The 5th Auckland Triennial

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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/

Maddie Leach’s practice is project-based, conceptually driven and frequently involves research into the specifics of the site in which she is working. With her interest in the development of new thinking in relation to social, place-based and process-driven artwork,Leach’s early work held a central position in New Zealand’s relational aesthetics practice. While no longer overtly participatory, her work continues to explore ideas of spectatorship, expectation and strategies of cooperation in the production of art works. Leach’s recent projects often operate beyond the walls of the gallery and focus on constructing complex arrangements between space, time, place and audience.

Campaign to re-open tunnels under Auckland's Albert Park - 3 News

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/

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.

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’.