The 5th Auckland Triennial

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.

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.

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a ‘readymade artist’ and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity which seem to define contemporary society today.

http://www.clairefontaine.ws/

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.

Ryoji Ikeda is one of Japan’s leading electronic composers and visual artists who successfully works across both visual and sonic media. His work involves elaborate orchestrations of sound, visuals and mathematical notions which explore the characteristics of sound and result in immersive live performances and installations.

http://www.ryojiikeda.com/

Alongside his musical pieces, Ikeda continues to work on long-term projects including test pattern, 2008–ongoing in which he developed a system that converts any type of data – text, sounds, photographs and movies – into barcode patterns and binary notation consisting of 0s and 1s.

Atelier Bow Wow’s practice is based on a thorough study of existing cultural, economic, and environmental conditions and they are most well known for small-scale and idiosyncratic buildings squeezed into tiny sites around Tokyo. Known as ‘pet architecture’, these charming yet highly functional and considered residences reflect a deep understanding of local needs and cultural practices.

Atelier Bow-Wow has also acquired a following through its Micro Public Space projects and the innovative projects at exhibitions such as the 2011 Venice Biennale (as an official representative of Japan) and at the Hayward Gallery in London.

Do-Ho Suh’s sculptures and installations explore spatial dynamics and issues of cultural difference. His site-specific installations act like microcosms of the postmodern, globalised world, questioning the boundaries of identity in relation to public and private space. Suh’s work, which draws from his Korean background and life in the West, addresses the place of individual and collective identities in a global society. Through the use of architectural elements and references to the body, Suh evokes a trans-cultural life where the dynamics of space, culture and connection create unanticipated form.

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.

Maddie Leach’s practice is project-based, conceptually driven and frequently involves research into the specifics of the site in which she is working. With her interest in the development of new thinking in relation to social, place-based and process-driven artwork,Leach’s early work held a central position in New Zealand’s relational aesthetics practice. While no longer overtly participatory, her work continues to explore ideas of spectatorship, expectation and strategies of cooperation in the production of art works. Leach’s recent projects often operate beyond the walls of the gallery and focus on constructing complex arrangements between space, time, place and audience.

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Keg de Souza is an inter-disciplinary artist who works across mediums including video, artist’s books, printmaking, inflatable architecture, installation and drawing. The investigation of spatial politics is central to de Souza’s work, as she focuses not only on the built environment but also social space. De Souza is involved in collaborative artistic projects and groups, such as the SquatSpace artist collective, the collaborative duo You Are Here, the Network of Un-Collectable Artists and the Rizzeria printmaking collective. Under the name All Thumbs Press she publishes hand-bound books and zines featuring her illustrations and writing.

http://www.allthumbspress.net/