The 5th Auckland Triennial

Noël Burch has been publishing books since the 1960s and these include Theory of Film Practice (1973) and To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (1979), which remains the seminal history of Japanese cinema. While he is primarily known as a writer, Burch is also a filmmaker and has directed over 20 films, most of which are documentaries. Burch is the co-founder and director of the Institut de Formation Cinèmatographique, an alternative film school connecting theory and practice.

Ho Tzu Nyen is a multidisciplinary artist interested in the construction of history and the relationships between still, moving and painted images. Immersive and dreamlike, his films incorporate elements of painting and performance as he extends the boundaries of traditional filmmaking. Ho’s work is characterised by richly detailed and dramatic scenes in which he draws on cultural references from Eastern and Western historic and contemporary sources.

Ho has stated, ‘I wanted to make a film that’s packed dense with so many references that everyone can draw their own visions and hallucinations out of the same source.’ In the recent works including Earth and The Cloud of Unknowing Ho mixes elements from contemporary life with references from traditional Chinese landscape and classical Western painting.

Working primarily in film and video, Anri Sala creates works that bring together documentary, history, language and cultural memory. Early films referenced his personal experience and reflected on Albania’s social and political changes, while recent works have explored the tension between repetition and improvisation, often involving or offering the possibility of live performance.

http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/anri-sala/

Sala’s films and installations disrupt and reconfigure the viewer’s relationship to the image and the space, echoing his approach to making work, which the artist describes as being ‘shaped, inspired and constrained by rupture, and transitory or intermediate stations’.

Yangjiang Group was founded in 2002 by Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin in Yangjiang, China. The direction of their work is driven by Chinese classical philosophy, the traditions of Chinese calligraphy, and notions of social transformation. In the 2009 Lyon Biennale Yangjiang Group created The Pine Garden – As Fierce As a Tiger, a work which brought art, football and chance together in a traditional Chinese garden setting.

Working across film, photography, sound and video, Amie Siegel’s work uses the cinematic image to investigate social issues. Making use of stylistic devices drawn from film genres such as action, science fiction and the western, Siegel’s installations and single-screen moving image works address critical theory and popular culture.

http://amiesiegel.net/

Interested in the history and act of filmmaking, fakes and the tradition of the remake, much of Siegel’s work is based on critiquing existing films. In Berlin Remake, she re-created shots from East German films to investigate differences and how these fictional films ‘become documents of a city’. In the recent work Black Moon, Siegel reworked a film of the same name by French director Louis Malle, setting it in abandoned suburban homes in areas of the US which have the highest mortgage foreclosure rates.

Born 1982, Ngāpuhi, Samoan, Niuean
Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand

Janet Lilo is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the politics of space and the exploration of popular culture within a localised framework. Her work includes appropriated amateur photography and video from online platforms, music videos, vlogs (video logs) and experimental documentary. With a keen eye for online trends Lilo has recorded people’s behaviours and interactions and displayed them on monitors and objects in gallery spaces, the sides of buildings, in museums, the internet, bus stops and billboards. Recently she created internet art projects specifically for YouTube, establishing a bridge between global online communities and the local communities of Auckland.

Listen to Janet Lilo in conversation with Nina Tonga at Artspace as part of the 5th Auckland Triennial.

Hemi Macgregor, Saffronn Te Ratana and Ngataiharuru Taepa are leading contemporary Māori artists who collaborate to combine their individual practices. Collaboration is an essential element of tikanga Māori (customary values). Drawing from shared indigenous experiences the group created Ka kata te po, 2011 first shown at Te Manawa Art Gallery. This is a large installation that explores the expressions of tribal mana motuhake (authority) and the state’s suppressions of tribal voices. Earlier collaborative projects include Tu te manu ora i te Rangi, 2008 a mixed-media installation which explores the relationship between the atua (deity) Tāne and Rehua, a subject the artists have explored in their own individual practices and collectively.