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.

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/

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.

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.

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/

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.

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/

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/

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.