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.

Peter Robinson’s recent work investigates both the materiality and metaphoric potential of his chosen medium. Whether it is the massive weightless volume of polystyrene forms or the densely contracted materiality of felt, Robinson’s sculptural propositions play out various oppositions such as density and lightness, and dispersion and compression. His felt sticks reference the formalist legacies of minimalist, post-minimalist and conceptual art, conflating these iconic art-historical conventions with both traditional Māori abstraction and taonga (treasure) forms, and genetic or binary codes, to activate a contemporary recoding and recontextualisation.

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.

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/

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/

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/

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.

Emory Douglas created the visual identity for the Black Panther Party and his iconic images came to symbolise the struggles of the movement. As Minister of Culture for the "Black Panther Party" from 1967 until the 1980s, Douglas’ work, described as ‘Militant Chic’, featured in most issues of the newspaper The Black Panther. His work is characterised by strong graphic images of young African American men, women and children. He used the newspaper’s popularity to spur people to action, portraying the poor with empathy and as being unapologetic and ready for a fight.

http://www.emorydouglasart.com/

Wayne Youle’s playful and subversive art practice ranges from painting and sculpture to photography, ceramics and bronze casting. Informed by his heritage, Youle makes work which addresses Māori/Pākehā relations and bicultural concepts as well as broader social issues. One of his most recent projects was a large-scale mural painted on a concrete wall in Sydenham, Christchurch. I seem to have temporarily misplaced my sense of humour, 2012 was a giant painting of a shadow board with tools that represented what had gone from people’s everyday lives and all those who lent their equipment and hands to help clean up Christchurch following the earthquake in February 2011.

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/