The 5th Auckland Triennial

Zhou Tao’s work reflects on the activities and elements of everyday life. His subtle and humorous videos record interactions between people, things, and situations – touching on questions about the multiple trajectories of reality. In the performance piece Time, 2010 in New York Zhou attached a ball of string to his body as means of recording his movements throughout the day. For Zhou, the decision to use video was not a deliberate choice of artistic language or medium; instead, the operation of the camera is a way of being that blends itself with everyday life.

http://listart.mit.edu/node/509

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.

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.

Working primarily in film and video, Anri Sala creates works that bring together documentary, history, language and cultural memory. Early films referenced his personal experience and reflected on Albania’s social and political changes, while recent works have explored the tension between repetition and improvisation, often involving or offering the possibility of live performance.

http://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/anri-sala/

Sala’s films and installations disrupt and reconfigure the viewer’s relationship to the image and the space, echoing his approach to making work, which the artist describes as being ‘shaped, inspired and constrained by rupture, and transitory or intermediate stations’.

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.

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.

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.