The 5th Auckland Triennial

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.

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.

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.

Collaborating since 1995, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have produced an experimental and interdisciplinary body of work, combining performance, sculpture, video and sound. Their Land Mark, 2001–ongoing, project focuses on what the artists describe as the ‘transitional geography’ of Vieques, an inhabited island municipality of Puerto Rico used by the U.S Navy as a weapons-testing range from 1941 to 2003.

http://www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/allora-and-calzadilla/

Interested in questions of social justice the artists set into motion a series of structural couples – inscription and erasure, presence and absence, appearance and disappearance – which link processes of mark-making with counter-memorial claims for rights and justice vis-à-vis specific sites.

mounir fatmi makes art which directly addresses global current events by looking at the origins and symptoms of global issues, as well as speaking to those whose lives are affected by specific events. In his recent work, fatmi has criticised the formation of supranational political and economic structures in the late 1990s and offered an Arab perspective on megalopolises and urban architecture. fatmi defines a megalopolis as architectural development in cities that is carried out at speed and without taking time to consider or reflect upon the wellbeing of the people who live there.

http://www.mounirfatmi.com/

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.

Born 1982, Ngāpuhi, Samoan, Niuean
Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand

Janet Lilo is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the politics of space and the exploration of popular culture within a localised framework. Her work includes appropriated amateur photography and video from online platforms, music videos, vlogs (video logs) and experimental documentary. With a keen eye for online trends Lilo has recorded people’s behaviours and interactions and displayed them on monitors and objects in gallery spaces, the sides of buildings, in museums, the internet, bus stops and billboards. Recently she created internet art projects specifically for YouTube, establishing a bridge between global online communities and the local communities of Auckland.

Listen to Janet Lilo in conversation with Nina Tonga at Artspace as part of the 5th Auckland Triennial.

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.

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/

Peter Robinson’s recent work investigates both the materiality and metaphoric potential of his chosen medium. Whether it is the massive weightless volume of polystyrene forms or the densely contracted materiality of felt, Robinson’s sculptural propositions play out various oppositions such as density and lightness, and dispersion and compression. His felt sticks reference the formalist legacies of minimalist, post-minimalist and conceptual art, conflating these iconic art-historical conventions with both traditional Māori abstraction and taonga (treasure) forms, and genetic or binary codes, to activate a contemporary recoding and recontextualisation.