The 5th Auckland Triennial

Local Time is an Auckland-based collective of artists, writers and teachers who have been working together since 2006. Their practice is varied, creating site-specific projects with an emphasis on local and indigenous knowledge and the investigation of naming and framing across multiple histories. Local Time’s multi-strand projects and events aim to integrate their academic and artistic backgrounds. Their research and interventions have often been staged in remote areas, addressing the complexities of living in a colonial nation.

Abraham Cruzvillegas’ practice is informed by growing up in Ajusco, a district of Mexico City. Cruzvillegas transforms everyday objects including pieces of scrap metal, plastic rubbish, and animal waste into art. Stark and somewhat precarious in construction, these dynamic assemblage sculptures retain a deep mystical quality. His recent work addresses solidarity, collaboration and optimism, and his construction of art using readily available materials operates as a metaphor for the articulation of individual identity and place.

Pakistani-born American artist, Shahzia Sikander is best known for her experimentation with the formal constructs of Indo-Persian miniature painting in a variety of formats and mediums, including video, animation, mural and collaboration with other artists. Over the years, she has pioneered an interpretive and critically charged approach to the genre of miniature painting. Sikander’s interest in paradox, societies in flux, and formal and visual disruption as a means to cultivate new associations also underpins her work.

Rigo 23 is an artist interested in the different forms of community-based practice. In the 1990s he painted a number of large-scale Pop Art-inspired murals which highlight world politics and the plight of political prisoners including the "Black Panther Party" and the "Angola Three". Some of Rigo 23’s most memorable murals appear on the sides of buildings, including the large black and white mural One Tree, 1995. In this mural Rigo 23 painted the words ‘one tree’ in a giant traffic arrow which points to a lone tree in a crowded industrial setting – a reminder to the people who pass it of what is lost in urbanisation.

http://www.artistsrespond.org/artists/rigo23/

Teddy Cruz is best known for his socially responsible and artistically motivated architecture on the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico. As a research-based practice, Estudio Teddy Cruz has amplified urban conflict as a productive zone of controversy, leading to constructive dialogue and new modes of intervention into established politics and economics of development in marginal neighborhoods which become sites of artistic experimentation.

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.

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.

Michael Lin is best known for his large-scale colourful floral paintings which cover the facades of building, interiors, windows and furniture. Using patterns from traditional Taiwanese textiles and decorative arts Lin’s work blurs the lines between art and craft, and raises issues around the continuity of traditional and domestic art forms. These playful insertions question the role of art in public space as Lin transgresses the line between the undervalued domestic realm and the dominant public one. Lin has collaborated with architects and local trades people to create environments and structures which encourage new ways of encountering art.

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.

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/