The 5th Auckland Triennial

Barrie's academic research and exhibition practice includes okoshi-ezu, an ancient Japanese architectural drawing technique often associated with teahouse design, which takes the form of annotated folding paper models. He has been adapting this method for use in modeling contemporary buildings, and in Model Home 2013 extends it further to create a one-to-one paper model of Atelier Bow-Wow's workers' house.

Allan Sekula (1951–2013) was a photographer, filmmaker and writer engaged with issues of social reality and globalisation. The Forgotten Space, 2010 is a filmic sequel to his book Fish Story, 1995 which explores the historic use and representation of the maritime space and the radical modern-day shifts and transformations. In recent work Sekula explored the uneasy relationship in maritime space between anti-authoritarianism or imaginative freedom and instruments of economic, military and political power. As an intellectual and practitioner, he was mainly engaged with socio-political critique of what he described as ‘the imaginary and material geographies of the advanced capitalist world’.

http://www.theforgottenspace.net/

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.

Angelica Mesiti creates performance-based videos that analyse culture in a state of transformation due to social or economic shifts. Past projects have focused on traditional music, movement languages, and storytelling. At the core of her work is an ongoing interest in the potential of performed cultural practices as expressions of the particularities and history of a given place and community.

http://www.angelicamesiti.com/

Listen to Angelica Mesiti talking at Artspace as part of the 5th Auckland Triennial.

Ou Ning is a graphic designer, editor, curator, filmmaker, writer and lecturer and founder of U-thèque, an independent film and video organisation. He is the founder of the Bishan Commune which brings together artists and intellectuals to get involved in the rural reconstruction movement in China. In 2011 the Commune held its first Harvest Festival in the rural settlement of Bishan. This incorporates music, dance, a small documentary festival and academic panels on rural reconstruction with local and international intellectual speakers.

http://www.alternativearchive.com/ouning/

Cinthia Marcelle’s video and photography deals with interventions in urban spaces or landscapes and frequently incorporates carefully choreographed, repetitive actions and elements of chaos. These works contain a sense of irony, where the absurd is presented with the appearance of certainty. Paradox is one of the concepts most linked to the performance method used by the artist, along with photography and video. 

Marcelle’s videos are often shot from one camera angle and depict actions that appear to be happenstances but which become aesthetic occurrences. Her actions create situations that challenge our notions of conventional behaviour by introducing humorous coincidences and connections.

Collaborating since 1995, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have produced an experimental and interdisciplinary body of work, combining performance, sculpture, video and sound. Their Land Mark, 2001–ongoing, project focuses on what the artists describe as the ‘transitional geography’ of Vieques, an inhabited island municipality of Puerto Rico used by the U.S Navy as a weapons-testing range from 1941 to 2003. 

http://www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/allora-and-calzadilla/

Interested in questions of social justice the artists set into motion a series of structural couples – inscription and erasure, presence and absence, appearance and disappearance – which link processes of mark-making with counter-memorial claims for rights and justice vis-à-vis specific sites.

Luke Willis Thompson’s art deals with sites and objects that embody a sense of historical, political or social trauma. In recent work the artist has used ready-made objects – such as a local funeral home’s art collection and a house in the Auckland suburb of Epsom – to trace the faultlines of race and class in his chosen context. Thompson sets up estranging encounters where the viewer is confronted with an object both ontologically and in the space of narrative and mythology.

Yto Barrada’s art reflects her experiences of living in Tangier, and the realities and struggles of life in a city undergoing rapid development and modernisation. Her photography captures the quiet dramas that play out when the diversity of local people and wildlife give way to the mono-cultural visions of planners and developers. Barrada’s work reveals a ramshackle kind of modernity and the existential issues of a society dominated by a desire to leave.

http://www.ytobarrada.com/

Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro met at the New South Wales College of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Avid travellers, their peripatetic lives inform much of their practice as they explore ideas of home and transience, and engage with issues such as real estate, permutations of space and modes of living. They are best known for transforming everyday objects into large-scale and provocative sculptures and installations. Through the presentation of the deconstructed and the reassembled Healy and Cordeiro literally unpack notions of domicide, and make us question our own materialistic tendencies and the impermanence of occupation.

http://www.claireandsean.com/