Fiona Amundsen, ‘Handmade Baseball Glove at Cowra Prisoner of War Camp, 7th August 1944’, 2017, HP PVC Free Wallpaper Print, 3600 x 3300mm, in A Body that Lives, ST PAUL St Gallery, AUT, 28 September – 26 October 2018. Photo: Sam Hartnett.
Foliage, soil, silence. It Was a Cave Like This (2017-18) opens to the lens drawing a gentle, verdant line, bringing the viewer into the cool sensations of an undergrowth. A voice; “You helped do this.” “...You helped light this flame.”
Walking the shore is commonplace in this country. But are we looking out, or in? Who are ‘we’ here? What are we walking on, or along? And how far does the shore extend in time, place, and, well, film? - Stephen Turner
Curated by Laura Duffy, worth your while is an installation for public art space Masons Screen. Featuring works by Elisabeth Pointon and Dilohana Lekamge, worth your while examines self care within the day to day environments of work and home.
"... Johns’ is deeply immersed in the symbol not as a western cultural apparatus, a semiotic of contested bio-politics but as a divisible structure, a meditative aid that backs onto a compassionate, beatifically contemplative worldview" - Hamish Win
“What is true to you may not be true to your neighbour.” -Vea Mafile`o
Ahead of the premiere of Truth or Consequences, CIRCUIT’s 2018 programme of Aertist Cinema Commissions, Vea Mafile`o and Jeremy Leatinu’u discuss responding to curator Erika Balsom’s brief which challenged the artists to consider personal and public ‘realities’.
“The terrorist spectacle accommodates a dirtier game underneath” - Johan Grimonprez.
Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez discusses his films Blue Orchids (2017) and dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), showing at City Gallery Wellington as part of the exhibition Iconography Of Revolt.
“There's something inevitably fascistic about a perfect world” - Stella Brennan.
UK academic Sean Cubitt joins Stella Brennan and host Mark Amery to discuss Stella's recent show at Trish Clark gallery Object Permanence, technological utopias and "responding to the ancestors that we’ve locked up."
“If the essay film has become a trope…and these strategies that we’re using have become formulaic, how do we negotiate our way through that?” - Gavin Hipkins.
In the fourth of our conversation series Sonya Lacey and Gavin Hipkins discuss a shared interest in failed utopias, the moving image as a distribution mode of sculpture and working methodologies. Hosted by Mark Amery.
What strategies do contemporary artists employ to test media representation of reality and the means through which we channel and consume it? How do artists expand the documentary form through various material processes and formal strategies? How do artists deconstruct the surfeit of images we already have and the means by which we receive them? Can 'truth' and fiction exist in the same space? What historical artworks could be part of a revised genealogy of current documentary practices in Aotearoa New Zealand? How could an ethic of care, as understood through sustained relationships with Indigenous and diverse communities be played out through documentary practices?
"...it makes sense to read the satellite as an extension of an embedded technology already at work, not just the out-reaches of an exploitative capitalism, but just another iteration of a frontier that’s always been with us." - Hamish Win
