codes than by been fairly emphasised. However, equally, if not representing cultural or historical elements that more important cultural and social mutations will are characteristic of particular contexts. come from massive urbanisation developing full speed in Africa, Asia and Latin America. On the other hand, we must remember that the majority of humankind does not migrate. 44—

7. Carlos Monsivais, Another silent cultural revolution that is taking place globalisation's short circuits. This region, associated "La arquitectura y nowadays is urban demographic growth in the so- with small villages and tribal life, has achieved the la ciudad". Talingo, no. 330 (19 Septem ber called Third World. Just think that at the beginning highest rate of growing urbanisation worldwide. In 1999), 15. of the twentieth century only 10 per cent of the less than 20 years, 63 per cent of its inhabitants will 8. Cities with more planet's population lived in cities. Now, one hundred be city-dwellers. During the next decade, 50 million than eight million inhabitants. years later, half of the globe inhabits urban environ­ will move from the countryside to West African cities. 9. All statistics are ments. If urbanisation was characteristic of the In 2015 Lagos, with 24.6 million inhabitants, will be taken from Mutations, the third largest city in the globe, only surpassed (Bordeaux: Actar, developed world, and rural life predominated in the 2001): a n d "C iu da d es Third World, by 2025 urban population will prevail in by Tokyo and Mumbai.9 The myth of 'Black' Africa is del Sur: la llamada the whole planet: five billion individuals, two thirds gone with the twentieth century. Africa is no longer de la urbe", El Correo the jungle, the masks and the lions, but the new de la UNESCO, (Paris: of the world's inhabitants. But the crucial aspect is June 1999). that two-thirds of them will be living in poor countries. chaotic cities and their new - and wilder - urban lions. 10. Gerardo Mosquera, Since 1975 the world's city-dwellers duplicated, and The colonial narrative of 'the heart of darkness' has "Alien-Own/Own- Alien: Notes on they will double again from now to 2015. This urban moved to dwell inside modernity. Globalisation and revolution is chiefly taking place in the non-Western Cultural Difference", in What implications will all these processes have for Nikos Papastergiadis. world. To give an example, Mumbai's population has ed.. Complex quadrupled in thirty years. Obviously, cities are not art and culture? Art is a very precious means to deal Entanglements. Art, prepared to afford such demographic shock, but, with cultural disjunctions and to find orientations. Globalisation and Cultural Difference, as Carlos Monsivais put it, "the city is built upon its Many artists from the most diverse places are (London: Rivers Oram systematic destruction".7 Urbanism and architecture, reacting to and participating in these transits. There Press. 2003), 21. as we have traditionally understood them, are over. is also a plausible tension caused by displacements in dominant artistic canons, their transformation by Right now there are only two megalopolises in different cultural values, the introduction of heterodox the and two others in Europe.8 There approaches, and the ensuing predicaments for are 19 in the rest of the world, and their number will artistic evaluation. increase, mainly in Asia. Of the 36 megalopolises predicted in 2015, 30 will be located in underdevel­ Many issues are at stake: conflicts, social and oped countries, including 20 in Asia. New York and cultural articulations; dialogues and collisions Tokyo will be the only rich places to appear in the between neologic urban cultures and rural tradi­ list of the ten largest cities. The cultural implications tions, religious clashes; chaotic, wavering and of this demographic penchant are obvious. A most dissimilar modernisations; massive diasporas, important one is the complex, metamorphic and outrageous poverty, social contrasts, traffics of all multilateral process that entails the substitution kinds, fanaticism, violence, terrorism, wars; shanty of the traditional rural environment by the urban towns and their culture; global communications situation, a clash that involves a massive number and huge zones of silence; homogenising global of very diverse people. tendencies and affirmation of differences; mutating identities, cultural and social mixtures, international Living in a city does not mean living in a house: networks and local isolation; cultural shocks and one hundred million people do not have permanent assimilation...10 What about the implications for the lodging. A majority of them are children. The home­ individuals? After September 11, these problems less are perhaps the ultimate city-dwellers: their have come to the forefront for all of us - and not home is the city itself. "A home is not a house", only for the majority of humankind. Rayner Banham's famous phrase, is acquiring a new meaning today. But a city might not be a home either. GERARDO MOSQUERA/INDEPENDENT ART CRITIC/CURATOR/HISTORIAN AND WRITER/BASED IN HAVANA/ADJUNCT CURATOR AT THE NEW Fear of the city - instead of the fear of wilderness - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART/NEW YORK/ADVISOR AT THE is a syndrome of our times. Before, jungles were the RIJKSAKADEMIE OF FINE ARTS/AMSTERDAM space of danger and adventure, while cities were the protected realms of civilisation. The situation has reversed nowadays: jungles are ecologically pure, rather idyllic areas that we enjoy on Discovery Channel, while big cities have become increasingly polluted, insecure domains of paranoia, where 'civil life' is more and more difficult.

Just by going through statistics one receives strong symbolic impacts. Sub-Saharan Africa has been stereotyped as the territory, par excellence, of wild life and 'primitivism'. Today, on the contrary, it impersonates the deliriums of modernity and 1 CO 1— LO CO v r 1— O' < It is unclear if the men have returned to demolish a building that they once owned, or whether they are seeking to complete the task of destruction. The co < gesture of renewal competes with the image of CD < w ongoing vengeance. Starting again and erasing the past may have totally different motivations, but in < < one sense the effect is the same. The haunting □ 5 ambiguity is also expressed in the soundtrack. □ < It rises and then fades into silence. It comes from somewhere in the landscape and yet seems to have no direct association with any of the actors. The sound leaves you with a foreboding sense that Lida Abdul's work begins in the ruins of war but her threat or hope could come from any point. The title aim is not to document its brutal realities. Her work of the video suggests an act of recollection, or faces the consequences of actions taken by testimonial, and yet, the structure of the video combatants as they seek to obliterate the enemy. suggests a more ambiguous claim about the past. She recognises that the intention is to destroy not The blurring and overlaying of the images creates only the signs of life, but also the capacity of another sense of struggle with memory. survivors to return, reclaim and rebuild the place in which they feel 'at home'. It is here that urbicide In quiet and modest gestures Abdul resists the meets ethnocide: the murder of the city and its monumentalising of the trauma of war. I imagine citizens meets the disabling of a culture. Today that she wants to reclaim the normality of everyday warfare is more than just murder and exile; it is also life, rather than conjure some version of the epic evisceration of the survivors' capacity to live a resistance or resign herself to the cruel fate of nature's normal life. It seeks to render everyone in a state cycle. The destruction of the buildings is intended to of paralysis, in which they remain gripped by fear. produce these very associations. To see them in the Abdul is conscious that even in the midst of war it mythical proportions of a giant, or to see them as is the women who are among the first to return to being flattened into the elements of nature, is to reclaim the ruins. In the earlier video White House, strip them of their human and cultural reality. Among 2005, the depiction of herself was not an attempt to the ruins, Abdul is producing an aesthetic encounter reclaim the heroic position, but a more disturbing with the remnants of meaning that is parallel to the image of both the futility of violence and the double effect that Walter Benjamin found between allegory displacem ent of women in war. and the fragments in language. Abdul's images and her own gestures are about the hope that survives In War Games (What I Saw), 2006, the video revolves and strives to nestle into the most uncanny space of around another singular gesture. It involves three our time - home. horsemen in a battle with the remnants of a large NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS/ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND READER/ stone building. The horses are tethered to the THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE building with massive white ropes. Under the heel of the stirrupless riders, the horses pull with all their might. The horses' necks thrash as their mouths Lida Abdul was born in Museum, Polignano, Lorraine, Metz, 2005; Kabul, in 2006; Lida Abdul. G iorgio The UnQuiet World, grimace open with the signs of strain. The image of 1973. Follow ing the Persano Gallery, Turin, Australian Centre for these horses straining to make the crumbling building Soviet invasion of the 2006; Petition for Another Contemporary Art, yield begin to superimpose with each other. The sight country, she lived in World, Museum Voor M elbourne, 2006; Germany and India as a Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, Doubtful Strait, M useo of the struggle begins to blur. However, in the back­ refugee, before going to 2006; and the two- de Arte y Diseno ground the remnants of the building remain firm. the United States where person exhibition Contemporaneo, San she undertook her Now. Here. Over There, Jose, 2006; Gwangju studies. Abdul has Fonds Regional D'Art Biennial, 2006 a n d 27th recently returned to live Contemporain (FRAC) Bienal de Sao Paulo, and work in Kabul. Her Lorraine, Metz, 2006. 2006. In 2007, A b d u l's work featured in the Selected group work will feature in Afghanistan Pavilion, exhibitions include Global Feminisms, 51st Venice Biennale. Contemporaneity, Brooklyn Museum. Her 2005. Other recent solo Academy of Fine Arts, work is discussed in exhibitions include Tashkent and Museum of the catalogue that Ursula Blickle Video Fin e Arts, Bishkek, 2004; accompanied Now, Lounge Solo, Kunsthalle In the Shadow of Heroes: Here, Over There, FRAC Wien, Vienna, 2005; Lida Central Asian Biennial. Lorraine, 2006. Abdul. Pino Pascali Bishkek, 2005; Wall to be Contemporary Art Destroyed, FRAC War Games (What I Saw) (still) 2006 16mm film transferred to DVD co u rte sy o f th e a rtist an d G io rg io P e rs a n o G allery, Turin <

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Precisely because of the almost unequivocal This essay is extracted absence of the interview format in Akerm an's films, from Kaira Cabanas, "What the Map Cuts Up, it is important to think about how these shots of the Story Cuts Across: 'native informants' function in a film like De I'autre Chantal Akerman's De I'autre cote," Parachute cdte. Are these eleven interviews meant to be 120, Special ed., considered as transparent statements illustrating "Borders/Frontiers", the filmed reality that is the US-Mexican border? Are (Fall 2005). 12-27. Reproduced with they mere content for the viewer to decipher or to permission of the author. consider within some ethnographic and essentialist Chantal Akerman's recent documentary De I'autre logic of 'us versus them'? cote (From the Other Side), 2002, begins with a shot of a young adolescent boy who explains, "Mi nombre I would like to suggest that the interviews in De es Francisco Santillan Garda." (My name is Francisco I'autre cdte function in two ways; first, the self- Santillan Garcia).1 The boy is frontally framed just conscious and consistent framing secures the right of centre in a medium close-up; we then hear typicality of the interview as a form that announces Akerman, who is off screen, ask in a heavily accented the artifice of its construction; at the same time the Spanish, "iQue haces en la vida?" (What do you do frame is the formal device that ensures the emer­ in life?). For approxim ately the first hour of the film, gence of singularity within the image. Second, in the camera remains on the border's south side, terms of the various narrated accounts, the effect alternating between interviews with local Mexican they produce is not so much due to their referential residents and potential emigres in the town of Agua meaning or actual content, but rather to their Prieta, and an equal number of border shots - performative force as narrations of desire and fear. fixed-frame shots as well as a few extended lateral In other words, these interviews serve to narrate the tracking shots that reveal the border's varied founding of the border - through the interviewees' geographic and policed terrain - as well as shots claims and justifications for, among other things, a that include the surrounding context; the town's right to private property and their concomitant fear houses and commercial establishments, children of invasion - as well as the border's disruption playing in the street, and the arid desert conditions. through the stories of hope, fear, death, and The film continues on this side of the border until it concern on both sides. These personal stories serve cuts to a sign posted along a road that reads; "Stop to reconfigure the border's stability just as the film the Crime Wave/Our Property and Environment is also dialectically reveals that borders do indeed Being Trashed by Invaders." After this shot, the exist - that is, globalisation's promise of connectivity camera remains on the north side for approximately and prosperity is premised on maintaining both forty minutes and records interviews with inhabitants psychological and physical boundaries. of Douglas, Arizona such as the Mexican consul in KA1RA CABAN AS/AR T HISTORIAN AND CRIT1C/NEW YORK Douglas, Miguel Escobar, a bar owner, and a rancher couple, among others. These Douglas interviews narrate everything from Escobar's explanation of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Born in Brussels. From the Other Side, Art, Boston, 2006. Belgium in 1950. C hantal 2002; a n d Tomorrow We Her work has been the Service's (INS) strategy for border control, to his Akerman is currently Move, 2004. Latterly, her subject of self-titled solo description of local incidents in which residents based in Paris. A film­ practice has expanded exhibitions at the Centre are "detaining undocumented migrants" and how maker since the late to include video installa­ Pom pidou, Paris, 2004; 1960s, Akerm an has tions, which have been Museo de Arte this is "a very dangerous situation". By contrast the produced numerous shown in the 49th Venice Latinoamericano de rancher couple's account elides the difference short and feature length Biennale, 2001 and B uenos Aires, 2005; Cinematheque between the attacks of September 11 and illegal films taking the role of Documenta 11, Kassel, director, screenwriter 2002. Other group quebecoise, Montreal, immigration from the South, an elision that continues and, on occasion, exhibitions include 2006; and to inform the dominant public imaginary as to the cinematographer. She Faces in the Crowd: The Museum of Art, 2006. came to prominence in Modern Figure and Akerman's practice is status of Mexican immigration. 1975 w ith her film Jeanne Avant-Garde Realism, considered in the Dielman, 23 Quai du Whitechapel Gallery, monograph by Commerce, 1080 London and Castello di Gwendolyn Foster, Bruxelles. More recent Rivoli, Museo d'arte Identity and Memory: titles include Sud/ Contemporanea, Turin, The Films of Chantal South, 1999; La Captive, 2004 and Super Vision, Akerman, 2003. 2000; De I'autre cote/ Institute of Contemporary mam

De I'autre cote (From the Other Side) (still) 2002 documentary, video a n d 16mm film co u rte sy o f th e a rtist a n d 5 M a ria n G o o d m a n G a lle ry, * New York and Paris o<>

social position of the artist, strengthened his role as a political oppositionist.

< p In recent years, the artistic breadth of his practice > has continued to widen, and since the late 1990s he < Ll I has been working with both large-scale installations and video. His latest video works, done in collabora­ tion with Sergey Tichina, are free from postmodern W luz appropriation and quotation, preferring straight o C0j< narration; telling simple, but substantial stories that CJ are close to the genre of philosophic parable. These LO ^<< A- -»-» ^LlI works are a clear return to his previous interest in >- — CD Sophist texts. In Ascent, 2004, for exam ple he > emphasises the philosophical acceptance of the vanities of human aspirations, while in Corner, 2004, he contemplates the path of one's chosen solitude and self-concentration. Vyacheslav Akhunov is considered a founder of the Uzbekistan contemporary art scene. His ideas were This subject matter relates to the societal position central in overcoming the Soviet art orthodoxy and occupied by the artists. As a figure outside the introducing the language of international art to the establishment, he plays the part of the sage, country. surrounded by people, mostly young, who want to discover truth. Not by chance has education Akhunov managed to fulfil this task because of his becom e his new commitment. In 2005 and 2006 extrovert social temperament and vast awareness he spent time in neighbouring Tajikistan, a country of intellectual culture. His thinking is bright and which after a devastating civil war is now returning independent; and he has a deep understanding to normal life. For the second time in his life, Akhunov of European and Eastern philosophies, expressing invested his extrovert social temperament in the his own ideas in theoretical essays and fiction. By revolutionary changes of an art scene. In Dushanbe travelling all over the world in the 1990s, he formed in May 2006 Akhunov's young pupils opened the first his own vision of international processes, while his exhibition of what could be properly named contem­ critique of his local situation encouraged an porary art in Tajikistan. innovative practice. His criticism was also social and political, addressing how the art scene was However, the part of the guru is not for Akhunov. organised and ruled in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. His most recent works respect the medium of video, Consequently, his practice is rejected by the and the genre of the philosophic parable, but are conservative moral majority there. informed by a more social and political agenda. His video Canary, 2006, recreates Tashkent bazaar, Having graduated from the most prestigious art where butchers are selling meat, wrapping it in school in the Soviet Union, the Moscow Surikov paper printed with Braille alphabet. Poor invalids Institute, Akhunov's early paintings of the 1970s sell their libraries in post-Soviet Uzbekistan for avoided academic and social realist subjects. He nothing. Here we have one more parable about turned to topics inspired by Sophist mystics. His the triumph of flesh over soul, money over thought, works were based upon oriental motifs - images of and heartlessness over mercy. birds and animals, and the prime elements of earth, VIKTOR MIS1ANO/CRITIC AND CURATOR/CHIEF EDITOR/THE MOSCOW sand and clay. By these means he contradicted the ART MAGAZINE/MOSCOW official Soviet aesthetics, and was moving towards the roots of formalist modernist aesthetics. In the early 1990%he expanded this interest further by Vyacheslav Akhunov Money - Sand - Money, solo exhibitions dating back to his student days turning to pure abstraction. was born in Osh, Adam, Eve, and And K yrgyzstan in 1948. His Others..., a ll 2004. Their in the late 1970s. Recent collaborator, Sergey works came to exhibitions include In Influenced by his several decades of international Tichina, was born in prominence in the West the Shadow of Heroes: Tashkent, Uzbekistan in when they were shown Central Asian Biennial, art experience, in the mid-1990s Akhunov became 1958. They both currently in the Central Asian Bishek, 2005; a n d belief: interested in postmodernism. He used its principles live and work in Tashkent. Pavilion , 51st Venice Singapore Biennale, of collage and appropriation in a series of works in The two artists have Biennale, 2005. Their 2006. Tichina has an collaborated on video collaborative work is independent practice as which he borrowed images of Central Asian 'exotics' works since 2000, with included in Nafas: an artist and designer, from the works of the famous nineteenth-century Tichina the performer Contemporary Art from including designing the Uzbekistan national Russian painter Vasily Vereshchagin, combining and Akhunov the the Islamic World, ifa cam e ra operator. In touring exhibition, pavilions for the World them with images expressing the political realities of addition to Comer and Germany, 2006-7. Expos, in Hanover, modern Uzbekistan. These works, together with the Ascent, their works Akhunov has a long Germany, in 2000 and include the installations history of group and Aichi, Japan, in 2005. Ascent (stills) 2004 DVD courtesy of the artists and Kurama Gallery, Kyrgyzstan o o Csl

CO The Trading Table trades in potential. It is 1. Eve Armstrong, Adaptives, Urban So an innovative economy that makes the most of Redevelopment resources that aren't being used by bringing them Campaign, brochure, back into circulation. The trading table starts as (Auckland: self CM < < publish ed. 2004). a tale with items on top ready to be exchanged.... Published on the UD LU n The trading table changes the normal supplier/ occasion of The Bed > 5 client relationship to a facilitator/participant You Lie In - Annual ARTSPACE New Artists LU z relationship. The pair must negotiate suitable Show, ARTSPACE. trades....The space of change and activity A uckla nd, 2004. 2. Eve Arm strong, How disrupts the regular flow of trade as it moves to Hold a Trading beyond money to create a new currency.2 Table - A Manual for Over the last five years, Eve Armstrong has pursued Beginners, lim ited edition artist book, an interest in transforming everyday materials into The artist facilitates the table. She convinces people (Auckland: self art works and performative 'actions'. She does not to trade, makes decisions about the value of an publish ed, 2004). simply use found objects as an artistic medium. object, creates a set of equivalences, controls the Rather, she forges an open and ongoing dialogue ethics and keeps the table 'alive'. At times her between the realms of the aesthetic and quotidian. 'participants' have traded services such as a scalp Specifically, the artist is interested in the w ays in massage, a poem, a promise of help and a recom­ which seemingly defunct or discarded materials can mendation for something to read or listen to. The be brought to life. She has, for example, created flow is thereby kept open. installations using recycled folded cardboard boxes that have been found on the street, along with The systems and standards engendered by increased bulging pink and green refuse bags. These works globalisation operate outside of local markets, and draw on what Armstrong calls the "accidental there is a dynamic relationship between the two as formalism" that one sees in city streets as garbage one tries to absorb the other. At one level, Armstrong's bags pile up in the evenings. Armstrong discovers project subverts the trade in new goods, instead the ways in which an original function of an object is presenting an amalgam of objects discarded by transformed or extended into something new. In today's global markets. At another level, the Trading 2004, she created a project entitled Handheld Table creates an environment for the exchange of Adaptives, "the ingenuous devices that respond to ideas and memories - it has even attracted the and alter the way an object, structure or system homeless. Is it art? The participants often do not may function. Adaptives are created by people who realise they are part of an art project. Rather, their want to gain greater control over their environ­ journey through a mall, on a street or across a Trading Table flyer 2007 ment."’ For example, a mother created a 'banjo concourse is slowed down and made local. The collage and photocopy o n p a p e r finger' by bending a banjo pick on the end of a Trading Table becomes an artistic parable of the courtesy of the artist and Michael Lett, Auckland splint so that her paraplegic son could send text turbulent journeys we take between local and messages. global streams of consumerism.

VICTORIA LYNN The artist has also created 'actions' in public spaces. These events create communities rather than simply service or draw on an existing group. Born in Upper Hutt, New artist Louisa Bufadeci Armstrong held the In 2006, for example, she devised the SLIPs project Z e a la n d in 1978, Eve for Public/Private - 2006 Summer Artist in Armstrong is currently Tumatanui/Tumataiti: Residence at Enjoy (Small Loca| Improvement Projects) in Wellington, based in Auckland. Her The 2nd Auckland Public Art Gallery, asking the local community for suggestions of ways work was the subject of Triennial, 2004. Other Wellington, receiving a major solo-exhibition group exhibitions the Arts Foundation of to improve Wellington. As a result there was an art ROAM, ARTSPACE, in clu d e Resistance New Zealand inaugural soccer tournament and a gardening day at Auckland, 2005-6. Other through Rituals, New Generation Award Arlington Gardens. solo exhibitions include Westspace, Melbourne, in November of that Book Bonaza, rm103, 2004: The Bed You Lie In, year. Key texts on the A u ckla n d . 2004: and ARTSPACE. Auckland. artist include her limited Since 2003, Eve Armstrong has held 'trading tables' SLIPs: Small Local 2004; Likes the Outdoors, edition artist books How at various sites in Auckland, and invited passers-by Improvement Projects, Ramp Gallery, Hamilton, To Hold A Trading Table: Enjoy Public Art Gallery, 2005: A Tale of Two A Manual For Beginners to trade for something on the table. She comments: Wellington, 2006. As a Cities: Busan-Seoul/ and Cardboard Box recent graduate from Seoul-Busan, Busan Adaptives, both 2004, Elam School of Fine Arts, Biennial, 2006: and don't and Jessica Reid's she w as invo lved in misbehave!: SCAPE 2006 essay in the catalogue The Auckland Project Biennial of Art in Public for don't misbehave! facilitated by Australian Space, Christchurch. 3 1A HOURS ONLY TRADING TABLE < u 5:

o o CO LlI c r q is O CO o CO < Lebanese Civil War: car bombs. Entitled My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: A History of the Car Bomb in the I 1975-1991 Lebanese Wars_Volume 1: Jan uary 21, 1986, x r

< LU CJ Q The swirling energy is compounded by the LU incommensurability between words and images. CO CO It presumes that someone can read it and know CD o that they are being addressed. But it also reveals — 1 < the void between bodies and language. In the c r 3 LO O space before the wall Capelan has left nine stone 3 < CL blocks inscribed with the words rematerialisation CJ and dematerialisation. Each monumental block rests precariously on a pile of plates which will eventually shatter into pieces and become ground down into a white dust. The sculptural and the performative are Always There 2 is a title for Carlos Capelan's left in this delicate balance between appearance installation but it is also provides clues to many and disappearance, echoing the tension between of his other drawings, paintings and performances. body and spirit. It refers to the horizon: a line that is always there and never here, always beyond but never within Capelan's work is at one level, an act of leaving. one's grasp; a boundary that surrounds but is He has left a trace of a gesture in the space of a never reached. Staring out from Sydney, he once gallery. On another level, it is about arriving. He remarked to me: "This is the Chilean horizon seen has sought to find the place in a gallery. Between from the other side." This alluring presence, which the void of space and the life of a place there is is also an absence, has underpinned Capelan's the subtle energy that connects the de- with the practice as an artist. re-materialisation of image and text. The bodies in the wall drawing have had their eyes shut open. Reiterations of the wall drawing that Capelan has Windowless souls. The only thing that we should executed in Auckland have appeared in Costa Rica, recall that is frightening about zombies is their Uruguay, Sweden and South Africa. In each faraway gaze. Their eyes are open but they seem instance the wall has been approached as a to register nothing, they seem to be powerless, but dynamic surface. It is never neutral and always we are surrounded by the fear that we too might improvisational. The dimensions, volume and scale become one of them. Hence the contemporary are as constitutive as the frame of a canvas in a anxiety that is at the core of Capelan's work - it is classical painting. Within its own bounded form the dread of seeing our solitude and the desperate Capelan will construct a unique vortex of figures hyper desire to avoid the gulf between our beliefs and words. The two most prominent words are and our reflections. How do we live when the words dematerialisation and rematerialisation. Other words for and the appearance of things swirl together but appear in English, Spanish and Swedish. Capelan is never meet? Where in the horizon does the gaze a polyglot, but given his background, that is no big find its focal point when the body is in limbo? deal. What matters is the struggle to find connection. NIKOS PAPASTERGIADIS

The particularities of language surround the haunted bodies. The figures that constitute the Born in Montevideo. Reflecting the inter­ M ontevideo, 2006. centre of the drawings are sometimes headless and U ruguay in 1948, Carlos national span of his Professor at Vestland's Capelan moved to career, Capelan's work Art Academy, Bergen, pierced like martyrs, and on other occasions their Sweden in 1973 after has been seen at the Norway, Capelan has eyes are vacant like zombies. Their mythical form being exiled from his Havana, Sao Paulo, also been involved in home country. He Johannesburg and curatorial projects. He defies any immediate identity and yet they embody currently lives in Lund, Kwangu biennials. has received a number a contemporary anxiety. The figures are also traces Sweden. Capeldn has Recent group exhibitions of grants including the of the institutionalisation and de-institutionalisation an extensive exhibition include c/o Sophien- Guggenheim Fellowship history dating back to holm, Sophienholm, in 1996 a n d the of the avant-garde. They have no origin or value, the la te 1970s. His Denmark, 2004 and Bildkonstnarsfonden, but they also re-instate the place and authority of retrospective onlyyou, Svenska Hjartan, Sweden in successive the artist. It is the paradox of the trace that appears which originated at the Moderna Museet, years from 1989 to 1995. BildMuseet, Umea, Stockholm , 2004; Photo In 2007, in a sso cia tio n in the representation of bodies that clash and Sw eden in 2002, has Biennale, Berlin, 2005; with the Auckland overlap in a flickering violent rage spun together subsequently toured Political Gestures in Art, Triennial, he is the to institutions in Spain, Thessaloniki Museum, in a u gu ra l research er in England and Latin and Museum of Contem­ residence at the School Am erica, onlyyou w as porary Art, Florence of Art and Design, AUT accompanied by a 2005; a n d Dialogos, University. m ajor ca ta lo g u e . Museo Blanes,

always at the horizon. For his version, Collins 1. While the disco recruits Palestinian teenagers from the Israeli- marathon lasted and CO was filmed for eight occupied town of Ramallah as dancers for an eight- hours, the z hour disco marathon.1 The performers' enthusiasm eventuating work is seven hours long as as well as their awkwardness, their determination to a one-hour long tape I last though the entire session and the limits of their went missing, I 08 endurance along with the virtuosities and clumsy inexplicably, at the Israeli border whilst 00 os ineptitudes of their performances, turn the work's in transit. generic music-filled dance space into a micropano­ — 1 a LO *— • L U rama of human conditions and attitudes. Inevitably, I t it also becomes an allegory on life under Israeli CL § occupation, where notions of endurance and exhaustion collide the socio-political with entertain­ ment and spectacle.

At the core of most of his projects Phil Collins sets Crucially, this collision also occurs between different up encounters, trading in faces and lives at points registers of familiarity, they shoot horses sutures where private concerns and public conditions familiar gestures and tunes into the otherness of the collapse into each other. In portraits like sanja marathon's overdetermined location and feeds off (the morning vlada left for the army), 2001, or in an the interplay between recognition and distance they image of Collins' boyfriend's broken nose after an allow for; an interplay that only prolongs itself in its attack in sinisa (broken nose), 2002, lived reality immersive installation and the implicit invitation it only ever exists in the intertwining of both realms. presents to an audience. Depending on how many of the seven hours of the piece one sits, stands or The other element in his projects is always Collins dances through, or at which point one enters, one himself. In how to make a refugee, 1999, he is there of its endings could be dancing; another could be as the shadow behind the camera team making a generally shared not-quite-wanting-to-dance- a reportage about a Kosovar refugee boy, as anymore; or the sequence of two men snuggling into witness and accomplice to the mixture of voyeurism, each other half falling asleep in a cross of exhaustion sensationalism, banality, cliche and embarrassment and tenderness. The uncommented juxtaposition of that constructs an image from a situation in order experiences forces the situation's and the image's to then export both to those places where the reality contradictions back onto the viewer who needs to seems far removed anyway. Or, he figures, implicitly work their own w ay in and out of the piece's at least, when recruiting youngsters from the Iraqi scenario. The awkwardness of this turbulent capital for his baghdad screentests, 2002, re-casting encounter is no longer simply the dancers' then or Andy Warhol's Screentests, 1963-66, of Factory one's own, but is now inevitably mutually projected superstars. That he is from Britain filming Baghdad and shared, no matter how uneven the terms of that youth before Britain starts bombing them is one level sharing. of this presence. That he is a gay artist placing EDGAR SCHMITZ/ART1ST AND WRITER/LECTURER IN VISUAL CULTURES attractive young men in front of the camera and AT GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE/CO-DIRECTOR OF A CONVERSATION IN MANY appropriating their looks as screens for projected PARTS/LONDON desires is another. And so he remains present down to the most minute registration of discomfort inscribed onto these faces looking back, as far as they do, in Born in Runcorn, don, 2006-7; and New Museum of Contempo­ E n g la n d in 1970, Phil Work: Phil Collins, San rary Art, Chicago and a mixture of defiance and celebrity posturing. Collins is currently based Francisco Museum of Hayward Gallery, in Glasgow. Solo M odern Art, 2006-7. In London, 2005; Istanbul: The overall horizon to all this is fiction, as media exhibitions include real 2005, his work was the 9th International society, Ormeau Baths subject of an exhibition Istanbul Biennial, 2005; fakery and as a means of (self)invention, as flight G allery, Belfast. 2003; el and publication yeah.... Populism, Stedelijk from reality and as attitude towards it. The set-up mundo no escuchara, you, baby you, Milton Museum, Amsterdam, for they shoot horses, 2004, too, is borrowed there. Espacio La Rebeca, Keynes Gallery, for which Frankfurter Kunstverein, B o gota. 2004; phil he was nominated for Frankfurt, and Centre for Horace McCoy's 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t collins: they shoot the Turner Prize 2006. He C ontem porary Art, They? depicts American Depression-era dance horses, Wexner Centre was also one of four Vilnius, 2005; a n d British for the Arts, Columbus, artists short-listed for Art Show 6, H ayw ard marathons as an exploitative spectacle of failed Ohio. 2005; Phil Collins, the Deutsche Borse G a llery Touring heroism and drawn-out exhaustion with death Stedelijk Museum voor Photography Prize 2006, E xhibition, 2005-6. In Actuele Kunst, Gent, The Photographer's 2007, C ollins w ill hold 2006; erreala denaren Gallery, London. Other solo exhibitions at the itzulera/el retorno de lo recent group exhibitions Carnegie Museum of Art, real, sala rekalde, in clu d e Universal Pittsburgh and Dallas Bilbao. 2006; they shoot Experience: Art, Life, Museum of Art. horses, Tate Britain, Lon­ and the Tourist's Eye, they shoot horses (stills) 2004 synchronised two-channel video projection courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. N ew York < < 2 2 \ < o 5

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< ! < CO 2 _ (/) endlessly, carrying fragments of leaves to use as 1. Donna Conlon, artist's compost in their nests. This idea came to her while statement, emailed to the author in 2005. watching a parade of ants in Palenque, Mexico, and musing about messages and marches. Back in Panama, she drew peace signs and the flags of the COEXISTING IN DONNA CONLON'S WORLD then 191 members of the United Nations on tiny Coexistence, 2003, is a short video work filmed by pieces of paper, and left them in the path of the Donna Conlon in the forest, close to Panama City. ants. Camera in hand, she watched the results. The Conlon is a prolific artist, who has emerged as one ants kept on scurrying crazily in their chores, picking of the most witty and sharp video creators, in the up the small banners as well as the cut leaves. Central American region and beyond. Her work is Conlon documented a full hour of parade. Editing concerned with environmental issues but mainly with the material, and trying to select the flags of the absurdity of life and people. Conlon considers countries with a recent history of war, or struggle her work as a "socio-archeological inquiry into my with peace, Conlon realised conflict was present in immediate surroundings."1 Instead of focusing on the most nations. This 'ant demonstration' as the artist global environment, Conlon relates to a specific time calls it, presents an ideal surrounding in which and place, and within this, to the situations and peace and harmony seem possible within turbu­ details of everyday life that in her eyes appear lence. It acts like a metaphor for the collective effort senseless or out of place. Her work possesses needed to arrive at a better world - if only every strong political implications that are more organic small human being would contribute the energy of a than predetermined, and she points to her subjects single ant to arrive at the same objective of in an ironic and almost playful way. Conlon first understanding. The ant hill becomes an image of produced ephemeral open-air sculptures and positive turbulence, in which individual quarrels and interventions in the public space, installations of interests are left aside for the benefit of the collected refuse, and she has progressively arrived community. Coexistence is a serious reflection, from at producing video. Among her works from 2002 a playful perspective, on the value of collective onwards, Coexistence, which was created in the conscience and power. wake of the Iraq invasion, is probably the closest to VIRGINIA PEREZ-RATTON/ CURATOR AND WRITER/FOUNDER AND a global vision of the turbulent relations between DIRECTOR OFTEOR/ETICA/SAN JOSE/COSTA RICA humanity and its environment, and humans them­ selves. The video is a wishful reaction that, through the'instrusion of an unexpected element, manages to cast a light of hope in the midst of unbalanced Born in Atlanta, United 2006. In 2003, she w as 51st Venice Biennale, States of America in the recipient of the 2005; Warp and Weft, power struggles in the world. 1966, D on na Conlon lives residency prize at the Latin American Pavilion, in Panama City. Trained Caribbean Biennial, Italo-Latin American Trained in the arts as well as biology, Conlon has as a biologist, Conlon Dominican Republic; Institute. 51st Venice commenced her artistic gaining second prize Biennale, 2005, This is specialist knowledge of tropjcal jungles and the career as a sculptor, in the First Central America, C entraal diversity of their fauna. She has chosen to work with and in recent years has American Emerging Museum, Utrecht, 2006; one of the humblest and smallest animals in the rain expanded her practice Artist Prize, M useo de Historias Animadas, to include video, Arte y Diseno CaixaForum, Barcelona, forest, and probably one of the most plentiful and installation, photography Contemporaneo, San 2006; Biennale Cuvee: symbolic of a community: the leafcutter ants that run and performance art. Jose, 2003. Conlon's Weltauswahl der Recent solo exhibitions work was shown in the Gegenwartskunsi, OK in clu d e Trash Trees, 4th Biennial of Visual Centrum fur Gegenwart- Nuevo ESPACIO/ARTE Arts of the Central skunst, Linz, 2006 and Contemporaneo, American Isthmus, Altered States, Taipei P an am a City, 2004; M as Pan am a in 2004, w inning Fine Arts Museum, 2006. me dan, Jacob Karpio first prize. Other recent Her practice is profiled Galena, San Jose, 2006 exhibitions include the in the catalogue that and Coexistence, 7th Panamanian Biennial accompanied Always Herzliya Museum of of Art, 2005; Always a a Little Further. Contemporary Art. Israel, Little Further, Arsenale, Coexistence (stills) 2003 DVD courtesy of the artist preserved tattooed head. These heads are anony­ 1. Christina Barton, "Return of the Dead". mous and rather than being an image of death, they Shane Cotton, i°_< i suggest the transition from living to dead. They exist exhibition catalogue, in a dream state, a body that is at once present and (Wellington: Hamish McKay Gallery, 2006), absent. The paintings are conceptual in the sense <->* unpaginated. I that there is no narrative within their frame. These Ll|| are not paintings of Maori traditional stories. Rather CNI ~7 x than describing a specific myth or cosmology, the CD <£ works attend instead to the idea of myth. Shrouded X < in dark blue, like the half-light of dusk, the paintings COz seem to be other-worldly in the sense that they are both somewhere and nowhere - they defy specificity of narrative. The space between the imagery is as significant as the forms it surrounds. This space is Over the last decade, writers have explored Shane bodily. It is a void into which the viewer is invited to Cotton's 'appropriation' of Maori and other diverse conceptually 'leap' (a nod to Yves Klein). It is also visual traditions as a form of 'commentary' on the space across which the birds, and the heads biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand. His art has gaze - a space for perception, reflection, isolation mostly been discussed in terms of a hybrid aesthetic, and resonance. Cotton's paintings challenge us to and has been compared with the strategies of explore a world in which land, sea, figure and bird appropriation in the work of, amongst others, revolve around one another with the freedom of Australian artist Imants Tillers. Most recently, paradox. Christina Barton has extended the discussion of Cotton's work by highlighting the sheer presence The non-specificity of these symbols and their of the paintings. It is this quality that makes the playful relationship also suggests a resistance to a work of Cotton such an abiding force. As Barton singular point of view. The inherent contradictions says, "I am left looking, suspended between in the paintings have a purpose beyond that of darkness and light, life and death, stillness and 'appropriation', further signalled by the emotions flight".' These words signal the role of space in underpinning the works. On the one hand, the Cotton's new works and the brooding energies palpable sense of lament could be for a time of that loom within. narrative certainty. At another level, the melancholy could refer to the struggle involved in maintaining Like many of his contemporaries, Cotton does not belief systems in a world that is increasingly feel the need to adhere to a particular painted galvanised by either rampant secularism or fervent history in the way pursued so vigorously by modernist fundamentalism. Cotton's fragmented, sparse land­ artists. Instead, he explores historical antecedents, scapes mobilise natural forms and cultural symbols across centuries, cultures and within his own milieu in a way that signals potential relationships: the to find inspiration and consolidation. Cotton builds survival and revival of meaning in a world tormented bridges to parallel worlds - he conjures, montages by contemporary ruins. and fragments images and forms in order to create VICTORIA LYNN visions that are replete with lamentation and melancholy.

For Cotton, painting is an act of bodily and con­ Born in Upper Hutt, New exhibitions include rary Art, Prague, 2005, Z e a la n d in 1964, Shane Recent Paintings, which travelled to Caja ceptual expression. In his new large, dark blue and Cotton currently lives in Hamish McKay Gallery, de Burgos Art Centre, black paintings the artist us.es symbols from Maori . Palmerston North. He W ellington, 2004; Spain in 2006; and traditions, the landscape of the Grand Canyon, and has tribal affiliations to Pararaiha, Sherm an Contemporary Common­ Ngati Rangi, Ngati Hine, G alleries, Sydney, 2005; wealth, National Gallery birds from a variety of locations and mythologies, Te Uri Taniwha and Nga Maori Gothic, Ham ish of Victoria, Melbourne, including North and South American regions. Amidst Puhi. In 2003, his work McKay Gallery, 2006. Cotton has been the recipient of a this array of symbols is often a mokomokai, a received critical Wellington. 2006; and attention in the major Recent Paintings, Gow number of awards and exhibition, Shane Langsford Gallery, grants, including the Cotton: Survey 1993- Auckland, 2006. Group prestigious Frances 2003, accompanied by shows include Paradise Hodgkins Fellowship, a significant catalogue Now? Contemporary Art Dunedin, which he held edited by curator Lara from the Pacific, A sia in 1998. Until recently, Strongman. Shown at Society. New York, 2004; Cotton taught on the City Gallery, Wellington, nEUclear Reactions, a Maori Visual Arts the exhibition toured to project within A Second programme at Massey Auckland Art Gallery in Sight: International University. 2004. Other recent solo Biennale of Contempo- Free Fall (detail) 2006 acrylic on canvas Chartwell Collection. Auckland Art G a lle ry Toi o Tam aki, 2006 CO Q < H—I Q sL

Q < 1 Z 2 1I 1i—i-- LU01 x r cn Z CD 2 u X LU LJ o 2005, three colour prints that show the artist in 1. Christina Dimitriadis, her frenzied attempt - through a paranoid dance, artist's statement to author. standing upside down on her palms with her skirt covering her torso and head - to find release and an 'answer'. Spaziergang (Promenade), 2004, A woman - the artist - literally loses herself before comprises three colour prints, of a foggy beach. a mirror. Her reflection is nowhere to be seen. The In one of the pictures a human figure - her father - viewer can see her back as she is dressed in a silk can be seen walking away, while in another he is dressing gown with embroidered flowers. This is not there anymore. Obsession and paradox, the only spot on the picture where the gaze can together with pain and a fear of the 'predictable', 'breathe'. I remember all of you is the title of this dominate these works. They seem to fill the space work - shot by Christina Dimitriadis in 1996 - that has where they are hosted with a smell of ether, almost inspired the latest body of her work. It is comprised like in a hospital. Dimitriadis records, in a surgical of four different photographic sets from which any manner, the load of 'human demons' and the apparent trace of emotional activity seems at first ineffective effort to exorcise them. There seems to sight markedly absent. be no way of escape from this place; the only thing to be done is go back into an almost bare room and “This older picture came to me when I realised that 'deal' with it. While she remains firmly self-referen­ I kept on having to remember to forget all the time", tial, Dimitriadis goes to the core of the matter, writes the artist probably referring to the realisation without needing to provide many details. Unlike that several events in the cycle of life recur in previous works, her face does not ap p e ar in this identical form, as if they were never of the past, series. This absence seems to create a tremendous (and at the same time) as if they never happened. feeling of suffocation, yet at the same time the "Everyday life was incapable of containing the fascination of these abstract images - of a female desirable, imaginary life became more real than body, herself, completely covered under the bed real everyday life. Space itself became emptiness, sheet in her bed, Ubungen Um Zu Vergessen loss, deprivation. How long can this last, when the (Oblivion's Exercises - Bedded), 2005 - is perversely impossible leaves no possibilities for the possible?"1 gratifying, like the pleasure formed sometimes by deep pain.

In these works, Dimitriadis continues the journey of MARINA FOKIDIS/FREELANCE CURATOR AND ART CRITIC/ understanding 'the self' across the timeless every­ ATHENS/GREECE day reality of existence that has prevailed through her oeuvre. Her body as well as her whole being becomes once more the vehicle to describe the Born in Thessaloniki, featured in group shows Macedonian Museum of G reece in 1967, Christina such a s Berliner Zimmer, Contemporary Art, 2005; sensitively complex situation of living that seems Dimitriadis is currently Kodra, Thessaloniki, The Athens Effect: The so familiar qnd so nameless at the same time. The . based in Berlin. Recent 2004; Any Place Any, Photographic Image in series is complemented by Oblivion's Exercises, solo exhibitions include Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Obscure Passages. Eleni Contemporary Art, Fondazione Mudima, Koroneou Gallery, Thessaloniki, 2004; Milan, 2006; Crossing the Athens, 2003; / Breakthrough, A laca 31, Borders, State Museum Remember All of You. Madrid; Caravanserai: of Contemporary Art, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Artistic Exchanges, Thessaloniki, 2006 and Athens, 2005; and International Forum of An Outing: Contemporary Dystopia, K a n a za w a Visual Arts & Events, Art in Greece in the 21st Citizen's Art Center, Contemporary Art Century, Beltsios 2006. This last exhibition Centre, Caucasus, Collection, Matsopoulos arose out of the Georgia, 2005; The Mill, Trikala, 2006. International Exchange Gesture: A Visual Library Her work is discussed of Contemporary Artist in in Progress, Quarter, in the catalogue that Residence. Kanazawa, New Centre of accompanied the w hich she held in 2006. C ontem porary Art, The Athens Effect. Dimitriadis' work has Florence and Spaziergang (Promenade) 2004 Lambda print, colour photographs courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens Closure, 2005, a single channel video projection, This essay is extracted from Jean Fisher, Out of > - has a similar structure to Non-Specific Threat, 2004, Position: The Video I— although in this case the camera focuses on the Installations of Willie DC head and shoulders of a woman as she walks Doherty, (Mexico City: LU Laboratorio Arte impassively and silently round the perimeter of an Alam eda, 2006). exterior, steel-walled enclosure. If this place has Reproduced with o< the feel of a prison yard, one strand of the voice­ permision of the author. over commentary suggests a mental prison, a rigid 1. Henri Lefebvre, The I adherence to what the first person voice calls her Production of Space, LU z "unwavering loyalty, undimmed faith, engrained trans. Donald CD < cr Nicholson-Smith, nature, pre-ordained destiny...”. These statements (Oxford: Blackwell, CD alternate with 'eye-witness' descriptions of a 2000), 35. •—•j f cr 2. Ibid., 34. domestic space stricken by grinding poverty or 3. Ibid., 415. urban violence, fire and water, that we are left to 4. A gency, in this visualise for ourselves: "The street is ablaze/The instance, is the construction of steel is twisted/The surface is melting/The roof is the individual or decomposing/The ceiling is dripping/The floor is collective as a submerged". Two contrasting spaces are evoked: a political and Man does not live by words alone; all 'subjects' historical subject. are situated in a sp ace in which they must either psychic space either remarkably resilient or intransi- The power to do this recognize themselves or lose themselves, a space gently self-enclosed, and an imaginary social space comes from those aesthetic and social which they may both enjoy and modify.1 in which the boundaries between inside and structures capable of -Henri Lefebvre outside, private and public are disintegrating. producing cultural meaning and an effective political In his book, The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre Closure invites us to ask ourselves whether subjective voice. contends that in Western thought a mathematico- or social agency is possible when any space of 5. Law rence G rossberg, negotiation with others is occluded; and when we "Identity and Cultural philosophical schema comes to dominate our notions Studies: Is That All of space, conceiving space as a void waiting to be populate the world with unseen and threatening There Is?", in Stuart filled, or as a mental space superior to the lived space 'others' that, for the most part, are phantoms Hall and Paul Du Gay. eds., Questions of of the body and its social practices. According to conjured by a politics of fear and fuelled by cynical Cultural Identity, Lefebvre, however, space is a practice, and "like state interests. According to Lawrence Grossberg, (London: Sage all social practice, spatial practice is lived directly agency should not be thought in terms of individual Publications, 1996), 99. before it is conceptualized; but the speculative will, but as the fields of activity in which subjects primacy of the conceived over the lived causes and communities map and position themselves with practice to disappear along with life, and so does varying degrees of mobility relative to relations of very little justice to the 'unconscious level' of power. If subjectivity constitutes "homes" as places experience."2 Hence, "when institutional (academic) of attachment, "agency constitutes strategic knowledge sets itself up above lived experience, installations... [it] involves participation and access, just as the state sets itself up above everyday life, the possibility of moving into particular sites of activity catastrophe is in the offing."3 and power, and of belonging to them in such a way as to be able to enact their powers."5 But to surrender The separated categories of space - physical lived social space to the dictates of institutional (perceived) space, ideal (conceived) space, and discourses is to relinquish both political and ethical social (lived) space - can be mediated only when agency and invite catastrophe. it Is understood that space does not exist prior to JEAN FISHER / LECTURER IN ART AND ART THEORY / subjects but is produced by them, or, more crucially, THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART/LONDON by .the authorities that manipulate the political, social and economic dispositions of space. This Willie Doherty was born Art, B elgrade in 2005. He Venice Biennale, 2005. Other recent major group raises the problem of political agency. To acquire in Derry, Northern Ireland also showed Apparatus, in 1959, w here he still at Galena Pepe Cobo, exhibitions inclu de Faces agency onp must grasp thp power to act and lives and works. In 2006, Madrid and Galerie in the Crowd: The Modem control elements of the world; one has to connect Doherty's work w as the Nordenhake, Berlin in Figure and Avant-Garde subject of a mid-career 2005 and Empty, at Kerlin Realism, Whitechapel with power.4 Agency however seems to be precisely retrospective Out of Gallery. Dublin and Gallery, London and that which is disappearing over a horizon of political Position, Labortatorio Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Castello di Rivoli, Museo impotence and social alienation, along with art as Arte Alamdea, Mexico Zurich in 2006. d'Arte Contemporanea, City. Other recent solo Nominated for the Turner Turin, 2004; and a potential interventionary voice. Nonetheless, exhibitions include self- Prize in 2003, Doherty's Reprocessing Reality, through its interrogation of the interactions of titled shows at De Appel, work was exhibited in P.S.1 Contem porary Art Center, Long Island, 2006. subjects, their surroundings and their representations, Amsterdam. 2003 and Q Re-Run: 25th Bienal de Gallery, Derby, 2005; as Sdo Paulo, 2002; Poetic A major text on the artist Willie Doherty's artistic practice puts back into relation w ell a s Non-Specific Justice: 8th International is Carolyn Christov- those hitherto separated categories of space, Threat, at Galerie Peter Istanbul Biennial, 2003; Bakargiev and Caoimhin Kilchmann, Zurich and 3rd Berlin Biennial for Mac Giolla Leith, Willie enabling us to reflect upon the contribution the Alexander and Bonin, Contemporary Art, 2004; Doherty: False Memory, politics of space and vision makes to the processes New York in 2004, and and in The Experience of 2002. of social disempowerment. Museum of Contemporary Art, Italian Pavilion, 51st Closure (stills) 2005 DVD courtesy of the artist. A le x a n d e r a n d B o nin , N ew York and Galena Pepe Cobo. Madrid o o

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CM < X LU U r ^ LU LU you may die if you only step into this river. This got 1. Alexandros Georgiou, him closer to the understanding of religious faith as artist's statement, oc. www.koroneougal- < o a strong unconditional belief in a reality that might lery.com . All of the be foreign to one until discovered. Since then artist's statements in this text derive from Georgiou has developed an urge to share, in his this source. words, "the notion that spirituality is the effort to It is W ednesday, 28 November 2006, four o'clock act against what seems normal - usually full of fear in the afternoon in Athens, Greece. Alexandras and mistrust - and to apply a healing affect to what Georgiou is at this moment commencing his trip from is seen by our 'developed' conditioned eyes as here to Auckland, New Zealand, via India, Bangla­ negative." desh, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia. Continuing a project titled Without my own vehicle Soon after this experience, the project Without my he is about to spend the next four months 'on the own vehicle was set in motion. Postcards, hand- road' sharing his experiences with four people: the coloured photocopies of pictures he had taken, curator of the 3rd Auckland Triennial, with whom music, poetry, personal notes and ephemeral he wants to become acquainted before he actually objects found along his path, became part of meets her; a curator-friend from New York with ten different sets of private correspondence, ten whom he keeps in contact; a patron of the arts different journeys that were developed not only on who collects his work; and a curator-friend from his the road, but between Georgiou and the recipient. hometown, the place that he is now symbolically His intention for sharing was, and remained through­ leaving behind. out the trip, genuine and, together with his artistic sensitivity, the correspondence helped his work to About a year ago, Alexandros Georgiou asked stay away from any kind of folkloristic traces and several people who support the arts and who were to maintain an inventive aesthetic. familiar with his work to sponsor a trip by land to Varanasi, India, crossing the sensitive borders of Georgiou continues this project in response to the Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The idea was that he invitation of the Auckland Triennial, an international would mail things that he would find interesting to exhibition occurring in a far off place he has never everyone individually throughout the trip, thereby been to. Again travelling overland he circumvents shaping a 'new' kind of relationship and possibly the systems of travel agents and tourism, giving inspiring them to experience a different, more him the freedom to move, develop his own network, humane and not so materially dependent approach reconnect with old friends and make new ones, to life! In a text about this project, Georgiou says, thereby restoring bonds destroyed by the hectic "I feel the West is rushing towards a horrible future rhythm of consumer society. For him, his journey and unhappiness has become a norm regulated by is not so much about terrain he covers, as about pills."1 This is his reasoning for travelling in such a understanding the broken links between people way. He follows an undefined path that comes to be in terms of time and emotion. shaped by the very material he seeks to send to his MARINA FOKID1S "mail family" with whom he always feels "connected with invisible threads".

Varanasi, the holy city of Shiva, was a symbolic Born in Athens. Greece Games, Eleni Koroneou Produzione Arte, point of arrival for his first trip, and is the place of in 1972, A lexa n dro s Gallery, 2004; and Florence, 2005; Jasmine, Georgiou currently lives Without my own vehicle, E31 Gallery. Athens, 2005; departure for the second leg of his endeavour. For between New York and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Give(a)way: 6th Biennal him the city represents and communicates his ideas Athens. He undertook his 2006. Recent group Exhibition of Visual Art, initial studies in Athens, exhibitions include Self- EV+A, Lim m erick, 2006. on spirituality and the juxtaposition of East and completing a postgradu­ Aboutness, Canal Isabel A key text on his work is West. On a previous trip there, he swam daily in the ate qualification in New II, M adrid, 2004; The the catalogue published Ganga River against the advice of his Western travel York. Solo exhibitions Gesture, Macedonian to accompany Without in clu d e Cut-outs, Eleni Museum of Contempo­ my own vehicle. guide, which included a whole page describing how Koroneou Gallery, rary Art, Thessaloniki, Athens, 2002; Favourite and Quarter, Centro ” Ow Une ity&fj Lk a fkck. \leil £oven\p) it cdf. I

In a world of pure, fast, annihilating, digital credit From the useful structures of economic botany, transactions, paper banknotes seem absurdly we slide across to the disinterested abstractions anachronistic: in their insistent physicality; their of scientific botany: the hierarchy of naming. Even national and denominational inflexibility; their here we can sense residual imperialism, with grubby, fragile mortality. Equally archaic is their Linnaeus' Latin binomials echoing both the Roman repertoire of images: landscapes, animals, ancient Empire and medieval Christendom.2 Even the plant's ruins, national leaders, writers and artists, all common name, 'maidenhair tree', reflects history engraved in forgery-resistant fine-line curlicues. This and politics, in this case sexual politics: it, too, sense of being out of time entirely suits Fiona Hall, comes from Linnaeus, from the great taxonomist's whose obsessive manualism is equally obsolescent. seeing the leaf as a woman's pubic triangle. In her latest work, she constructs an aesthetics of numismatics, painting careful, detailed renderings Having drifted into the domain of form, of the graphic of botanical specimens onto selected banknotes. and pictorial, we note the leaf's curved parallel veins rhyming with the longboat's sail. Thus highlighted, the The ongoing When my boat com es in, is actually Viking ship becomes a reminder of early transconti­ the third element in an already extended sequence nental exploration, a signifier of rape and pillage, of of works which identify and describe links between capitalism. The springing 'v' of the base of the leaf, the worlds of flora and of finance. The first was Cash and its fine white lines also find echoes in the net- Crop, 1998, a vitrine sculpture in which eighty labelled patterned, dentellate framing of the '5'. Within these fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds carved in soap, borders, skeins of engraved lines ripple and curl like float on glass shelves above a carpet of banknotes. sea foam, waves and currents, all intersecting and Each ’specimen' is punningly labelled with a phrase weaving into the lace tablecloths of western luxury. from the language of economics. Each note bears a painting of a leaf of one of the plants fruiting above. That is just one example - at the time of writing, there are 200 works projected. Many are in this Extending the idea. Leaf Litter, 2000-3, presents a exhibition. Spend some time. Wait for change. wider geographical reach, with the leaves of econom­ DAVID HANSEN / CURATOR AND WRITER / HOLDER OF A SENIOR ically useful flora from almost 200 nations painted over FELLOWSHIP FROM THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS grids of each country's cash. When my boat comes in functions in a similar way to Leaf Litter, but with the Born in Sydney, Australia of South Australia, Together is Easy, Mito Arts Foundation, Mito-shi further complication of specific maritime references. in 1953, F io n a Hall lives Adela ide. It w as and works in Adelaide. accompanied by a and National Gallery of Addressing the vehicles of global commerce as well . She has been active as monograph written by Victoria, M elbourne, 2004; as its substance, Hall has limited her supports to notes an exhibiting artist since exhibition curator, Julie Strangely Familiar, the mid 1970s. Hall's work Ewington. Other recent University of Technology bearing images of boats: from canoes to container has been included in the solo exhibitions include Sydney Gallery, 2005; vessels, from sailing ships to supertankers. Biennale of Sydney, Asia Cell Culture and Leaf Uncanny (the Unnaturally Pacific Triennial. Litter, Roslyn Oxley9 Strange), Artspace, Brisbane: Adelaide Gallery, Sydney; So so. Sydney, 2005; By thus limiting the frames of reference Hall directs Biennial and several of Coffs Harbour City Contemporary and contains semiological drift. When my boat comes the Art Gallery of New Gallery, 2005 and Fiona Commonwealth, N ational Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery of Victoria, 2006; in is primarily or generally 'about' exploration, trade, South Wales Australian Hall, Perspecta exhibitions. Gallery, 2005. Selected and Prism: Contemporary colonialism, migrations, money. But individual works Her work w as the subject group exhibitions include Australian Art, are resolutely specific. Nations, plants and vessels of a major self-titled Face Up: Contemporary Bridgestone Museum. retrospective at Art from Australia. Tokyo. 2006. Hall held the each have their own story. Rigorous adherence to Queensland Art Gallery, N ationalgalerie im Asialink Lunugunga these material and conceptual settings produces Brisbane in 2005, w hich Hamburger Bahnhof, Residency in successive subtle coincidences of form and meaning, “the toured to the Art Gallery Berlin, 2003; Living years from 1999-2005. When my boat comes in (detail) 2002-ongoing Ginkgo biloba/maidenhair tree gouache on banknotes courtesy of the artist and Roslyn 0xley9 Gallery, Sydney something else. Consider the shape of the cable as it spills out from the square mat into individual curving tendrils. Splayed out on the floor, the work seems to create its own territory, like a map of some Ll I invented land. Each tendril reaches out from the < Z I— centre towards some new geography. If left alone, 0 0 CO UJ the movement of the tendrils suggests Undercurrent o might continue to expand across the floor, annexing < Q_ the space around it. Here, as elsewhere in her work, Hatoum invests ordinary objects with political echoes.

Finally, and perhaps most intriguingly, Undercurrent It is hard to imagine an artist better suited to the looks - and acts - like more than an object. Though theme of turbulence than Mona Hatoum, whose cable and light bulbs have mechanical functions, sparely elegant and profoundly unsettling works the tendrils have a delicate and animated feel. In usher us into arenas of emotional and political the biomorphic structure of its cables, with the disturbance and leave us there to find our own way breathing pace of its lights, the work seems to glow out. Uncanny, beautiful, and enigmatic, her work with purpose and intent. It could be an organism, a always creates an atmosphere of dislocation. Yet being with consciousness. Perhaps that conscious­ the exact nature of that dislocation is multi-faceted ness is malevolent: the sinuous tendrils evoke and ambiguous, as her work encompasses overlap­ Medusa's head, that frightening nucleus covered ping terrains of domesticity, politics, and the body, with snakes, one glance from which could turn a its very refusal to specify narrow ranges of meaning person to stone. In this sense, encountering is the source of its power. Undercurrent feels like a reckless form of trespass. Or perhaps the consciousness of the work is not Her work in this exhibition. Undercurrent, 2004, is threatening but poignantly isolated, its glowing composed of electrical cable, light bulbs, and a lights emitting a message whose meaning we are computerised unit that brightens and dims the lights unable to decipher. at the pace, Hatoum has said, of "slow breathing." The nucleus of the sculpture is a square mat of A living being, territory, or house turned inside out: woven cable, from which tendrils snake across the all of these associations can be layered into floor, each strand ending in a twenty-five watt bulb. Hatoum's work. Each of them gives us the feeling of a world where things are not quite as they should Undercurrent 2004 The ambiguity of the work begins with its ingredients. be - in a way we can't quite put our finger on. The electrical cable, light bulbs courtesy of the artist and Cable has a specific function - to provide the wiring bulbs brighten and dim in silence, hinting at all the A le x a n d e r a n d B o nin , N ew York photo: Mattias Givell, courtesy inside buildings - and we are generally told to stay trouble we know goes on beneath the surface, all Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall aw ay from it when it is exposed. Light bulbs are the disturbing undercurrents of our time. meant to brighten the interiors of built spaces. ALIX OHLIN/ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH/LAFAYETTE COLLEGE/ They hang from ceilings, covered by lampshades PENNSYLVANIA/UNITED STATES OF AMERICA or fixtures, and are not to be laid out on the ground. Undercurrent, then, seems composed of a building Born in 1952 into a Magasin 3 Stockholm of Contemporary Art, Palestinian family in Kunsthall in 2004. It Boston and UCLA collapsed and turned inside out, its skeleton Beiruit, Lebanon, Mona was accompanied by Hammer Museum, Los exposed. If the square at its centre recalls a carpet, Hatoum moved to London a major monograph. A ngeles. 2004; Always the house itponjures is not g cosy one. Instead, in 1975. She w as an artist Other recent solo shows a Little Further. in residence on the include self-titled A rsenale, 51st Venice the mood created is obliquely menacing, hinting of DAAD program, 2003-4, exhibitions at Galerie Biennale. 2005; Zones cellars and interrogation rooms, of dangerous areas and has since divided Rene Blouin, New York, of Conflict: Biennale where we will not be safe. her time between Berlin 2005; and Douglas F. of Sydney. 2006; Super and London. A Turner Cooley M em orial Art Vision, The Institute Prize nom inee in 1995, Gallery, Reed College, of Contemporary Art, Given that the building for which these components Hatoum won the Portland, 2005; as well Boston, 2006; Into M e/ prestigious biennial as Mobile Home. Out of Me. P.S.1 were designed has apparently evaporated, we Sonning Prize, given Alexander and Bonin, Contemporary Art might ask what function they are now serving. We by the University of New York, 2005 and Center, New York, 2006; seem to catch them in the midst of an evolution into C o p en h a g e n in 2004. Hot Spot. White Cube, and Out of Time: A The most comprehensive London, 2006. Selected Contemporary View. survey of her work was group exhibitions , shown at the Hamburger in clu d e Documenta 11. New York, 2006. Kunsthalle, the Kassel, 2002; Made in Kunstmuseum Bonn and Mexico. The Institute

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One of the men who landed on the Levuka beach 1. Henry Britton, Loloma, Or Two Years that year [1870] w as a Hungarian Count in his in Cannibal-land, A In the Tongan language, 'liliu' means to change early thirties called Gideon Vecsey. Having fallen Story of Old Fiji, or transform. It is the title Julian Hooper gives to from the Emperor's grace (reportedly there was a (Melbourne: Samuel M ullen. 1884), 64. a mosaic of small-scale drawings and collages lady in the case), he had snapped his sword juxtaposing real and imagined episodes from the across his knee and bowed himself out of the tumultuous life of an ancestor who migrated from world of the court, and practically from the world Europe to the Pacific. Fast-drying and portable, of civilisation forever.1 watercolour was the preferred medium for colonial painters to diarise their impressions in sketchbooks. Hooper points to the parallel between Vecsey's Hooper uses it because of these associations, just life story as it is being reconstructed by his father, as he uses the extant visual language of traditional anthropologist Antony Hooper, and that of the ngatu, the dyed mulberry bark Tongan tapa, to fictional plantation owner Thomas Sutpen in William denote the patterns of the Pacific. Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, published in 1936. Just as in that allegory of the American South, Hooper's project is analogous to Paul Klee's well- miscegenation and the burdens of the past attend known painting Carpet of Memory, 1914; a painting of Vecsey's plan to make his fortune planting cotton. the idea of a carpet and what it may signify once it With both his money and (ironically) his sight has endured the passage of time. Similarly, Hooper's dwindling, Vecsey left his Tongan wife Elenoa, and journey into family history is weighted with the larger took the two eldest of his four children to Sydney inheritance of colonialism. Motifs and symbols from in 1888. His daughter Alice or Alisi married Frederick the Austro-Hungarian Empire clash and blend with Hooper in 1902, and came to New Zealand, and she Tongan and Fijian imagery and ideas suggesting probably never saw her Hungarian father again. conflict and assimilation in the construction of Pacific identity on both personal and cultural levels. Like Faulkner, Hooper uses a variety of viewpoints to tell this story, deploying the imagery of European, This is not the first time Hooper has delved into the Melanesian and Polynesian art to suggest competing haunted house of kinship. A decade ago, after interpretations of the facts. In so doing, he alludes reading the journals of a maternal forebear, the to the historical and cultural Zeitgeist of the Pacific, Reverend Richard Taylor, Hooper depicted scenes where the past is always present, and constantly in from the missionary's life in the Wanganui district in a state of revision as stories are retold over time. the 1840s. Benign bees populated those paintings, LINDA TYLER/DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR NEW ZEALAND ART in contrast to the frigate birds and bats that attend RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY/THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND the adventures of Hooper's paternal great-great­ grandfather, Count Gideon von Vecsey, in the current work. Coincidentally, both ancestors are romantic figures in colonial history, Taylor in New Zealand and Vecsey in Fiji: Julian Hooper was born in recent years at Ivan Studio Program in Auckland. New Anthony Gallery, residency in New York, Z e a la n d in 1966, w here Auckland including participating in the he still lives and works. Other Places, 2002; Program's Open Studio He spent time as a child Williwaw, 2004; The show and exhibiting living on the island of Unreliable Guide, 2005; at Rare Gallery in 2001. Tokelau, where his and Hupa, 2006. In 2000, Other group exhibitions fa th er w as an with the support of a in clu d e Just Painting, anthropologist. Hooper grant from Creative Auckland Art Gallery, has been exhibiting New Zealand and the 2006. H ooper currently since the late 1980s and Wallace Art Trust, he tutors painting at Unitec, has had regular shows held the International Auckland.

< u 5 CANTO VI According to a recent United Nations report, there were o ^ u . at least 18 million active landmines in Angola. About one in every 356 people is an amputee, the highest ratio in < ° the world. As a result of the civil war, a large number of people are still missing. Their relatives come every day to the Praza gS da independencia in Luanda, where their appeals are O LU filmed and broadcasted daily on national television. SOUND: Muxima, Beto de Almeida v t L U g C£=> CANTO VII 00 The journey to the church continues. A popular song says: My heart is clean, for that reason I can go to Nossa <5 Senhora da Muxima without any fears or regrets and nothing will happen to me. An Angolan proverb declares that "he who goes to Nossa Senhora da Muxima with an evil heart risks being drowned Muxima is a visual poem divided into 10 Cantos. crossing the river to get there." Each Canto uses a structure similar to a Haiku and SOUND: Muxima, Os Kiezos focuses only on one to three issues, with the greatest CANTO VIII economy of means possible. The objective of the Children playing and dreaming of a better future for work was to express the maximum with the minimum, Angola. In the background, the only visible signs of like the extraordinary short poems by one of my a booming economy. favorite poets, Giuseppe Ungaretti. SOUND: Muxima, Mario Rui Silva Music is a central element to the film and the CANTO IX sequencing of Cantos. It provides the connecting As Nelson Mandela said, "a tragedy of unprecedented link, conceptually as well as rhythmically. Each song proportions is unfolding in Africa: AIDS is a disaster, has a different tempo, and each Canto is structured effectively wiping out the development gains of the past to follow closely each song. decade and sabotaging the future." Between 8 and 12 percent of the population of Angola is living with HIV-AIDS.

TITLE SCENE Angola is the second largest oil producer in sub-Saharan The title scene is an homage to Angolan mothers as Africa. The United States remains the country's principal Agostinho Neto does in this poem: oil partner. In spite of massive oil revenues, the Angolan Government and its foreign partners fail to distribute their My mother newfound wealth into urgently needed health and social (oh black mothers whose children have departed) initiatives. you taught me to wait and hope as you have done through the disastrous hours Inside the church, a young woman prays to Nossa Senhora da Muxima. CANTO I Six children pose for the camera, smiling, and touching SOUND: Muxima, Waldemar Bastos their hearts. 'Muxima' means 'heart' in Kimbundu, one of CANTO X Angola's main languages. A pianist plays a very personal version of Muxima and CANTO II ends his daily journey in the Avenida Marginal, dreaming The start of a journey to The Church of Nossa Senhora da of Muxima, the woman of his dreams. Muxima. A simple structure built in the sixteenth century; SOUND: Muxima, Paulo de Oliveira it is located 160 km south of Luanda, Angola's capital. CREDITS SOUND: Muxima, Os Kiezos SOUND: Muxima, Ruy Mingas

CANTO III ALFREDO JAAR A visit to the Fortaleza, an old military casern where

Portuguese Colonial monuments have been abandoned. Born in Santiago, Chile of Fine Arts, Houston, Selected group One of the legacies of the Portuguese Colonisation is in 1956, Alfredo Ja a r 2005; Muxima, Grant Arts exhibitions include lives and works in New Gallery, Kansas City, At the Mercy of Others: underdevelopment: the great majority of Angola's York. He has a substantial 2005 and Galerie Lelong, The Politics of Care, inhabitants live in extreme poverty in makeshift constructions exhibition history dating New York, 2006; Alfredo Whitney Museum of on 'borrowed' land. b a ck to the la te 1970s, Jaar: Santiago de Chile. American Art. New York, and works as an artist, Sala de Arte Fundacion 2005; and The Gold SOUND: Muxima, Ngola Ritmos architect and filmmaker. Telefonica, Santiago, Standard and Into M e/ CANTO IV Recent solo exhibitions 2006; The Sound of Out of Me, both at P.S.1 The utopian dreams of a young nation crushed by in clu d e Todo el Dolor del Silence, Fabrica, Brighton Contemporary Art Center, Centro Portugues in association with the New York in 2006. For corruption and ruthless global economic interests. Mundo, de Fotographia, Porto, Brighton Photo Biennial. further reading see, SOUND: Muxima, Ruy Mingas 2004; Let One Hundred 2006; and Alfredo Jaar: P a tricia C. Phillips, "The Flowers Bloom, M useo The Eyes of Gutete aesthetics of witnessing: CANTO V d'Arte Contemporanea Emerita, Hood Museum a conversation with An emergency clearly exists but it remains invisible, Roma, 2005; The Eyes of of Art, Darmouth College, Alfredo Jaar", Art Journal, and there are no witnesses. Cutete Emerita, Museum New Hampshire, 2006. Fall 2005. Muxima (still) 2005 digital film with sound on Mac Mini computer ©Alfredo Jaar courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York Shot in Iceland and Sweden, the film responds to 1. "True North: A the story of Matthew Henson, an African American, conversation between Isaac Julien who took part in Robert Peary's expedition to the and Cheryl Kaplan", North Pole in 1909, and who was the first person to www.deutsche-bank- kunst.de/art/2005/2/ reach the geographic North Pole, True North, (as LU e/1/320.php. See also opposed to the magnetic North Pole). The minimal Kimberly Myer, ed., —1 ^ voiceover in Julien's film, which has the intimacy of Isaac Julien: True North, (Los Angeles I a whisper, replays the tension between these two and Miami: Mak ~ o men that escalated to the point at which Henson, Center for Art a n d CD u i motivated by fear, had to remove the ammunition Architecture, 2005). < a from his rifle at night and bury it in the snow. The OO men had a mutual dependence, however, with a respective double and constantly changing index. i—ion 35 The 'conquest', mapping and surveying of the world is a white undertaking - it is, in other words, colonisation. By casting a black woman in the role Isaac Julien's three-screen synchronised film of ’explorer', Julien contradicts the ideology of installation, True North, 2004, is a meditation on the colonialism, which is assumed to be both white and treacherous and complex journeys beckoned by male. At the same time, he opposes the ideology of the sublime and contested space of the North Pole. 'terra nullus' by making it obvious that the utmost Julien's camera is at times continuous across the north is inhabited, and that 'conquest' is therefore three screens, and alternately, sliced into a triptych, also always a form of theft. For example, Inuit men suggesting the multiple ways in which 'land' is and women at work in the landscape are juxtaposed perceived and, literally, apprehended. At one with a Christian church interior, hinting at the disputed moment, the camera literally seems as though it is histories of this location. falling through the cavernous cracks in the ice, the sequences changing abruptly. At another, the In True North, representation itself is revealed to shifting planes of the three screens meet in absolute be both an aesthetic and political challenge. The harmony. Then one plane will slide behind another, blazing beauty of white ice and the sonic thunder or a screen is 'turned off' as it were, fading to black of the falling water is visualised as a paradoxical and allowing for iconic moments and singular space. As the imagery shuttles between telescopic images. The very real treachery of the ice is played and panoramic journeys, the female subject of the out in these metaphorical slippages, suggesting film is sim ultaneously 'at home' in her icy environ­ both the elusive nature of 'true north' and the highly ment, and at other times engulfed by it. In True fraught notion of truth itself. North, Julien creates a new kind of topography in which black identity is not aligned to the nation Julien has, for a number of years, been a forerunner state. Working to disrupt historical assumptions of in the use of parallel montage. Works such as colonisation and the aesthetic rules of the moving Paradise Omeros, 2002, Baltimore, 2003, and image itself, Julien invokes a fluctuating and Fantome Creole, 2005, explore issues of black experiential interpretation of the voyage. identity across multiple screens. This principle of VICTORIA LYNN AND LEONHARD EMMERLING/OIRECTOR AND montage - the repetition, mirroring, doubling and CURATOR/ST PAUL ST/AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY interchanging of individual shots - emphasises at a technical level Julien's idea that memory is non­ linear. In relation to True North, he says, "the idea Isaac Julien was born contemporain de Triennial, 2005. Other of 're-memorizing' is different from the official in Lon don in 1960, w here M ontreal, 2004; Isaac group exhibitions include he continues to live and Julien: Fantome Creole, The Projected Image, discourses of History with a capital 'H\ A lower-case work. His early work was Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate Modern, London, investigation into the historical material is at work in the subject of the 2005; Isaac Julien. Irish 2005; Videodanse 2006, exhibition. The Film Art Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou; True North. Memory is not chronological."1 Historical of Isaac Julien, show n Dublin. 2005; Isaac Making History: Art and memory is juxtaposed with contemporary imagery, in 2000 at Bard College, Julien, Brandstrom Documentary in Britain and is thus revealed to be increasingly unreliable. Annandale on Hudson, Stene, Stockholm; from 1929 to Now, touring to the Museum and Isaac Julien, Tate Liverpool, 2006; The promise of existential uncertainty in the face of Contemporary Art, Kestnergesellschaft, a n d Contemporary of the snow-covered, icy and sublime landscape, Sydney; BildMuseet. Hanover, 2006. Commonwealth. Australian Centre for (a clear reference to the tradition of nineteenth- Umea; Henie Onstad Nominated for the Turner Museum, Oslo and Yerba Prize in 2001, Ju lien 's the Moving Image, century sublime landscape painting, for example Buena Centre, San work was included in Melbourne, 2006. For the works of Caspar David Friedrich) is continually Francisco, 2000-2. More Documenta 11, Kassel, further reading on the recent solo exhibitions 2002; Whitney Biennial, artist, see Veit Gorner undermined by the non-linear format of the work. in clu d e Isaac Julien: 2004; Busan Biennial, and Eveline Bernasconi, Baltimore, The Aspen 2004; 3rd Berlin Biennial eds., Isaac Julien: True Art Museum, 2003; True of Contemporary Art, North-Fantome Afrique, North, Musee d'art 2004 and 2nd Guangzhou 2006. True North Series 2004 digital print on Epson Premium Photo Glossy courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro Gallery. London and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney < 0 0 < y intellectual property, copyright, and the incidence 1. Lucia Madriz, artist's ; on of the much-discussed free-trade agreements in statem ent. 0 0 forcing a greater dependency on a particular economic model, symbolised to a great extent by — I u food, in agriculture-based, semi-rural countries like the Central American region.

These installations combine the sophistication of The diversity of languages that Lucia Madriz has design with the humbleness of materials (rice, beans, examined and experimented with to date in her corn) linked to the historical basic diet of regional artistic career of less than ten years is held together populations. The first of these works was a square by a systematic concern with uneven relations in the carpet made of rice in which the beautifully world. A particular kind of gaze was evident even in calligraphed words Money Talks were m ade in black her first paintings - a suite of small, monochromatic beans. A second piece was the copyright sign in squares in shades of grey, representing apparently beans placed in a circle of white rice and a yellow irrelevant city details and street corners, but that in corn rim. In the case of R ed Alert, the stars are used fact, become a large polyptych that created an off­ as a subtle reference to imperial powers, and the beat urban mosaic. skulls as the image of death brought about by genetically manipulated crops. This technique is She then produced a series of photographic, andro­ perhaps inspired by the traditional Guatemalan gynous self-portraits adopting various personalities street carpets, made of coloured sawdust, flowers or types, followed by delicately coloured paintings and seeds, 'embroidered' on the cobblestones for with subtle references to sexual organs and the Holy Week and other feasts, particularly in Antigua. origins of female pleasure. Intending to develop her The origins of these intricate designs range from perspective on "symbolic constructions of women religious references to floral or abstract motifs. and the subtle social practices that perpetuate Madriz's proposal, however, stems from a clearly gender inequity," Madriz experimented further in political position and follows a recent tendency several feminist-oriented video works.1 In these she for several Central American artists to turn towards uses, in an ironic and critical way, the aesthetic elements, materials or traditions in local popular stereotypes that define female beauty parameters culture in works that, whilst carrying a strong and, more recently, a colourful and effective ideological concept, seek to put forward new formal animation around the notion of being Hispanic. solutions, and, through artistic work, convey the Her awareness of inequity at all levels, and of the turbulence that constantly unbalances their context. turbulence that subalterity generates in social and VIRGINIA PEREZ-RATTON economic structures, has led her toward themes of consumerism, globalisation, the abuse of economic power and presently, the genetic manipulation of Lucia Madriz was born 2005, Jacob Karpio was awarded a prize food. Madriz has chosen to use basic grains as a in San Jose, Costa Rica Gallery, Miami; Landings at the Second Central in 1973 w here she 2, Centro de Artes American Contest for material to create beautifully designed installations. continues to live and Visuates Merida, Mexico, Videomaking, Museo These floor-pieces are directly linked to several work. Solo exhibitions 2006; Second Central de Arte y Diseno in clu d e Erscheinen, American Emerging Contemporaneo, San aspects of domination having a wider significance Badischer Kunstverein, Artist Prize, M useo de Jose and a scholarship throughout the region, involving issues such as Karlsruhe. 2004 and Arte y Diseno for foreign artists from Alteridades, Ja co b Contemporaneo, San the German Academic Karpio Gallery, San Jose, Jose, 2006; One More of Exchange Service, 2006. Recent group exhi­ Women, Some Women Hochschule fur bitions include Art for Extra, Centro Cultural de Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, the Children, Pan iam or E sp an a, San Jo se, 2006; Germany. For further Fundacion, Hochschule Duck Soup, Centro reading see Tamara Diaz fuer Gestaltung, Cultura e Historico Jose Bringas, En el Trazo de Karlsruhe. Germany, Figueres Ferrer, San las Constelaciones, (San 2004; 4ta Edicion Salon Ramon de Alajuela, 2006 Jose: Editorial Centro de Arte Digital, M useo and Landings 3, Centro Cultural de Espana y de Arte Contemporaneo Leon, Santiago, Perro Azul, 2003). del Zulia, Maracaibo, Dominican Republic, 2005; Art Basel Miami 2006. In 2003, M adriz Alerta Roja (Red Alert) 2006 installation of beans, corn, rice courtesy of the artist M silk screens to draw his self portrait, he then rubbed 1. Paulo Herkenhoff, O charcoal over them, placing the screens on top of "Autonomous IZ Doodles. Verbal low, square acrylic trays filled with water, some of Scrawls and them containing pages of books, maps or other Erasures, On Drawing in South America", in documents. The floating dust drawing was altered Mari Carmen Ramirez, and broken through the days, as the water evapo­ ed., Re-aligning Vision, Alternative o rated and left only the charcoal traces on the Currents in South bottom of the tray. This series has led to many other American Drawing, c r > works that relate to disappearance: this is a subtle (Austin: Archer M. cnS and poetic way of referring to the dead and disap­ Huntington Art Gallery, The 0 8 peared during years of extreme turmoil in Colombia, University of Texas at but it is above all, a reflection on the ephemeral in Austin. 1998), 72-83. life. Aliento (Breath). 1996-2002, first presented at the Bienal de la H abana in 1997, is probably the Drawing and printmaking have strong traditions in piece that is most clearly related to the turbulence Latin America, and Colombian artists are particularly created by the missing: several round concave interested in approaching them in original ways. mirrors, made of polished steel, are placed on the Oscar Munoz is perhaps one of the artists who has wall. The spectator is invited to breathe on them, most considered the boundaries and possibilities of the condensation on the surface allowing the drawing, and gone beyond these limits. As Paulo emergence of a serigraphed archive image of a Herkenhoff has stated, in relation to Latin American disappeared person. When the condensation is drawing, it configures itself as a way of navigating in absorbed by the air, when the breath of life is no time, and drawing is always a voice, whether a longer present, the image vanishes, and the missing scream in the void or the subtle border of silence, disappear once more. The mirrors are once again and "being stone, liquid or light, it is no longer a clean and shiny as oblivion. canon."1 The work by Munoz is always an exercise in subtlety. His poetics are anchored in turbulence, More recently, Munoz has realised video works like in violent and painful realities, but his handling of “Re-trato", literally "re-portrait”, in which the hand the visible/ invisible, the unsaid and the forsaken, of the artist draws his portrait with a wet brush, on and his aesthetic proposals, always delicate and a hot concrete surface, again and again. The hand original, inscribe his work within the discreetly can barely cope with the speed of the burning sun forceful, and never compromise with the obvious. that evaporates the drawing even before it is finished. A gifted draughtsman, his initial work in charcoal or Drawing here is an eternal beginning: Narcissus graphite was marked by strong chiaroscuro effects soon turns into Sisyphus and forever starts re-drawing and announced a certain spirit of the spectral that himself, re-recognising himself. has accompanied him since. Munoz creates work VIRGINIA PEREZ-RATTON linked with the relations of opposites: oil/water, condensation / evaporation, appearance / disap­ pearance, opacity/transparency. Born in Popayan, Colom­ Pori Art Museum, B a ss M useum of Art, bia in 1951, Oscar Munoz Fin la n d . 2006. In 2004 Miami Beach, National A Work of the early 1990s presented oil drawings currently lives and works he received first prize Portrait Gallery, of life-size figures on plastic curtains, sprayed with in Cali. Colombia. A at the Salon Nacional Washington DC and San water while the oil was still wet, and creating images sen io r figure in de Artistas, Colombia. Antonio Museum of Art, Colombian art, he has Munoz's work was 2004; The Hours: Visual of bodies in the shower, suggesting the usual been exhibiting since included in the Latin Arts of Contemporary deformation caused by steam. Around the same the e a rly 1980s. Recent American pavilion in Latin America, Irish Museum of Modern Art, time, Munoz started the long series, Narcissi. Using solo exhibitions include the 51st Venice Biennale, Oscar Munoz, M useo de 2005 and the Prague D ublin, 2005; Cantos Arte Moderno de Buenos Biennale of the sam e Cuentos Colombianos, Aires. 2003; Eclipse, S a la year. Other recent group Daros-Latinamerica, Com fandi, Cali, 2003; exhibitions include Zurich, 2005; and Proyecto para un Stretch, Powerplant, Biennale Cuvee: memorial. Galena Sante Toronto, 2003; Slowness, Weltauswahl der Fe. Planetario Distrital, Dorsky Gallery, New Gegenwartskunst, OK Bogota, Iturralde York, 2003 and Govett- Centrum fur Gegenwart­ Gallery. Los Angeles and Brewster Art Gallery, skunst, Linz, 2006. His Feria de video arte, New Plym outh, 2004; O.K. work is discussed in LOOP B a rcelo n a , 2005; America! Apex Art, New Hans-Michael Herzog, Oscar Munoz: York, 2004; Retratos: 200 ed.. Cantos Cuentos disolvencias y years of Latin American Colombianos: fantasmagorias, M useo portraiture, Museo del Contemporary Municipal de Guayaquil, Barrio, New York, San Colombian Art, D aros- 2006; a n d Oscar Munoz, D iego M useum of Art, Latin am erica, 2004. Aliento (Breath) (detail) 1996-2002 grease photoserigraph on steel disks co u rte sy of th e artist an d Daros-Latinamerica Collection, Zurich photo: the artist and Fernell Franco, Cali LU az _l3 ----—)> LU< I Q_ M The new paintings do not repress his allusions to 1. John Pule, in con­ shocks gained via broadcast news but expand into versation with the CM author, November fundamental issues of moral and social dysfunction; 2006. CD i s cruel actions seen here mirror real events responding 2. 'Another Green World" is a homage to Brian directly to American soldiers' abuse of Iraqi prisoners Eno's ambient musical — i z at Abu Ghraib. The meanings of a 'war on terror' are work of the same title. echoed everywhere and are projected as having 3. Red 'clouds' first appeared in Pule's spread throughout the world's entire geography. w ork in 2002, in the Opposites are regularly opposed; love and war exhibition I had a mind as invisible as THE NATION OF NIUE IS IN NEW ZEALAND' co-exist in the one image. light, Gow Langsford John Pule's recent paintings scan a diverse and Gallery, Auckland. discordant humanity and reveal that they are A decade ago, Pule's paintings addressed the 4. The Niuean language has an astounding inhabitants of an incoherent global reality. He emotional amplitude within diasporic experience. He directness and is filled invokes a newborn character for Earth, which mined the Niuean language for its inspirations and with poetic allusions has evolved into another entity, simply known as brilliantly focused mix of naming objects, relation­ to botany, zoology and cosmology. Another Green World.2 In a series of works created in ships and human actions.4 Memories transformed 5. Ian Were in 2006, green liana wildly tumble out of vegetal ethers themselves by converging actions of love, loss and conversation with John Pule, "Life is containing seething apparitions that are more death. In Pule's words; worthless if we disconcerting than any of the volcanic vapours in forget", The majority of my earlier works were an enquiry Artlines: Art his earlier series I h ad a mind a s invisible as light, and People 1-2006,14. into the stability of memories. Remembering is 6. Jo h n P ule to the 2001.3 These amaranthine paintings from 2001 to 2004 what makes life independent from forgetting. author, November looked at a writhing world detonated by the 2006. More and more I retied on the past. Nowadays pleasures and dangers of a fresh millennium. The with the threat of global wars, extinction of futurist world of Pule's paintings has now ripened animals and insects, over-fishing and the and is loaded with a fecund verdure of virescent slaughter of ocean animals, memory may or green. Pollution is both celestial and terrestrial may not create a dazzling future. Life would and has somehow become wholesome. be worthless if we forget.5

The cultural ferment now occurring throughout His new paintings are no longer maps directing us Timor, the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Tonga has to visual stories inspired by Niuean hiapo, legend or become a forceful currency in Pule's latest images. ethnology. They reach far beyond the limits of Niue and encompass the world's conflicted predicament. The paintings communicate clamorous stories, both Kehe Tau Hauga Foou real and imagined, while mixing up location and Friends, lovers, enemies; all now share a cerulean (To All New Arrivals) (de ta il) 2007 enamel, oil, pencil, pastel. period. Oppression and the dark pains of human locale resonating in a world poisoned with conflict. oil stick and ink on canvas courtesy of the artist and affairs migrate across these works. The paintings In Pule's words "the green describes the world".6 Gow Langsford Gallery. Auckland have become visions of opposing weights in order to RON BROWNSON/SENIOR CURATOR/NEW ZEALAND AND PACIFIC ART/ tackle the scales of human injustice. Morality is shown AUCKLAND ART GALLERY as being as much about passionate relationships as it is about malevolent action. Pule further reveals how frequently lovemaking is often spiritually and physi­ Born in Liku, Niue in 1962, York. 2004 and The 5th Cultural Museum, Rarotonga and in 2004 cally adjacent to the sites, and sight, of human torture. John Pule is currently Asia Pacific Triennial, based in Auckland. Pule Queensland Art Gallery, was made an Arts emigrated to New Brisbane, 2006. Other Laureate by the Arts Z e a la n d in 1964. Recent recent group exhibitions Foundation of New solo exhibitions include include the 9th Festival Zealand. Pule held the Niniko Lalolagi - of Pacific Arts, Belau, Romerapotheke Art Resi­ Dazzling Worlds, Gow 2004; Future Tense: dency, Basel in 2005. His Langsford Gallery, Security and Human work is discussed by A u ckla n d , 2004; John Rights, Griffith University, Nicholas Thomas in John Pule, Galerie Romera- Queensland College of Puhiatau Pule: Another potheke, Zurich, 2005 Art, Brisban e. 2005; Te Green World, 2006. Pule and Another Green Moananui a Kiwa, is also highly regarded World, Gow Langsford Auckland Art Gallery, as a poet and novelist, Gallery, Auckland, 2006. 2005; and Tribute, his collection of poetry, Pule's work has featured Auckland Art Gallery, Restless People = Tagata in Paradise Now?, A sia 2006. In 2003, Pule w as Kapakiloi, was published Society Museum, New artist in residence at the in 2004. S l i i i

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'A.rJ ;.vja diaspora from regional Australia to the cities. It is Glossary of Gamilaraay necessary to probe beneath the surface of m aang's terms used in maang: sheer visual beauty and its poetic lyricism to find a maang - message stick buurru - initiation ground way into the work's deeper themes and concerns, wandabaa - ghost, spirit < t/i particularly regarding the tumultuous impact of yugal - song gari - language colonisation on Indigenous Australians, resulting s s barran - boomerang in contemporary Indigenous diasporic identities bilaarr - spear and extensive land and language loss, m aang's yulay - skin

mapping of country and rea's incorporation of 1. Please note that p5 o words from an endangered Indigenous language - because Indigenous v r from her natal tongue, Gamilaraay - constitute a Australian languages were originally orally c r > significant turning point for this artist. While, for transmitted, and only LU g z r e a, issues of language dispossession, relationship relatively recently written, they have K o o to country, and the Indigenous diasporas resulting been subject to a from processes of colonisation, have been long­ num ber of different standing preoccupations, this is the first time she orthographies. Linguists and has foregrounded these concerns in a creative work. Indigenous people r e a is a new media artist who works in photography, themselves have Importantly, m aang is not only about land and contributed various digital media and moving image, as well as exploring different spellings. creative environments through installation. language loss, and the turbulent times that are 'Gamilaraay' (the an inevitable consequence of colonisation, but its current preferred spelling of the people maang, r e a's contribution to the 3rd Auckland beautiful, ostensibly elegiac imagery also conveys themselves) has in the Triennial, extends certain key ideas and visual hope - for the renaissance and revitalisation of past also been people, land, language and culture. As r e a spelled in various themes expressed in an earlier digital work, gins_ texts as Gamilaroi, leap/dubb_speak, 2006, set near C oonabarabran observes: Kamilaroi or Gomilroi. in New South Wales. In the latter work, r e a, who 2. r e a, artist statement. was born into the Gamilaraay nation, focuses on ...I lost access to my mother tongue as a result local oral histories relating to her family's rocky, of colonisation. My great grandparents from undulating, inland home.1 g in s je a p is accom panied both parents' sides spoke their own languages. by an understated, unobtrusive though vitally From my grandparents' generation through to important soundscape. At times, this comprises little my generation we did not learn to speak our more than background murmuring, miscellaneous language fluently... [However] our family and fragments of whispered speech, birdcalls and the the current generation of children have regained swishing sounds of gently lapping water. Like that access to our language now through the local of g in s je a p the captivating soundscape of m aang primary and high schools. Gamilaraay language works synergistically with the work's compelling groups are forming all over our region to create visual elements. opportunities for learning our language. In 2003 the Gamilaraay language dictionary was released In m aang, r e a directs her attention away from and now we also have a website that introduces her 'own' inland home. Instead, the setting is La our language to all.2 Perouse, a coastal site on the southern shores of It is about the possibility of such regeneration Sydney's Botany Bay. Named after the French following the seismic shock of colonisation and navigator who arrived on 26 January 1788, the same its subsequent aftershocks that m aang speaks day that British captain, Arthur Philip, also landed; so eloquently. La Perouse is a place of immense significance for Indigenous Australians. CHRISTINE NICHOLLS/SENIOR LECTURER/AUSTRALIAN STUDIES/ FLINDERS UNIVERSITY/ADELAIDE

Shores are boundaries, in the physical sense, dividing land from sea. But this littoral has an additional metaphorical dimension, marking the dramatic r e a w as born in 1962 Traverse, Lake 2004, and currently holds the Australia Council for rupture between the Indigenous Australian past in Coonabarabran, M acq u a rie City Art Australia, into the Gallery. 2004; Contempo­ the Arts New Media Arts and present. As a result, the Indigenous population Gamilaraay/Wailwan rary Commonwealth, Fellowship. She has also experienced the imposition of the social, cultural and people of New South Australian Centre for the been active as a curator Wales. She currently Moving Image, and lecturer, teaching linguistic practices of the (mostly) English-speaking lives in Sydney. In 2006, Melbourne, 2006; The Australian Indigenous colonisers, and a corresponding widespread loss of her work g in sje a p / Cleveland Street Project, History at the University their unique ways of speaking, seeing and being-in- dubb_speak, w as toured The Performance Space. of New South Wales by dLux media arts to Sydney, 2006; and sin ce 2003. Her work is the-world. New South Wales Nocturne, 24HR ART. discussed further by regional galleries. Darwin, 2006. r e a w as Christian Bumbarra Recent group exhibitions awarded a Fulbright Thompson in the Contem­ In 1855, La Perouse was to become an Aboriginal inclu de Australian Studio, Scholarship for research porary Commonwealth reserve that still today has a sizeable Indigenous P.S.1 C ontem porary Art and development into catalogue. population, many of whom form part of the Indigenous Center, New York, 2003; creative technologies in maang (stills) 2006-7 three-channel DVD installation courtesy of the artist < u 5 o' < LUo ZB

CP. LUa _J t The flames that appear grouped or isolated, vertical < § or horizontal within the frames of Site A, Site C, and CD Site E from the series Postcards, 2006, are extracted CD from images Rovner shot in the oil fields of CP for a film loop entitled Fields of Fire. At a brief nine Z £ and a half minutes, the video, painstakingly edited with the programme aptly called Flame, has the power of making a viewer feel present at both the beginning and the end of the world. What appear to Artist Michal Rovner seeks understanding of the be organic masses that change colours as the video natural world through abstraction. Whether in the proceeds rapidly across a wide screen, are actually form of large, elaborate video installations such flames erupting from the oil rigs. Shaped something as Overhang, 2000, filmed with three cam eras and like a volcano exploding every which way, the mass projected on seventeen windows of a building in seems to bubble up, subside, then explode, then New York City, or in the intimate laptop size works reorganise. Embedded in small LCD screens and exhibited in Fields of Fire, 2006, she employs the placed on shelves, these images become domesti­ power of abstraction to invite her viewers into a cated, in a sense, but no less eerie. Instead of the unique experience of wonder and mystery rare in family portraits we might expect to see in such a the arena of the non-specific image. That her work setting, we are presented with the intense heat is so emotionally engaging is a testament to her of an oily explosion. Of course, these oil fields are wizardry with digital editing and, often, her use the place where so many of the inhabitants of of music. She does not offer viewers some dry, Kazakhstan work and sweat. Thus, these abstractions conceptual thesis. She rather engulfs them in a become portraits in a real way, portraits of labour, self-contained world that, while based on the of lives lived and lost. 'real' or the 'pictorial', is so re-formed by her digital manipulations that her source material becomes Rovner's work echoes earlier experiments in manipu­ unrecognisable. lated moving image by artists such as Stan Brakhage, Ed Emshwiller, Nam June Paik, and Woody and Overhang, for example, is a haunting, abstract work Steina Vasulka. Rovner is unlike any other, however, depicting what look like black-hooded figures making in the intense emotion her works evoke. Even though their way, effortfully. through an unidentifiable we may not be able to immediately discern the space. Above them, other human figures walk, content of her images, we cannot help but be moved slowly, ploddingly, in white silhouette in a straight by them. She rewards our efforts with an intense line across an equally barren landscape. They all connection to a power that we know is much bigger move in painstakingly slow motion across what looks than any one of us. like' a desert or a snowy tundra, ambling endlessly MICHAEL RUSH/DIRECTOR/THE ROSE ART MUSEUM/BRANDEIS towards no visible destination. It is as if these lonely UNIVERSITY/ WALTHAM / MASSACHUSETTS souls were muttering the closing words of Beckett's novel The Unnamable, "You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on." Based on footage filmed in a snowy park, Rovnef's figures represent the eternal migrant Born in Tel Aviv, Israel Other recent solo Artists, Krannert Art exhibitions include Museum, University of wandering the world in search of a place. They are in 1957, M ich a l Rovner In currently lives and works Stone. PaceWildenstein, Illinois. 2004, and touring caught in a timeless struggle for solace. Even in between Israel and New New York, 2004; Fields, nationally; Techniques their oddness, we recognise them. We pity them. York. In 2002, her work Jeu de Paume, Paris. of the Visible: 5th was the subject of a 2005; Fields of Fire, Shanghai Biennale, mid-career retrospec­ PaceW ilden stein , 2006; 2004; Haifa Second tive, Michal Rovner: The and the site-specific International Space Between, W hitney video installation Living Installation, 2004; Museum of American Landscape, . Logical Conclusions: Art, New York, 2002, The Holocaust Martyr's 40 Years of Rule-Based accompanied by a and Heroes' Remem­ Art, PaceWildenstein, major catalogue. Rovner brance Authority, 2005; and A Curator's represented Israel with , 2005. Group Eye, Los Angeles Against Order? Against exhibitions include Museum of County Disorder?, at the 50th Beyond East and West: Art. 2006. Venice Biennale, 2003. Seven Transnational Site A 2006 two metal-framed LCD screens, metal shelf, two computers, and digital video ©Michal Rovner, licensed by VISCOPY, Australia. 2007 courtesy of the artist, P a ce W ild e n ste in , N ew York a n d Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland CL < DC DC < A body double is the person who stands in for the CO LxJ 1—1 3< actor in a film, especially when specialist skills are CD required. These impersonators are like shadows of =J£ the original. In essence, the body double performs < a trick. Julie Rrap's work has been defined by the image of a trickster for over two decades: she has often represented herself as a kind of interloper. The trickster can play hide and seek and can Since her first seminal piece, Disclosures: 4 Photo­ transgress established boundaries through wit graphic Construct, 1982, Julie Rrap has sought to and guile. In an earlier series of photographs on 'disclose' the human body, and unravel the ways watercolour paper entitled Soft Targets, 2005, Rrap it has been represented throughout key phases in featured fragmented images of her own body, and the history of art and perception. For the most part, its shadow, in a choreography of distorted forms. Rrap has used her own body in photographs, videos As in much of her work, she sought to mobilise the and sculptures. This is a performing body - not in position of being the 'other', the shadow, by the sense that the artist documents performances - reversing the relationship between body and rather, it is a body that enacts various postures. shadow. The shadow remained, while the limb had been erased. Rrap's representation of the body is never comfort­ able, for it is a figure that has often been dissected In Body Double, identities are blurred as the projected into parts, distorted, and at times squeezed into the forms seamlessly transform from female to male. stance of the artist's muse. Even when Rrap uses These moving images are engaged in a process the male form, it has been Trapped' [sic], as it were, of perpetual arrival and departure. In one moment around a rock or landscape formation. Rrap's works they seem to be tossed, unwillingly, from side to side. go to the heart of the photographic paradigm - they At others they are in charge of their own destiny. The deliberately occupy an ambivalent zone between viewer's presence triggers their movement across the documentation and invention. The 'performance' expanse of the installation, complicit in their endless is a continual shuttling between the reality of the restlessness. As such, the classic nude sculpture is Body Double (stills) 2007 ru b b er. DVD, sou nd exposed body, and the trickery offered by the made dynamic, transformed into something mutable, courtesy of the artist. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney photographic apparatus and its more recent digital mischievous and ultimately both ephemeral and and Arc One, Melbourne permutations. interdependent.

VICTORIA LYNN The artist has made a new work for the Auckland Triennial, entitled Body Double. In this installation, two silicon rubber life-size casts of the artist's body lie on the floor, their white surfaces literally receiving Born in Lismore, End: Contemporary Art in Gallery, Northbridge, the projection of two rolling figures from above. One A u stra lia in 1950, Julie Australia, seen in Korea W estern Australia, 2005; Rrap currently lives and and Ja p a n , 1996; and a n d Girls, Girls, Girls: rubber sculpture is face-up, the other face-down. works in Sydney. She Fieldwork: Australian Images of Femininity As the projected bodies shift from one body to the has an extensive Art 1968-2002, N ational from the Banyule Art exhibition history dating Gallery of Victoria, Collection, Bendigo Art other, and into the dead weight of their rubber hosts, b a ck to the 1980s. M elbourne, 2002. Other G allery. 2005. In 2001, they literally breathe life into them. In one instance, Recent solo exhibitions recent group exhibitions Rrap won the Hermann's a female body lies face-up on the face-down in clu d e Soft Targets, in clu d e Australian Art Award and was shown at both Roslyn Culture Now, Australian awarded a Fellowship sculpture, so that the bottom is transformed into a Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Centre for the Moving Grant from the Australia pregnant form. In another moment, a male body lies in 2004 and Arc One. Image and the National C o u n cil for the Arts. In within the female form, transforming the union of M elbourne, 2005; and G allery of Victoria, 2004; 2007, Rrap's work w ill be Fall Out, Roslyn Oxley9 Penumbra: Images of shown in a major image and sculpture into a hermaphroditic figure. G allery. 2006. Her work Light and Darkness. retrospective at the has also been in major McClelland Gallery Museum of Contemporary Australian and and Sculpture Park, Art, Sydney. Publications international exhibitions Langwarrin, Victoria, include Victoria Lynn's including: Australian 2004; The Dead Travel forthcoming monograph Perspecta, Sydney, 1983, Slow, Artspace, Sydney, published by Piper Press 1985 and 1987; the 2004; Bones of the Skin: and Julie Rrap, 1998, Biennale of Sydney. 1986, the Denaturalisation of also a Piper Press 1988 and 1992; Systems the Body, Bread box publication.

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Lazaro A. Saavedra Gonzalez turned twenty in because it is the easiest material to find”.1 Saavedra 1. Interview by 1984, and was commencing his art studies at the declares his apology to say more with less as a Aylet Ojeda in www.arteamerica.cu. celebrated Instituto Superior de Artes when the permanent element of his aesthetics. This has 2. Lazaro A. Saavedra 1st Bienal de la Habana took place, with a massive gained criticism from those who he calls lovers Gonzalez, artist's statement in Virginia participation of hundreds of artists from Latin of "visual massage" who accuse him of a lack of Perez-Ratton, ed., America and the Caribbean. This event had a dual craftmanship. "I prefer the art that is shown on the Estrecho Dudoso impact in the following years. His generation marked walls of the human mind”.2 (Doubtful Strait). (San Jose: TEOR/ and was marked by the successive biennales eTica, 2006), 84. celebrated in Havana, and the biennale itself as The work presented in the Auckland Triennal is a 3. Ibid. an institution has marked the development of art result of his interest in mental observation: the eye in Latin America ever since. Unlike many of his for him is a means to attain something beyond limits. contemporaries, Saavedra still lives and works in The video work El Slndrome de la Sospecha (The Cuba, and whilst he has travelled throughout his Syndrome of Suspicion), is the gaze of the fearful, career, his work maintains a strong connection to the observed, the dissident, but also of the observer popular culture, developing particular poetics that himself. This piece is a simple but powerful statement manage to combine conceptual positions with on the confused, turbulent relations and limits humorous reflections on existential issues. between vigilance and self-vigilance, between censorship and self-censorship, between the public The Pure group in which he participated in the 1980s and the private. In his own words, it is about "saying approached, from a collective stance, the symbolism as much as one can, and not being clear at all... and aesthetics of Cuban kitsch in those years. In the end, the syndrome is only a sum of symptoms Saavedra is permanently aware of a context in or phenomena that reveal an unbalance in social which, in spite of the dram atic lacks in every material health, in this case: the illness of suspicion."3 aspect, there is a desire to impress with appearance. VIRGINIA PEREZ-RATTON During that first period, this group engaged in what could be considered performance, but in fact was called "plastic actions”, based on improvisation and on the eventually turbulent relations between art and its audience. Saavedra has continued to experiment with performance in recent years. He has also implemented an educational strategy Lazaro A. Saavedra and El unico anima que Daros-Latinamerica through the Enema collective, an experience which Gonzalez was born in rfe. National Museum of Collection, Morris and H avana, C uba in 1964 Fine Arts, H avana, 2003. Helen Belkin Art Gallery, came about due to the "need to systematise a flux where he continues to Recent group exhibitions Vancouver, 2006; of exercises, and the body was chosen precisely live and work. Recently, in clu d e New Installa­ Pacemaker, Edward Day he held residencies at tions, Artists in G allery. Toronto, 2006; the Mattress Factory, Residency: Cuba, and Estrecho Dudoso Pittsburg, 2004, a n d the M attress Factory, 2004; (Doubtful Strait), M useo Iaab Christoph Merian The Hours: Visual Arts de Arte y Diseno Foun dation, B asel, 2002, of Contemporary Latin Contemporaneo, San which resulted in the America, Irish Museum of Jose, 2006. Saavedra's solo exhibition at Iaab M odern Art, Dublin, 2005; practice is profiled in Ateliers, Todo final es el Museo Tornado, 9th the catalogues that comienzo de algo Bienal de la Habana, a cco m p a n y The Hours desconocido. Other solo 2006; Arte de Cuba, and Estrecho Dudoso. exhibitions include Can't Centro Cultural Banco buy, my love, H a b a n a do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, G allery, H avana, 2003; 2006; Certain Encounters: El Sindrome de la Sospecha (The Syndrome of Suspicion) (stills) 2004 DVD courtesy of the artist o

dwarf dances and the opera singer calls for silence. 1. Bali Hai is a drink that The recent Twin Oak Drive, 2006 plays with its translates as the place of your dreams dialogic invitation, leaving the viewer caught or the p la ce w here oscillating between two screens. This video install­ the sea meets the sky. It is also the title of ation becomes an experience of tension and the theme song from Seven days and who knows where you might end time, and in this w ay it sings. Totems ap p e ar and the film South Pacific. As art w riter Tessa 1. disappear and in the dreamlike state of deciphering, up. Particularly if you're entering the jazz like rift Laird comments "For of Sriwhana Spong's visual musicality. Spong's video it becomes unknown if what is seen has actually Spong, the irony of installations potentialise form by visualising and occurred. 5. These assertions into liminal space - the song is that it the physical river of the public garden in Day Trip, doesn't even refer to navigating the spontaneous, free forming space Bali, and yet she can't from where things are made. 2. She assembles filmic 2006, or the interpretive space of the ubiquitous help thinking of her references and recordings of sculptural utterances symbol of the Peace Mantra, 2006 - embrace a own tenuously Balinese identity aided by the tools of intertextuality. The works act residual seeing both in what is presented and what every time she hears outside the empty embrace of postmodernism's is inferred. And like the implied image, meaning is it." Tessa Laird, multiplicity to create a poetics of difference, not determined, rather the work generously asks "My life as a goddess" Staple, no. 4, layering collected references, methods of making you to assem ble it in time to its rhythm. 7 Days, 2007, (M arch-A pril 2004), 28. and sampled sounds. Whether it be the recorded continues to time-lapse objects of offering. In 2. rm103 is an artist run space in Achilles performance of Spong drinking Bali Hai cocktails in addition, the screen transcends a monolith from House, Custom Street a sp ace suit in Bootleg Bali Hai, 2002, or the Spong's own space odyssey leaving a sculptural East, Auckland. referential sense of anticipation in the horror-film utterance in 'real' space, 'real' time. 6. Through a 3. S p o n g 's la n g u a g e of object making inspired Nightfall, 2005, Spong asserts a Hitchcock distilling of form for generous intention Spong includes totems, possessed magpie picking to intervene in the meditates on the darker subconscious edges where offerings, gifts things come together, where the latency of thought produced by an structures of language and its catch-pool of assemblage of her homogenising experience.’ Back when rm103 was resides, and the imaginary is constantly re-defined. own lexicon of 201, Spong was interested in a more direct encounter 7 D ays is a tribute to creative gesture and to art, its flowers, ribbon, incense, cloth, Coca with translation and its inevitable misunderstandings.2 uncanny otherness and its ability to politicise a Cola cans and fruit. For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, space outside of structure, inside poetic possibility 2002, drew the eye into a hypnotic yet repelling and all that jazz in between. 7. repetition of imagery from two shelved monitors; LAURA PRESTON/CURATORIAL INTERN/ARTSPACE/AUCKLAND Spong attempting to learn a new drumbeat and a series of floating place names that slipped between both the real and the imaginary Casablanca Botswana Bali Hai. 3. Increasingly the tension of Spong's work has been concerned with unfixing narrative through an embrace of material's strange­ Of Balinese and Nightfall. Recent group Projects, City Gallery, European heritage exhibitions include Wellington, 2006; Happy ness. Form has become more abstract and meaning The Sriwhana Spong, was Greenhouse, Frankfurter Believers: Werkleitz locatable in the ritual evidence of the made object.? born in Auckland. New Welle, 2004; ACP Video Biennale, Halle, 2006; 2. This is work that in fetishising its own imagery also Z e a la n d in 1979 w here Show, Scott Donovan A Tale of Two Cities: she continues to live G allery, Sydney, 2004; Busan-Seoul/Seoul- eludes it by carrying an other-worldliness. It is as and work. Solo Break Shift, G ovett- Busan, Busan Biennial, though these works were made from within David exhibitions include C'est Brewster Art Gallery, 2006; and don't Lynch's alternative narrative spaces, where the La Vie ma Cherie, A nn a New Plym outh, 2004; misbehave!: SCAPE 2006 Miles Gallery, Auckland. World Famous in New Biennial of Art in Public 2003; Muttnik, Anna Miles Zealand, C a n b erra Space, Christchurch. G allery. 2005; and Contemporary Art Space, Spong's work is profiled Candlestick Park, A n n a 2005; Cultural Futures, ST by Virginia Were, in Miles Gallery, 2006. PAUL ST. A uckla nd. 2005; "When night falls..." She received the Trust An Unlikely Return to the Art News New Zealand, Waikato National Legend of Origins, Summer 2005 and Laura C ontem porary Art Aw ard. Sparwasser HQ, Berlin, Preston's essay in the Waikato Museum of Art 2006; Local Transit, don't misbehave! and History, Hamilton, ARTSPACE. Auckland, cata lo g u e. 2005, for her vid eo work 2006; 2x2 Contemporary 7 Days (producton still) 2006 photograph courtesy the artist and Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland arms. North Korea was the clear winner, with the 1. Yuk King Tan to the United States following in second place. author, by email. 21 N ovem ber 2006. All of the artist's Boomtown, 2006, presented in Local Transit at Artists statements, unless otherwise indicated, Space, New York, addressed an industry over which derive from this wars are fought. Using firecrackers of several different source. colours Tan recreated Oil City in the South, a Chinese 2. Yuk King Tan, artist statement, propaganda painting, in which utopia is presented Hallucinations of the as a prospering city comprised solely of oil tanks and City, Sue Crockford refineries. To twenty-first century eyes, this vision of Gallery, Auckland, 2006. utopia is no Shangri-La, rather given the current 3. Warren Dotz, Jack social, political, environmental and economic climate Mingo and George Moyer, Firecrackers - the image is filled with irony. The fact that some of the The Art & History, structures have been torched seemingly emphasises (Berkeley and the failures and futility of such aspirations for society, Toronto: Ten Speed Press. 2000), 13-4. foreshadowing their inevitable collapse.

BEAUTIFUL SABOTAGE Tan continues to probe this area, seeing in the city Yuk King Tan has been making images from firecrack­ and oil industry microcosms that show "patterns of ers since the early years of her career. Explaining her conflict, social hierarchy, expansionist boom periods attraction to the material, she refers to her fascination and invasion or exodus".2 Elaborating further, "As I with stretching the limits of art processes. Quoting make the works I think about diverse ideas about Paul Klee's idea of "taking a line for a walk". Tan society and social order, cities and the needs of articulates that the firecracker drawings extend this civilisation.... Like the dramas of a master city builder concept, by "losing control of the line".1 who by day plans the future of a city and by night has hallucinations about its past and present." Essentially wall-based line drawings, forms are out­ lined and modelled through the deft use of hundreds Within the history of firecrackers, one finds an of small Tom Thumb crackers, while the white wall is intriguing parallel to these interests. Strings of exploited as negative space. Performance is also firecrackers of the sort used by Tan were sold in the an integral aspect of these works. In an act of nineteenth century to the domestic Chinese market as "beautiful sabotage" some of the crackers are lit, a 'Emperor packs'. Consisting largely of common red task Tan entrusts to certain members of the audience, firecrackers, a colour associated in China with luck, so that viewers in effect become collaborators with one or two green and yellow crackers were also the decision of how much of the work to ignite. The included. Intended to represent society, the red stood smoky residue that results leaves a spectre of the for the masses, the green for government and yellow drawing on the wall and sculptural debris in the for the emperor.3 Read as a microcosm of society, one space, reminding viewers of the explosive potential cannot help but wonder whether rulers and common­ of those still intact components. By this means, the ers alike saw the subversive implications and revolu­ firecracker drawings assert their presence in the tionary possibilities inherent in this distilled model of gallery, influencing both institutional and audience social order; concepts Tan continues to engage with.

behaviour. The artist is interested in this response, JANE DAVIDSON/ASSISTANT CURATOR/AUCKLAND ART GALLERY reflecting, "In a room full of a potentially dangerous substance we tread differently, our body operates in another way." Of Chinese heritage, Yuk Crockford Gallery, Biennial, Christchurch, King Tan was born in A uckla nd, 2004; Flowers 2004; 26th Bienal de Sao Townsville, Australia, in of the Revolution, Paulo, 2004; Hong Kong As this statement highlights. Tan is well aware of the 1971 a n d raised in Jonathon Smart Gallery, Artspaces selection, real and metaphorical associations of her medium, Auckland, New Zealand. Christchurch, 2004; Guangzhou Triennial, In 2005, she m oved to Overflow, City Gallery, 2005; Local Transit. constantly playing with these references. In recent, Hong Kong where she Wellington, 2005, touring Artists Space, New York, years, this has become particularly marked as her currently lives and to Te Tuhi - the Mark, 2006; Asia Traffic, Hong work has taken on specifically political subject works. She has held Auckland, 2006; Yuk King Kong Visual Arts Centre, residencies with Tan, Sue Crockford 2006 and Pearl River matter. The Beautiful Came, 2004, presented spheres associated exhibitions, G allery, A uckla nd, 2006; Delta, Kunstverein of firecrackers on the gallery floor, as if abandoned at the Camden Arts and Shelter, G allery W iesbaden, 2006. Projects for 2007 in clu d e soccer balls. Suggesting that a similar sense of Centre, London. 2000; Quyn, Ho Chi Minh, 2006. Kunstlerhaus Schloss Tan's work was part of This Place is my Place - competition and national pride drives the arms race Wiespersdorf, 2001; and the seminal exhibition begehrte Orte, as sports, each ball represented one of the eleven 8th Baltic Triennial, curated by Rene Block Kunstverein in Hamburg. Lithuania, 2002. Toi, Toi, Toi, show n at Major publications countries with the greatest military expenditure Passerby at ARTSPACE, Museum Fridericianum, include the catalogue compared to gross domestic product (GDP). Scaled Auckland in 2000 Kassel and Auckland Art for Overflow, 2005 and according to this percentage, each sphere sported surveyed recent works. Gallery in 1999. Recent Robert Leonard, ed., Yuk Subsequent solo group exhibitions King Tan, 2002. the colours of its country's flag. In this World Cup of exhibitions include in clu d e Scape: Art and Disorderorder, Sue Industry Urban Arts The Beautiful Came (de ta il) 2004 firecrackers courtesy of the artist and Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland Boomtown (detail) 2006 firecrackers installed in Local Transit, Artists Space. New York. 2006 courtesy of the artist and Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland o I— o

Waddington's camera brings us troubling messages from the night; the industrial haze bruising the sky, lights on the horizon where people sit at home watching television, a world away from the men and children moving through the grass like ghosts. The slow exposure gives light time to register as !n 1999, the Red Cross established Sangatte, a a flying blur and our minds quieten before the refugee camp one and a half hour's drive from Paris. hypnotic pulse of the abstract and the abject. It was not a detention centre but provided material Except for the sequence showing police and support to refugees, mostly from Iraq and Afghani­ refugees clashing after the eventual closure of the stan, who were trying to get to England. Many made camp, all natural sound is replaced by a needle-fine the last leg of their journey hidden in trucks organised rain of electronic music, and sparse narration that by smugglers, but for those without money the only evokes rather than describes individuals in the option lay in trying to evade police and jump the fields, "...and there were children, they had no-one trains going through the Channel Tunnel. waiting and no-where to go."

In 2002, Laura W addington spent many nights in the Bordereaus to mind Terrence Malick's The Thin Red fields and roads around Sangatte, walking to the Line, 1998, where extended shots of grass waving trains with the refugees, building friendships and in the battlefield act as a visual narcotic that creates shooting video. Border presents her memories and a space for daydreaming about the soldiers caught observations of that time. Working alone with a small in the violence of war. The sensuality of these video camera and in low light conditions made it im ages imprints the emotions of the film deeply difficult to record pristine images. With the aperture on the memory. wide open, and the shutter set to a slow rate that captures less than the standard flow of 25 frames Waddington does not try to speak on the refugees' per second, the images register at the very edge behalf. She gives her audience space to wonder of the equipment's technical ability to capture them. about the lives these people have lived and what their futures hold. She spends time showing us the Both the situation and the filmmaker's non-intrusive sites of their humiliation, and invites us to contem­ way of working dictated this approach, but the plate why it is that refugees without papers cause power of Border lies in the way it turns the resultant so much disturbance at the border between self 'poor' images into resonant and poetic metaphors and stranger. for the precarious state of the displaced people who FIONA TRIGG/AFFILIATED WITH THE AUSTRALIAN CENTRE FOR THE are at the heart of the film. Just as the cam era MOVING IMAGE / MELBOURNE / AUSTRALIA struggles to find figures in the dark, nations struggle to find words and policies that register the presence, much less recognise the human rights, of refugees Born in London, England Oberhausen Interna­ Montreal. Edinburgh and New York Video Festival. who travel the black market routes shadowing the in 1970, Laura Waddington tional Short Film Festival, lives in Brussels and is 2005; Homage to Laura Her work has also been global trade in goods. currently researching a Waddington, Sp a zio presented at various film in Amman. She has Video, 41st Pesaro museums including in been making short films International Film Cine y Casi Cine, M useo and videos since the Festival, 2005; Tapis, Nacional Centro de early 1990s, the most cousins et video: Laura Reina Sofia, Madrid, recent of which are Waddington, 33rd La 2005; and Women with CARGO, 2001 and Border, Rochelle International Vision, W alker Art Center, 2004, both of which have Film Festival, 2005; and Minneapolis, 2005. garnered awards at their Video et apres: Laura A key text on her work various festivals. In Waddington, Centre is Bouchra Khalli, recent years, her work Pompidou, Paris, 2006. "The Pain of Seeing: has been the subject of Waddington's films have The Videos of Laura a number of retrospective been shown at Waddington", in the screenings including numerous international catalogue for 51st Crossing Frontiers - film festivals including Oberhausen International Laura Waddington, 51st Locarno, Rotterdam, Short Film Festival, 2005.

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Audiences literally feel the presence of the 1. Lynette Wallworth to women. In part this has come from a negotiation the author, by email, 30 N ovem ber 2006. between them and me. I asked them to show them­ 2. Ibid. selves and the work is an experience of a kind of LU revelation and emergence. I thought about the 00 fact that one has to seek permission to photograph or film in many traditional communities. This LU suggested to me that something might be imparted. v — I wondered what might be felt if I sought those > - permissions and if, with consciousness, these were given.1 The sensation of the work is ceremonial even though there is not much to suggest this, but the act of raising a hand in greeting to a stranger is hard­ Lynette Wallworth creates video art works that wired in our synapses. From this emergence comes trigger, reflect upon and release profoundly felt a moment of meeting across space and time. The emotional registers. She first came to prominence artist continues: in Australia with her ground-breaking work, Hold, 2001. Visitors were encouraged to 'hold' a glass Essentially these real women are elevated bowl under the light and 'catch' falling images of through the medium to another more mythic underwater life. Her new work, Evolution of Fear­ environment, one where their stories, though real, lessness, shares with Hold the belief that art can become representative of something greater. We provide a transformative experience. change our stance and pace and, in this trans­ ference, both we and they are in silhouette, as Evolution of Fearlessness is based on the harrowing though at any moment-circumstances may change stories of ten women. Though impossible to summa­ and we may find ourselves in their shoes.2 rise here, they feature Eva, who was imprisoned in a Russian gulag; Ayen, who was beaten to near­ The artist draws on the strength of attitude among death by soldiers in the Sudan; Fatima, who lost her 'cast' as much as she does on the circumstances her brother in Iraq; Ihsan, whose Eritrean family is of their lives. Their facial expressions and the way dispersed throughout the world; Jenny, who they hold and inhabit their bodies communicate suffered abduction and rape; Kaliope, who lost her life's experiences. This is a mutual and collaborative father in Greece's Civil War, trained to be a guerrilla gesture between the artist and the women, and fighter and was eventually deported to Romania; then between the visitor and the women. Through Rita, who is one of Australia's 'stolen generaton'; this sense of touch. Evolution of Fearlessness Tomasa, who escaped massacre in El Salvador; literally holds us with its magical ability to convey Evolution of Fearlessness (still) 2006 Violetta, who railed against and then escaped Chile; simple and yet profound revelations about human single-channel interactive video installation and Edith, who suffered awful events in Nazi Germany. nature. The work reminds us how temporary produced by Forma, com­ missioned by New Crowned Two of the women were born in Australia, all of the peaceful existence can be and how quickly our Hope Festival, V ien n a courtesy of the artist and Forma others immigrated following the circumstances that lives might change. It reminds us of the essence photo: Rocco Fasano drove them to a new home. of compassion.

VICTORIA LYNN Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to read the stories in full and many will be aghast at the torment that the women have endured. However, it is not suffering that is the focus of Born in Sydney, Australia Bristol, 2006; and New inaugural International Artists Fellowship from Wallworth’s camera, it is survival and, more specifi­ in 1961, Lynette Wallworth Crowned Hope Festival, has recently returned Kunstlerhaus Vienna, the Arts Council England cally, fearlessness. The video is not a translation of there to live and work. 2006. W allw orth w as to develop new works these women's lives. They do not speak on screen. Selected recent awarded a New Media at the National Glass exhibitions include Arts Fellowship from the Centre, Sunderland. Nor are they individually identified. The 'fearless Invisible by Night, Australia Council for the Wallworth's work is women' appear slowly through a dark light raising Melbourne International Arts for 2003-4. The discussed by Victoria their hand to meet ours in the gesture that resembles Festival, 2004; Still Fellowship allowed Lynn in, Space Waiting 1, Terra Alterius, Wallworth to research Odysseys: Sensation the Buddhist mudra of abhaya, which in Sanskrit Ivan Dougherty Gallery, and develop a new and Immersion, Art means 'fearlessness'. Their palm reveals a symbolic Paddington, Sydney, series of installations Gallery of New South Wales, 2001 and the rendition of their individual journey. As the artist says; 2004, which toured to through residencies in galleries throughout Iran, Massachusetts, catalogue for the New Australia in 2005; Still Lode Star Observatory, Crowned Hope Festival. Waiting 2, InBetween New M exico. In 2006, Time Festival, Arnolfini, she was awarded the

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Another diorama, 0502 He Aha Ahau?, 2005, presents G lossary: fictitious botanical specimens created with precious iwi - tribe mihi - greet/ metals and artificial plants, and inside the folding acknowledgment doors of the cabinet are the jeweller's tools of trade, Ta Moko - tattoo a hammer and cutting saw. The fake plants play­ takapau - floor mat tiki-touring - adventure fully distort history, recalling botanical specimens waka - canoe *1 catalogued as part of the colonial exploration of whakapapa - lineage/ L U < Aotearoa, but they also quote Wilkinson's own g e n e a lo g y CZ'Z history. Her previous project Legere to gather, 2004, 1. The title is a play on featured botanical specimen brooches presented the 1983 P au l Young song lyric, Where Ever pressed between the pages of books. The new, I Lay My Hat (That's fictitious plants in this series signify that the personal My Home). history presented in these dioram as is not strictly by 2. Used in the 1940s as part of education WHEREVER I LAY MY MAT, THAT'S MY HOME’ the book. outreach programmes Like photographic silhouettes or botanical speci­ into schools, the The latest dioram a 0504 Kaika, 2007, com pletes the glass-front museum mens pressed between the pages of a book, Areta cases presented Wilkinson's jewellery is getting flatter and flatter. trilogy. The diorama houses a collaborative video dioramas and semi­ Her paper-thin self-portraits, each with a brooch work that documents the making of Wilkinson's own precious collection items. pin secured on the back, are cut from metal and tattoo by Ta Moko artist Riki Manuel. It also features displayed in antiquarian glass bell jars. Wilkinson carved words from the rich oral history of Wilkinson's borrows outmoded display systems and presents tribe. Both elements are performative, the carved her own work - old and new - to reinvent and words in particular create a dynamic sense of the reinterpret history. Creating three portable display past when recited orally. Using a concept of history cabinets that mihi or introduce her work, Wilkinson quite different from the European model of a chrono­ adopts another antiquarian format to take her logical preserved past, Wilkinson creates and refers studio on the road, 'tiki-touring'.2 Each diorama to a history that is open ended, still current, a history cabinet is accompanied by a bell-jar silhouette that lives on through the present. The oral traditions figure out in front - the welcoming party. Wilkinson of Maori are a key to unlocking this concept of history has become a time traveller. where the boundaries of space and time collapse and events are ordered through whakapapa. The diorama 0503 No Hea Koe?, 2005, shows the artist at work in a tiny replica of her Auckland studio The project is a large-scale self-portrait that has a in a scene constructed from layered photographs. long, ever-present ancestry. It talks to the challenge With her tribe Kai Tahu to anchor her, to travel with of travelling to unfamiliar places, to staking a claim her, and provide a sense of security, Wilkinson in history, and stepping up to bat for your people makes forays into the unknown. Using the metaphor and where you come from. The stories and histories of a chief's mat or takapau, Wilkinson claims a that underpin these works have a way of carving physical but portable space to make and display out a personal and a collective identity and a place her work. Two of the bell-jar silhouettes feature in the world. It acknowledges the past at the same the takapau. Have Takapau Will Travel, 2005, has time that it asks questions of the future. Wilkinson with the mat rolled under one arm and the HANNA SCOTT/CURATOR AND WRITER/AUCKLAND diorama-suitcase in the other. Ki Mua Ki Muri, 2005, has Wilkinson sitting on her flying takapau as if it were a waka, with her jewellery tools in hand. Both Born in Kaitaia, New Auckland Museum. 2005- Belau National Museum, Z e a la n d in 1969. Areta 6 and Wahine Kino, Ann a 2004; Ka Kino To silhouettes are caught in a moment of transition, Wilkinson currently lives Bibby Gallery. Auckland, Pounamu He Pounamu travel, movement. They reveal the way that Wilkinson in Auckland. She has iwi 2006. Significant group Onamata, Auckland Art interprets the takapau concept, that when going affiliations to Kai Tahu. exhibitions include Gallery, 2004; and Atea, Solo exhibitions include Purangiaho: Seeing Christchurch Arts into uncertain territory, unravelling the mat creates The Herbal Mixture, The Clearly, Auckland Art Festival, Centre of a safe place to stand, a reference point of stasis Physics Room, G allery, 2001; Taiawhio: Contemporary Art, 2005. Christchurch, 2001; Continuity and Change, In 2003 she held a and calm in a moving and changing world. Legere to gather, Ann a Museum of New Zealand residency at the Banff Bibby Gallery, Auckland Te P a p a Tongarew a, Centre, Canada. For and Avid Gallery, W ellington, 2002; Te further reading on Wellington, 2004, and Puawai o Ngai Tahu: 12 Wilkinson's work see the Waikato Museum of Art Contemporary Ngai Tahu exhibition catalogue and History, Hamilton, Artists. Christchurch Art that accompanied Te 2005; Nga Kanohi o te G allery, 2003; Close to Puawai o Ngai Tahu and Rangi, Lopdell House Home, Craft Victoria, Virginia Were, "Flying Gallery. A uckla nd. 2005; M elbourne, 2004; 9th Carpet", Art News New Takapau Will Travel, Festival of Pacific Arts, Zealand, W inter 2006. 0503 NoHeaKoe? 2005 mixed media courtesy of the artist and Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland photo: Studio La Gonda o UJ o CL CL I— (/) I— CL < CVI

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Conceived in 1999, carried out in 2002, and continuing (but not precisely) the route of the historic Red today, the Long March Project is a complex and Army trek (1934-36), covering 25,000 li (6,000 miles), multifaceted art and social project that uses visual bringing the concept of contemporary art practice display to reconstitute and revisit different contexts, to the people and simultaneously realising contem­ geographies, histories, and cultures across borders porary art projects in their midst. and limits. The Project, like the journey itself, is continually developing, marching through local and The second major goal of the Long March Project is international spaces and acting as a platform for a re-examination of the experiences of a hundred mediation, communication, discourse, and debate. years of revolutionary struggle and the lived In collaboration with artists, curators, scholars, experience of socialism, which has not only influ­ and the general public, the Long March engages enced every facet of contemporary society in China with local contexts, exploring and imagining new but has also left a deep residue in the memory of possibilities and experiences for the understanding the people. This permeates every corner of Chinese of the relationship between art and society. contemporary visual culture, becoming a resource - sometimes apparent, sometimes not - for Chinese At the core of the series of different Long March contemporary art. Revisiting revolutionary memory Projects are two major goals. The first addresses in this way, it is not our intention to parody or subvert the increasing elitism of contemporary art and its the conservative or authoritative elements of rupture from the masses by providing a dynamic socialist life. Nor do we seek to turn history into exhibition platform for artistic creation that is based mythology by simplifying the past or maintaining within local and folk culture and that transmediates the integrity of the grand narrative via creative between art history and theory as an alternative to nostalgia. Our working method is to subtly explore the exhibition system of museums and art galleries. this historical period's traces in contemporary visual Today, contemporary Chinese art is in the early culture, re-organising the chaos and rescuing it stages of constructing a formal art system, but it from overused, canonised discourse. Our new Long has begun the game of comparison and competition March looks for a new approach to contemporary with the West, buying wholeheartedly into the system of museums and galleries. In its current state, the Long March is a travelling visual display moving through different spaces and topics. It follows 114—

Long March Space in the new Beijing art district of Factory 798. The Space's programming includes solo and group exhibitions, independent projects, and an international artist residency programme, as well as publishing, symposia, and Long March education. art, using China as a platform. The first segment It is the leading independent art organisation in The Long March - A Walking Visual Display, 2002, China, combining a new understanding and method­ involved over 250 international and local artists. ology of collectivism to become a focal point of Participants worked together to realise projects contemporary art both locally and internationally. and display works along the historical 1934-36 route, The third strand is international. Since being exhibiting paintings, sculpture, performance, video, initiated, the Long March Project has continually sound, and site-specific installations, as well as invited international artists and scholars to join it investigating folk art and holding film screenings. and has taken part in several biennale, triennale, Many of the projects created on-site during the and international museum exhibitions since 2002, journey also included workshops and symposia. In while at the same time persisting with the Long addition to Chinese and international artists and March mission of expanding exhibition space by scholars along the route were local contemporary carrying out activities outside the confines of artists and folk artists. museum space. The Long March's international projects are not an arrival into international space. Since 2002, the Long March Project has been Rather, they are a new departure point, taking the simultaneously marching along three parallel form of discussions, artworks, exhibitions, and strands. First, it has continually returned to the Long investigations into bodily experience and collective March route. In this it is no longer confined only to memory, migration, the urban, and rural construction, the historical route but has entered into a broader and the connection between history and the present.

'Long March Space'. This includes living and working LU JIE/CH1EF CURATOR/THE LONG MARCH PROJECT in coal mines and villages collecting materials, and engaging in documentation and discussion, all of which form a major basis of the art projects. Projects that the Long March has realised include The Great Survey of Papercuttings in Yanchuan County, 2004, the revisiting of the Long March route through the tattooing of the body in the Miniature Long March by artist Qin Ga, 2005, and the project 800 M eters Under Initiated in 1999 by artist, in north-western China Taipei Biennale. Taipei Fine Art Museum , 2004; with Yang Shaobin, which has been carried out Lu Jie, and realised in to determine the current 2002 with co-curator Qiu state of papercuttings in Art Circus: Jumping from continuously at the Kailuan coalm ine since 2005. Zhijie, the Long March one Chinese county. the Ordinary, 2nd A second strand of the Long March Project is the involves the collabora­ Additionally, the project Yokohama Triennale, tion of over 250 Chinese has moved into the 2005; Classified and international artists international sphere, Materials: Accumula­ from Sites 1-12 (3000 conducting exhibitions tions, Archives, Artists, miles) along the and museum shows, as Vancouver Art Gallery, historical Long March well as selected Long 2005; How to Live route. Taking the Long March projects. Recent Together: 27th Sao Paulo March Space in Beijing exhibitions include Bienal, 2006 a n d 5th a s site 13, Lu Jie Le moine et le demon - Asia-Pacific Triennial continues to organise An Exhibition of of Contemporary Art, projects at various sites Contemporary Chinese Queensland Art Gallery, along the Long March Art, Museum of Brisbane, Australia, route and throughout Contemporary Art, Lyon, 2006. For further reading China, for example, The 2004; Techniques of the see Lu Jie and Qiu Zhijie, Great Survey of Visible: 5th Shanghai Long March - A Walking Papercuttings in Biennale, Shanghai Art Visual Display (New York: Yanchuan County, a Museum . 2004; Do You Long March Foundation, massive survey project Believe in Reality?: 2004 2003). —115

LONG MARCH PROJECT Le moine et le demon. M useum Map plotting the route and sites of Contemporary Art, Lyon, 2004, of Long March - A Walking Visual exhibited the work of the Long Display 2002. March Project from the previous two years. Pictured in foreground Artist Qin Ga remotely followed Wang Wenhai's the Long March's movements in Mao Zedong and 2003. 2002 from Beijing by permanently Mao Zedong tattooing their progress onto his Photographs recording The back resulting in The Miniature Great Survey of Papecuttings in Long March 2002. Yanchuan County, 2004. Portraits of the survey participants were Site 8 on the - Zun yi, Long March taken; and individual survey Guizhou Province. The Long forms filled in, with examples of March curatorial team organised the papercuttings attached. The the collective painting of a survey was conducted over half portrait of Chinese movie star a y e a r b y a team o f 100 Zhao Wei. examining the Cultural volunteers. Revolution tradition of collective paintings of Mao. Images courtesy of Long March Project. Site 3 on th e Long March - on the road in Guangxi. The Long March set up an 'art stall' in a local market, distributing their propaganda and materials on contemporary art. Chief curator Lu Jie is shown handing out p o stca rd s. o < x < bottles as in Island, 2005; in the act of rolling back 1. Kah Bee Chow, L J M the Tsunami, thus momentarily saving her hometown Terrarium, ongo ing. Artist's notes. L U g Penang from devastation to a swooning, applauding 2. Kah Bee Chow and soundtrack seen in Toll of the Sea, 2005; in recon­ Mary Louise Browne, Chow Browne, group structing the eternal shape of absence as she did CO C D < show, Anna Miles in Fallout, 2006; in m apping the city's perishable Gallery, Auckland, 2005. X- 4 >■ < sparks of connection by roaming its streets in < < disguise. And in another disguise. And in another disguise. Do not be fooled by the playful forms - whimsy and utter infatuation are only for the brave. Shadowing her work is the fearlessness that goes with lost causes. I AM NOT A REALITY SHOW: FANTASY ISLAND. SURVIVOR ISLAND. EXILE ISLAND AND THE ART Chow's temporary installations, scrapbooks, and OF KAH BEE CHOW cheap, instant or edible objects cannot be mistaken You know the story. A kid fills her suitcase with for flimsiness - they become paradoxically weighty Indomie instant noodles and leaves her sleepy monuments to the momentary, to the eternally hometown for the bright lights of the big city. She's destroyable. Threads of disaster, erasure and escaping on her own, to follow her dreams. But to physical destruction run throughout her paeans to truly inhabit the escapist imaginary is to incarnate grand romantic turbulence (in her most ambitious as one's own fragile tissue of fantasy; to exist as show of 2005): abraded and abrading book covers fantasy is to become fragile; to become fragile is and a message-in-a-bottle bomb held together with dangerous; when in danger one’s thoughts turn to blinking lights, unnervingly mimicking debris left by survival; to survive we must escape. the Boxing Day Tsunami....2 Those works lack the overt, explosive fatalism of a Pierrot le Fou or If this is a doomed cycle, Kah Bee Chow is pedalling Bonnie and Clyde ending, staying contained, as hard as she can. strained, but primed to red-alert. Nowhere is this attention to lightness, weight and tension more clear Escapism is serious business. There is an intense than in 2006's video work Afterlife, in which Chow pathos to Chow's airy, romantic gestures when floats thin fluttery miniature parachutes from posed within the concrete environment. Let us take infamous Christchurch suicide spots, charting their the liberty of switching Chow with the trees she slow drift down into the sidewalks, public squares, herself describes planted optimistically in a corporate or out to sea. foyer or inside Kuala Lumpur International Airport. "There is often a sense of the apologetic and absurd Chow's works, like moths, like her own rustling in displaced [Chow], in the high-m aintenance parachutes, have kooky rhythms and kamikaze Goodbye Economical Snack Bar (stills) 2006 intent. They have the tense, lonely and impossible DVD aestheticised 'natural'... [I] seem to speak of a courtesy of the artist and desire for relief, for escape and yet, [I] will not radiance of fairylights in a blackout. They are Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland be afforded any of these luxuries [I] exist only meditations in an emergency. to represent."1 TZE MING MOK/W RITER AND OCCASIONAL CIVIL SERVANT/AUCKLAND

Her art's romantic propositions resonate in a tension with their requirements for survival. How will these gestures be kept alive? In a overambitiously self- Born in Penang, Project, Ramp Gallery, Arts, 2006; Mostly M a la y sia in 1980, Kah Ham ilton. 2004; Break Harmless, G ovett- sufficient terrarium environment such as Flight, 2003; Bee Chow lives and Shift, Govett-Brewster Brewster Art Gallery, in a fantasy art school lagoon like Ship Arriving Too works in Auckland. Key Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2006; SATELLITE project: Late To Save A Drowning Witch, 2004; in a small exhibitions include 2004-5; Summer Fling, Shanghai Biennale, Chow-Browne, Anna Artstation, Auckland. 2006; don't misbehave!: glass enclosure generating messages to send in Miles Gallery, Auckland, 2005; Duets II: The SCAPE 2006 Biennial of 2005 a n d Fallout. S p e c ia l Abandoned Sculpture Art in Public Space, Gallery, Auckland. 2005. Project, rm103, Auckland, Christchurch Art Gallery; Recent group exhibitions 2005; The New a n d Recovered Memory, include New New Situationists, SQUARE2, 4th Goodman-Suter Zealand Art. MOP Projects City Gallery, Wellington Contemporary Art Project, G allery, Sydney, 2004; and Canary Gallery, Suter Art Gallery, Nelson, The Bed You Lie In. Auckland, 2006; Hetero 2006. For further reading ARTSPACE, Auckland, Utopia: Mapping the see Laura Preston's 2004; Duets: The Urban Terrain, Bandung essay in the don't Abandoned Sculpture Centre for New Media misbehave! ca ta lo g u e .

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and World Bank Group. Malone also noted that art 1. According to 2005-6 was not the only thing the Government was recruiting rankings published in a World Bank-IFC to offer these guests a good impression. Also legible report, evaluated on in Malone's title was the official campaign urging ten key parameters, including the ease of 0 0 Singaporeans to smile for the benefit of the interna­ starting a business, tional visitors, "Four Million Smiles". getting licences, sourcing staff, as well as enforcing In the run up to Singapore 2006, the Government was contracts. reprimanded by World Bank president Paul Wotfowitz 2. www.mica.gov.sg/ for barring 27 activists, representing civil society mica_business/b_ creative.html organisations accredited by the World Bank and the Singapore Govern­ IMF, from entering the republic. Wolfowitz declared ment, Ministry of Information, "WORLD OF OPPORTUNITIES" this an embarrassment to Singapore, the World Bank Communications and Aotearoa New Zealand has been recently pipped and the IMF, and so the Government relented and the Arts. by Singapore for pole position as the most 'business- allowed 22 out of 27 activists entry. Squarely 3. See, for example. Franco Bianchini and friendly' economy in the world.1 Like New Zealand, addressing the Biennale's theme of belief against Charles Landry, The Singapore has developed policy initiatives that this backdrop, Malone's piece staged an act of Creative City, faith. In a state notorious for its authoritarian (London: Demos, respond to the findings of the United Kingdom's 1995). Creative Industries Taskforce, and so their "transit controls on freedom of speech and public assembly, 4. Malone's recent major into an innovation-fuelled economy" is officially he enacted a public gathering in homage to projects also include the 2004 Biennale of seen as something that will be driven by the Hoffman's, recognised as a forerunner of symbolic Sydney, Local Transit creative industries, including, of course, art.2 protest now common in the anti-globalisation at Artists Space, New Worldwide, 'creative city' thinking, linking art and movement. York, and an exhibition at Galena related activities to economic prosperity, has seen Metropolitana for the proliferation of headline art exhibitions in civic At no other time in his career has Malone been South Project, Santiago, Chile. galleries.3 Five years after the 1st Auckland Triennial, moving around the world so much.4 By coincidence, 5. www.southproject.org. Singapore mounted its first visual arts biennale in 2006. at the time of writing, Malone's contact with his collaborators for the 3rd Auckland Triennial, the Daniel Malone's performance for the inaugural Long March Project, amounts to having seen the Singapore Biennale w as Steal This Smile!:). To work they presented at the 2006 B ienal de Sao understand Malone's art, diverse in its media and Paulo, Como viver junto/How to live together. approaches, it is helpful to consider how, in a work (Ironically, perhaps, his trip to Brazil cam e off the like this, the political, economic and institutional back of a South Project meeting in Chile, where contexts of the opportunity to exhibit are central to one of the ongoing themes is the establishment of its motivation and content. A complex conceptual artistic flows between places in the South that are relationship to context is one of the clearest not mediated by the traditional art centres).5 consistencies in his practice. In this example, the JON BYWATER/TEACHER/ELAM SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS/ artist's title twisted Abbie Hoffman's famous Steal THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND This Book. Malone's piece got volunteers to hold hands, encircle and attempt to levitate Singapore's City .Hall - a play on the North American activist's 1967 Born in Greymouth. New in On Reason and Biennale, 2006; and Z e a la n d in 1970, D aniel TRANS VERSA, The South attempt to levitate the Pentagon in Washington DC. Emotion: Biennale of Malone is currently Sydney, 2004; Telecom Project, Galena based in Auckland. His Prospect 2004, New Metropolitana, Santiago M alone's interest w as in the, (officially som ewhat early work was surveyed Zealand Film Archive, de Chile. 2006. Active in the retrospective Wellington; World also as a performance downplayed) link between the Biennale and malone@artspace, Famous in New Zealand, artist, Malone has "Singapore 2006: Global City, World of Opportunities", ARTSPACE. Auckland. Canberra Contemporary recently presented with which it was timed to coincide. This event 2003. Other solo Art Space. 2005; Local works as part of Mostly exhibitions include Take Transit, Artists Space, Harmless, G ovett- centred on the site of Malone's piece, City Hall, M e To Your Dealer, Sue New York, 2006; High Brewster Art Gallery, which hosted the annual meetings of the Boards of Crockford Gallery, Tide - New Currents in New Plymouth, 2006 and A u ckla n d , 2004; 5 4 3 21: Auckland Artist Governors of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Still Life Contemporary Art from With Still Life, Sue Australia and New Projects, Auckland Art Crockford Gallery, Zealand, Contemporary G allery, 2006. For further A u ckla n d . 2006; and Art Center Vilnius, 2006; reading see Jon Window Shopping in don't misbehave!: SCAPE Byw ater, Da Nile is not a Brick City, WINDOW On 2006 Biennial of Art in river in Africa, 2000 or Site, University of Public Space, Kate Montgommery's A u ckla n d , 2006. Christchurch Art Gallery; essay in the don't Malone's work featured belief: Singapore misbehave! ca ta lo g u e . Steal This Smile!:) (stills) 2006 video documentation of performance, belief: Singapore Biennale. 2006 courtesy of the artist and Sue Crockford Gallery. Auckland X

project wants to address the narrow understanding of cultural characteristics and difference, widening and expanding the methodological understanding of the history and geography of visual culture initiated by the first segment of the Long March One of the consequences of globalisation is the to include specific works within specific contexts. globalisation of migration. Within this context what The narrative set forth by the globalisation of is the meaning of the 'globalisation of Chinatown'? Chinatowns is about the repetition of arrival and There is no way to calculate the size of the Chinese departure, and how each process invariably diaspora, just as there is no way to calculate how is linked and turns into the other. We are always many Chinatowns there are in the world. Indeed, as re-arriving, but in different forms. Long March - a consequence of the internal migration of people Chinatown is not simply a 'thematic' replacement within China with different geographical, language to the Chinese national pavilion filled with contem­ and dialects, cultural, ethical, class, ideological and porary Chinese art, but rather an international political backgrounds, the Chinese themselves are campaign that enters into the different temporal already a hybridity of migrants. The curatorial method and spatial sites of experience/action, as well as of the Long March seeks to uncover the linkages construction and reproduction. between history and the present, and the visual narratives and imaginations of different societies, For the 2007 3rd Auckland Triennial, the Long contexts and texts through the language of art. March - Chinatown will be brought to Auckland in a collaborative project with artists Kah Bee Chow Continuing with the Long March methodology of and Daniel Malone entitled No Chinatown. The movement and journey. Long March - Chinatown will project takes a public minded approach by utilising march for an indeterminate amount of time across public spaces not just as exhibitions sites, but also different geographies and countries, histories and involving the contributions of many other individuals, cultures. Chinatown can take place in the public communities and collectives as a vital part of the spaces of any Chinatown around the world or not work. The metaphor of 'Chinatown' will be used to in Chinatown at alt. It can happen within a museum engage with the Triennial's curatorial theme of or biennale space, it can be an extension of a large turbulence, and the subsequent dynamics of scale international exhibition - extending the immigration, tourism and cultural diaspora raised in traditional art spaces into the lives of the general the process of globalisation. Within this framework public. Chinatown can take place in an artist's studio, or in the private happenings of a notebook. It can be a cooperation between Chinese and international artists, it can be a collective collab­ oration, an individual artist, or an assemblage of individual works. It is noUimited to any topic, medium, or form. Chinatown is a visual space. The Artist Qiu Zhijie, Slowly Approaching 2005, in sta lla tio n and performance. Long March workstation. Survey forms, response boxes and special edition newspapers. Images courtesy of Long March Project. 122—

galleries during the course of the Triennial, most significantly at the Auckland City Council facilitated Lantern Festival in Albert Park in the week prior to the Triennial's opening, and through a number of events directly involving students, such as an Chinatown serves not as an illustration of identity architecture competition and a public survey to be politics or postcolonial discourse, but rather, as a organised through the Long March's involvement metaphorical site to explore general notions of in the Elam School of Fine Arts Residency Project. performed and constructed identity, as well as focusing on the local context of Auckland, a city, Like other Long March Projects, No Chinatown is which has been deemed a 'high-immigration' city. a process, an event, and a performance brought forth from grounded research which examines the No Chinatown will engage with the ambivalent relationship between theory and practice. No social atmosphere, at times ambiguously, at times Chinatown constructs a complicated context, which provocatively, around the relationship between is diverse and organic, and approaches exhibition Auckland and its Chinatown(s). Should Auckland culture not as platform for selecting works to have a Chinatown? Does Auckland in fact already forcefully emphasise a point, but rather, about have Chinatown(s)? What indeed constitutes a understanding the power of visual expression in Chinatown or any (self) determined cultural identifi­ interpreting the relationship between works and cation with place? No Chinatown will raise these their display, history and the present, and the questions and the discursive space for any number individual and collective, as well as how visual of simultaneous answers, sometimes contradictory, display can excite the individual and collective acting as a catalyst to precipitate the emotional expression which is both visible and invisible, state of Auckland; at times lamenting a lack, or psychological and bodily within our contemporary proposing an action, at others giving voice to context. confusion or resisting over-determination. It will LONG MARCH PROJECT WITH KAH BEE CHOW AND DANIEL MALONE engage in the Triennial's broad discourse around multiculturalism, as well as the unique context of Aotearoa New Zealand's bicultural geo-politic and the notion of Maori as Tangata Whenua (people of the land).

Within the Triennial space, No Chinatown will take place in an array of art venues offered by the exhibition, including the The Gus Fisher Gallery, ST PAUL ST and ARTSPACE. The display at each venue is both individual and linked„building momentum and resonance with a larger space of transitory events and activities outside and between the

In a sso cia tio n with the The Residency Project 3rd Auckland Triennial and students will assist the Long March Project in the production of are artists in residence No Chinatown, allow ing at Elam School of Fine students of the National Arts in February and Institute of Creative Arts March 2007. The Elam and Industries an insight Residency Project brings into the practice and remarkable and talented working methods of the artists from all over the Long March Project. world to New Zealand. —123

LONG MARCH PROJECT with KAH BEE CHOW and DANIEL MALONE No Chinatown 2007 No Chinatown lo g o (previous page). The Gus Fisher Gallery, one of the venues of No Chinatown, with radio tower used for radio transmissions. Photographs taken during the Long March Project site visit in December 2006. Project members - Lu Jie and David Tung - met w ith turbulence cu ra to r V icto ria Lynn, artists Kah Bee Chow and Daniel Malone, other artists and thinkers, and toured Auckland's sites. Lantern Festival - one of th e s ite s of No Chinatown. photo: Ben Tankard Artist's impression of proposed work in the window, ST PAUL ST. Images courtesy of Long March Project, Kah Bee Chow and Daniel Malone. CO cm 1 o £ Ll_ C s l O 1— CO □ —125

dimensions are height x THE ATLAS GROUP/WALID RAAD SHANE COTTON width x depth or length M y Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair: A History Takarangi 2006-7 details correct at the time of printing of the Car Bomb in the Lebanese Wars_ acrylic on canvas Volume 1: January 21.1986 2000 x 3000 mm LIDA ABDUL performance courtesy of the artist, War Games (What I Saw) 2006 a project by The Atlas Group in Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland 16mm film transferred to DVD collaboration with Tony Chakar, and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington colour, sound, 5 min Bilal Khbeiz and Walid Raad AUCKLAND ART GALLERY courtesy of the artist and project co-produced by The Atlas Red Shift 2006-7 Giorgio Persano Gallery, Turin Group, Beirut and New York; Ashkal acrylic on canvas AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Alwan, Beirut; Kunsten Festival des 2000 x 3000 mm Arts, Brussels; House of World Cultures, courtesy of the artist, CHANTAL AKERMAN Berlin; Spectacles Vivants, Pompidou Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland Centre. Paris De I'autre cote and Hamish McKay Gallery. Wellington 2002 courtesy of The Atlas Group/Walid (From the Other Side) AUCKLAND ART GALLERY docum entary, video and 16mm film Raad. Sfeir-Semler Galerie, Hamburg colour, sound, 99 min and Beirut, and Anthony Reynolds Blue Shift 2006-7 p ro duced by Am ip, Chem ah IS, Arte Gallery. London acrylic on canvas courtesy of the artist and THE UNVERSITY OF AUCKLAND 1800 x 1600 mm Marian Goodman Gallery. New York The Loudest Muttering Is Over: courtesy of the artist, and Paris Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland Documents from The Atlas Group Archive and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington ACADEMY CINEMAS performance AUCKLAND ART GALLERY a project by The Atlas Group in VYACHESLAV AKHUNOV with collaboration with Walid Raad CHRISTINA DIMITRIADIS SERGEY TICHINA courtesy of The Atlas Group/Walid 2004 Corner 2004 Raad, Sfeir-Semler Galerie, Hamburg Spaziergang (Promenade) Lambda print, colour photographs DVD and Beirut, and Anthony Reynolds triptych, e a ch 1000 x 1000 mm colour, sound, 7 min Gallery, London (unfram ed) courtesy of the artists and THE UNVERSITY OF AUCKLAND Kurama Gallery, Kyrgyzstan courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens AUCKLAND ART GALLERY CARLOS CAPELAN AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Ascent 200-4 Always There 2 2007 DVD Indian ink on wall, framed Ubungen Urn Zu Vergessen colour, sound, 12 min drawings, stones and plates (Oblivion's Exercises - Bedded) 2005 courtesy of the artists and dimensions variable Lambda print, colour photograph Kurama Gallery, Kyrgyzstan courtesy of the artist 1200 x 1200 mm (unfram ed) AUCKLAND ART GALLERY AUCKLAND ART GALLERY courtesy of the artist and Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens PHIL COLLINS AUCKLAND ART GALLERY EVE ARMSTRONG they shoot horses 2004 Trading Table synchronised two-channel video WILLIE DOHERTY four trading tables held in downtown projection Closure 2005 A uckla nd on 9 and 30 M arch, 20 April colour, sound, 420 min DVD anql 11 M ay 2007 from 11.30pm to 3pm courtesy of the artist and colour, sound, 11 min 20 sec courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York courtesy of the artist, Michael Lett, Auckland AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Alexander and Bonin, New York DOWNTOWN AUCKLAND and Galena Pepe Cobo, Madrid DONNA CONLON AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Coexistence 2003 DVD colour, sound, 5 min 26 sec courtesy of the artist AUCKLAND ART GALLERY 126—

REGINA JOSE GALINDO MONICA GIRON ISAAC JULIEN El Peso de la Sangre M ED "Miedo Existencial Democratico" True North 2004 (The Weight of Blood) 2004 (Democratic Existential Fear) 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 three-screen projection, DVD and 10 2004 16 mm film, DVD transfer colour, so und, 4 min 25 sec from a series of 10 drawings black and white, colour, courtesy of the artist and pencil and watercolour on paper sound, 14 min, 20 sec Prometeo Gallery, Milan 1230 x 1230 mm each (unframed) courtesy of the artist, AUCKLAND ART GALLERY courtesy of the artist Victoria Miro Gallery, London and AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2006 Limpieza Social (Social Cleansing) ST PAUL ST DVD GEORGE GITTOES colour, sound, 1 min 50 sec 2004 LUCIA MADRIZ courtesy of the artist and Soundtrack to War film 2006 Prometeo Gallery, Milan Alerta Roja (Red Alert) colour, sound. 95 min installation with beans, corn, rice AUCKLAND ART GALLERY courtesy of the artist 4000 mm diameter iQuien Puede Borrar las Huellas? ACADEMY CINEMAS courtesy of the artist (Who Can Erase the Traces?) 2003 AUCKLAND ART GALLERY DVD FIONA HALL 2006 colour, sound, 37 min 40 sec Hispanic When my boat comes in 2002-ongoing DVD courtesy of the artist and gouache on banknotes colour, sound, 45 sec Prometeo Gallery, Milan dimensions variable courtesy of the artist AUCKLAND ART GALLERY courtesy of the artist and AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. Sydney CARLOS GARAICOA AUCKLAND ART GALLERY OSCAR MUNOZ 2006 Postcapital Aliento (Breath) 1996-2002 wood, metal, polychromed MONA HATOUM edition 2 of 3 plaster, PVC, cardboard Undercurrent 2004 grease photoserigraph on steel disks 1500 x 1700 x 3270 mm electrical cable, light bulbs 6 disks, e a ch 202 mm diam eter produced with the assistance of and computerised dimmer unit courtesy of the artist and Institut de Cultura de Barcelona dimensions variable Daros-Latinamerica Collection, Zurich courtesy of the artist, courtesy of the artist and AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Galleria Continua, San Gimignano- Alexander and Bonin, New York Beijing, and Galena Elba Benitez, AUCKLAND ART GALLERY JOHN PULE M adrid AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Kehe Tau Hauga Foou JULIAN HOOPER (To All New Arrivals) 2007 Liliu 2006 enamel, oil, pencil, pastel, ALEXANDROS GEORGIOU various media on paper oil stick and ink on canvas 2006-7 Without my own vehicle - part II dimensions variable 5 panels, e a ch 2700 x 2000 mm various media on paper, found objects courtesy of the artist and courtesy of the artist and dimensions variable Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland courtesy of the artist and THE GUS FISHER GALLERY AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens ARTSPACE ALFREDO JAAR REA Muxima 2005 maang 2006-7 digital film on Mac Mini computer three-channel DVD installation colour, sound, 36 min colour, sound courtesy of the artist and this project has been assisted Galerie Lelong, New York by the Australian Government ACADEMY CINEMAS through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body courtesy of the artist AUCKLAND ART GALLERY —127

MICHAL ROVNER SRIWHANA SPONG Ki Mua Ki Muri 2005 Site A 2006 7 Days 2006-7 Monel 400, 9ct gold, edition 1 of 3 Super 8 transferred to digital video, brass, paint, wood, glass two metal-framed LCD screens, metal bamboo, newspaper, cigarettes, 240 x 250 mm shelf, two computers and digital video marigolds, wood, batik courtesy of the artist and 248 x 787 x 305 mm black and white, colour, sound, Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland courtesy of the artist, 3 min 20 sec, dimensions variable Poi Girl 12006 PaceWildenstein, New York and courtesy of the artist and Monel 400, 9ct gold, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland brass, paint, wood, glass AUCKLAND ART GALLERY ARTSPACE 270 x 200 mm Site C2006 courtesy of the artist and YUK KING TAN edition 1 of 3 Oil City 2007 Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland two metal-framed LCD screens, metal 0502 He Aha Ahau? 2005 shelf, two computers, and digital video firecrackers, lit and unlit 3545 x 10679 mm mixed media 248 x 787 x 305 mm courtesy of the artist and 520 x 600 x 180 mm courtesy of the artist, courtesy of the artist and PaceWildenstein, New York and Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland AUCKLAND ART GALLERY AUCKLAND ART GALLERY 0503 No Hea Koe? 2005 LAURA WADDINGTON mixed media Site E 2006 Border 2004 520 x 600 x 180 mm edition 2 of 3 Digibeta PAL courtesy of the artist and three metal-framed LCD screens, metal colour, stereo, 27 min Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland shelf, three computers, and digital France/United Kingdom 2007 video directed, produced, written, filmed 0504 Kaika DVD, m ixed m edia 279 x 1149 x 305 mm and edited by Laura Waddington colou r courtesy of the artist, co-produced by Love Streams 520 x 600 x 180 mm PaceWildenstein, New York and A g n e s b. Paris produced with the assistance Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland music by Simon Fisher Turner of James Pinker and Riki Manuel AUCKLAND ART GALLERY voice by Laura Waddington courtesy of the artist and courtesy of the artist Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland JULIE RRAP ACADEMY CINEMAS Body Double 2007 MULTI-ARTIST PROJECT rubber, DVD, sound LYNETTE WALLWORTH LONG MARCH PROJECT with KAH BEE dimensions variable 2006 Evolution of Fearlessness CHOW and DANIEL MALONE this project has been assisted by the single-channel interactive video No Chinatown 2007 Australian Government through the installation multi-site events and installations Australia Council, its arts funding and colour, sound courtesy of the Long March Project; advisory body and mrppp, Melbourne produced by Forma, commissioned by Kah Bee Chow and Anna Miles Gallery, courtesy of the artist. V ienna New Crowned Hope Festival, Auckland; and Daniel Malone and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney courtesy of the artist and Forma Sue Crockford Gallery, Auckland and Arc One, Melbourne AUCKLAND ART GALLERY produced with the assistance of Elam ST PAUL ST Residency Project, Elam School of ARETA WILKINSON Fine Arts, The University of Auckland LAZARO A. SAAVEDRA GONZALEZ Takapau Will Travel 2005-7 and Auckland City Council El Sindrome de la Sospecha produced with the assistance of LANTERN FESTIVAL - ALBERT PARK. (The Syndrome of Suspicion) 2004 Te Waka Toi. Creative New Zealand 2-4 MARCH 2007, ARTSPACE. THE GUS DVD THE GUS FISHER GALLERY colour, 2 min 57 sec FISHER GALLERY, ST PAUL ST, RADIO courtesy of the artist including the pieces: TRANSMISSIONS AND ONLINE AUCKLAND ART GALLERY Have Takapu Will Travel 2005 Monet 400, 9ct gold, brass, paint, wood, glass 270 x 200 mm courtesy of the artist and Anna Bibby Gallery, Auckland