The 5th Auckland Triennial

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/

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/

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/

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/

Bruno Serralongue’s images show the lesser events on the margins of major events and provide alternatives to the linear narrative of news reports of photo essays. Employing a photojournalistic technique Bruno Serralongue has captured important long-lasting geo-political conflicts in countries including Kosova, Sudan and Tibet as well as concerts, summits, forums, and demonstrations. His recent bodies of work reveal the effects of globalisation on those in developing countries.

http://www.brunoserralongue.com/

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.

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.

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

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.

Auckland-based artist Tahi Moore works across a range of media including video, sculpture, painting and performance. Moore’s installations typically unfold and collapse around a central text offered to the viewer through subtitles in his video works. Moore’s narratives combine elements from a range of curiously linked sources (with myriad references from philosophy, literature, film, and popular culture more generally) in quietly absurd sequences. These stories typically evince the artist's long-standing fascination with narrative structure, in particular stories of failure, fakes, and moments where meaning is misunderstood, misconstrued or mistranslated.

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.