The 5th Auckland Triennial

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.

Artists and co-directors of Makeshift, Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe collaborate on interdisciplinary projects that encompass live art, sculpture and installation, drawing, printmaking, writing, curating and design. As redirective practitioners, their work imagines or enacts other ways of living that are generative of sustainment, dialogue and new economies. Site-responsive and participatory, these works are shaped by provisional communities and appear as durational interventions. Such projects involve opening up spaces of dialogue or exchange (often facilitated by the presence of food), marking time to slow down and be attentive, and a revaluing of obscured cultural knowledge, stories and practices.

http://www.makeshift.com.au/

http://kaurioke.com/

Abraham Cruzvillegas’ practice is informed by growing up in Ajusco, a district of Mexico City. Cruzvillegas transforms everyday objects including pieces of scrap metal, plastic rubbish, and animal waste into art. Stark and somewhat precarious in construction, these dynamic assemblage sculptures retain a deep mystical quality. His recent work addresses solidarity, collaboration and optimism, and his construction of art using readily available materials operates as a metaphor for the articulation of individual identity and place.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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/

Luke Willis Thompson’s art deals with sites and objects that embody a sense of historical, political or social trauma. In recent work the artist has used ready-made objects – such as a local funeral home’s art collection and a house in the Auckland suburb of Epsom – to trace the faultlines of race and class in his chosen context. Thompson sets up estranging encounters where the viewer is confronted with an object both ontologically and in the space of narrative and mythology.

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