The 5th Auckland Triennial

Bijoy Jain is an architect and founder of Studio Mumbai, a contemporary and award-winning architectural practice drawing on the traditional skills and expertise of India’s craftspeople. Creating a studio where skilled stonemasons, wood workers and other traditional trades do not simply execute his projects but are regarded as advisors and collaborators, Jain has enabled a rediscovery of traditional knowledge and the sustainable use of local resources.

Drawing upon the Indian landscape and regarding it as a resource, Studio Mumbai have created buildings as diverse as private residences, public spaces, research centres and rural retreats formed by local climatic conditions, materials and technologies.

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/

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/

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.

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.

Auckland-based artist Tahi Moore works across a range of media including video, sculpture, painting and performance. Moore’s installations typically unfold and collapse around a central text offered to the viewer through subtitles in his video works. Moore’s narratives combine elements from a range of curiously linked sources (with myriad references from philosophy, literature, film, and popular culture more generally) in quietly absurd sequences. These stories typically evince the artist's long-standing fascination with narrative structure, in particular stories of failure, fakes, and moments where meaning is misunderstood, misconstrued or mistranslated.

Yangjiang Group was founded in 2002 by Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan and Sun Qinglin in Yangjiang, China. The direction of their work is driven by Chinese classical philosophy, the traditions of Chinese calligraphy, and notions of social transformation. In the 2009 Lyon Biennale Yangjiang Group created The Pine Garden – As Fierce As a Tiger, a work which brought art, football and chance together in a traditional Chinese garden setting.

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.

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/