The 5th Auckland Triennial

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/

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.

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.

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

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’.

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.

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/

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.

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/