TALKS
The Free Discussion Club
Orientation event
Tuesday 6 March 2012, 12 noon
Adam Art Gallery
The Free Discussion Club was founded at Victoria University in the Depression years of 1934-37. Artist John Lake will draw on this past forum to discuss the motivating ideas behind the year-long project he undertook at Victoria University over 2011, during another time of economic crisis.

Camera Work talks
Followed by mid-exhibition party
Saturday 17 March 2012, 7pm
Adam Art Gallery
Join artists John Lake and Fiona Amundsen, whose projects feature in the exhibition Camera Work, in a discussion on the documentary form and the act of photography as a process of research. Convened by Adam Art Gallery Curator, Laura Preston.
Followed by drinks. Music by Dugal McKinnon.

FILM SCREENINGS
Documents on Sculpture
A series of documentary film screenings
every Saturday during March at 4.30pm
New Zealand Film Archive
84 Taranaki Street, Wellington
Free entry

3 March: Michael Snow, Wavelength (1966-67), 45 mins.
Michael Snow’s Wavelength is regarded as an avant-garde classic. A watershed in experimental film-making, it utilises the simple, structuralist tactic of slowly tracking the length of a room. As the camera moves forward the passing of several nights and days is given visual form. The film ends on a wall-mounted photograph depicting the surface of the sea.

10 March: Douglas Wright, Gloria (1990), 35 mins.
An inspired dance work, Gloria is set to Vivaldi’s Gloria in ‘D’ and filmed by Alun Bollinger. He shows us intricate details of bodies, faces and limbs forming various shapes in rhythmic movement, to convey the exhilarating and life-affirming form of Wright’s work.

17 March:  Merata Mita, Mana Waka (1990), 80 mins.
Mana Waka is a feature-length, silent documentary produced from footage shot by R G H Manley between 1934 and 1940. Charting the spellbindingly slow process of canoe building, Merata Mita, with editor Annie Collins, pieces together the building of three large, skillfully carved waka commissioned by Princess Te Puea Herangi for the 1940 centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

24 March: Rosalind Nashashibi, Bachelor Machines Part 1 (2007), 30mins.
Chronicling the voyage of a cargo ship as it sails from Italy to Sweden, this film follows the company of men who form a community for the three months of confinement on this isolated shipping vessel. Framing with equal intensity the ocean, the vessel and the on-board activity, up-and-coming British film maker Nashashibi visualises the multiple dimensions of labour, time, and distance.

31 March: Bridget Sutherland, Anish Kapoor  Infinity on Trial (2012), 80mins.
Filmed on Alan Gibbs’ farm at Kaipara Bay, North Auckland, the documentary tracks the realisation of the latest commission—a large outdoor sculpture by British artist Anish Kapoor—for this renowned private park. The film provides unique insights into the processes of decision-making, consultation and construction that usually go unseen, revealing how a sculptural idea can be rendered physically. Music by David Kilgour.

Documents on Sculpture is a collaboration between the Adam Art Gallery, New Zealand Film Archive, and City Gallery Wellington. Films sourced from the New Zealand Film Archive and LUX, London.

14 July: Public/Private
Art writer, critic and collector Sue Gardiner discussed how the public display of private art collections questions our preconceptions of what is private and what can be made public in the production of cultural knowledge. Anthropologist Brigitte Bonisch-Brednich’s research informed the conversation.

8 September: Market Forces
Economic theorist Morris Altman and art auctioneer Ben Plumbly reviewed the factors that have informed the secondary art market recently, debating whether its exponential growth can escape the inevitable boom and bust of the economic cycle.

13 October: Telling Arrangements
Spatial design theorist Margaret Petty and journalist, writer and collector Rosemary McLeod’s conversation considered the politics at play in the presentation of art and other objects at home. Chaired by Roger Blackley, Senior Lecturer in Art History.

Tuesday 13 December: The Production of Identity
Cultural psychologist Ronald Fisher and art dealer Robert Heald teased out the notions of cultural value and social taste that underpin the cultivation of the collector. Chaired by David Maskill, Programme Director, Art History.

DOCUMENTARY FILM SCREENINGS
TUESDAY LUNCHTIMES, 12NOON
Kirk Gallery
12 July: Herb and Dorothy, dir. Megumi Sasaki, 2008. 87 mins.
23 August: Ydessa, Les Ours et etc, dir. Agnes Varda, 2000. 44 mins.
4 October: For Love or Money, dir. Shirley Horrocks, 1996. 46 mins.
15 November: Cinemania, dirs. Stephen Kijak and Angela Christlieb, 2002. 80 mins.

NIGHT TALKS
FRIDAY NIGHTS, 6-7PM
Kirk Gallery
3 June: Artist’s talk
With an investigative eye artist Marcus Moore elucidated on the recent iteration of the Retreat; an installation of art works from the collection of g. bridle.

12 August: Curator’s talk
Curator Laura Preston offered insights into the conceptual framework for the project (A Film Called) Ellipsis, which presented collecting as a process of sorting and assembling in time.

26 August: Critic’s talk
Sharing her knowledge of contemporary art in Moscow, art writer and curator Claudia Arozqueta placed the photographic work of Leonid Tishkov and Boris Bendikov in context by presenting a screening of recent video art from Russia.

7 October: Researcher’s talk
Visiting Scholar at the Stout Research Centre, Sandy Callister gave insight into her research on Victorian women’s creative deployment of the carte-de-visite photographic process.

18 November: Students’ talk
Students in the Art History programme shared their knowledge of the histories that have informed their presentation of the ‘almost exhaustive’ archive of Len Lye’s photograms. The Chartwell Student Art Writing Prize was also announced.

DISCUSSION SERIES
Adam in the City Art Forum Series 2011
A new series of discussions designed to engage key topics that are galvanising thinkers and practitioners.

3. Rehearsal
Wednesday 17 August 2011, 5.30-7.30pm with a drink to follow
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington

Why are so many contemporary artists treating acts of rehearsal as the basis of their practice? Why has there been a re-examination of performance art histories recently? What is the relationship between the repeated act and an ultimate act? Could the interest in rehearsal be a reflection of online modes of communication, where the self is continually performed and identity perpetually edited?

Speakers included: Artist Alex Monteith, theatre theorist David O’Donnell (Victoria University of Wellington), curator Helena Reckitt (Goldsmiths, University of London). Chair artist David Cross (Massey University Wellington).

4. Re-Locate
Tuesday 29 November 2011, 5.30-7.30pm with a drink to follow
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington

As the final forum in the series, this discussion brought the conversation closer to home. Reviewing the fervent interest in community driven endeavours and creative pursuits, this discussion questioned if ‘the local’ did indeed ever leave us. What are current understandings of the local, and how does the re-instatement of this term respond to the politics of globalisation? Is the return to the local an opportunity for post-colonial theories to be re-called? What are the economic drivers and environmental factors that are influencing this ethos?

Speakers included: Law theorist Tai Ahu (Victoria University of Wellington), art historian Peter Brunt (Victoria University of Wellington), artist Fiona Jack and art writer Damian Skinner. Chair curator Robert Leonard.

For further information and readings related to the Art Forum Series 2011 review here

The Art Forum 2011 series is a collaboration between the Adam Art Gallery and the City Gallery Wellington.

SOUNDCHECK

iiii Festival !!!! presents
WELLINGTON INTERNATIONAL MOST FAMOUS ORCHESTRA OF MIRACULOUS DELIGHTS and The NOT QUITE QUIET CHOIRAdam Art Gallery
Tuesday 8 November 2011
7pm

Graphic scores, alternative notation and conductions for large ensembles; this event explored music making through a wide variety of composition and notation methods. The orchestra interpreted found systems of code as scores such as lotto cards, cookbooks, and advertising leaflets to create unheard of music in the acoustically luminous environment of the Adam Art Gallery.

Featured: Amos Mann, Claire O’Neil, Nell Thomas, Chris Prosser, Erika Grant, Bek Coogan, Sascha Perfect, Chris Wratt, Bridget Kelly, Kate Telford, Zazie Rae Taylor, Daniel Beban, Gerard Crewdson, Phill Dryson, John Bell,  Josh Rutter,  Reuben Derrick, Cor Fuhler, Rod Cooper, Richard Nunns, Hermione Johnson, Simon Cummins, Simon O’Rorke, Reece McNaughten, Noel Meek, Alex Bartley Nees, Jeff Henderson and more.

Also featured:
MING
Campbell Kneale and Ellen Rodda play amplified cymbals

Campbell Kneale has operated for the better part of a decade under the moniker Birchville Cat Motel, and under this name has toured throughout Japan, America, Europe and Australia. His music has become synonymous with ear-shattering volume and over the last 15 years he has cultivated an extensive international following for his particular methods of systematically reassembling the hearing range of audiences.
http://www.iiiimusic.blogspot.com/

Jason Wright
JUKEBOX
Adam Art Gallery
Opening Tuesday 15 November, 5-7pm
16 November – 18 December 2011

JUKEBOX draws attention to the loudspeaker as an entity as important to music reception as any other technology that has informed its construction. The music played through the installation will be an assemblage of material collated from participants at the opening night event. The JUKEBOX installation will serve to highlight the loudspeaker as an instrument that plays an integral role in how we perceive sound and music. Presented between the sliding doors of the Adam Art Gallery until the end of the year.

Jason Wright is a sound artist and musician currently undertaking the Masters of Music Arts at the New Zealand School of Music. His current research sees him looking at tactile applications for the loudspeaker and the psychoacoustic effects of the object, using it not only to re-produce, but also to generate new sounds and music.
http://jwcomposer.bandcamp.com/

Jason Post
SIRENS
30 August – 13 November 2011

The primary concern of this sound based work was the space it inhabited. The space between the sliding doors of the Adam Art Gallery usually goes unnoticed. Its qualities as a threshold are masked by its functionality as an entrance way. This work aimed to draw visitors in and to entice them to take notice of their immediate surroundings, however momentary and seemingly incidental. As one walks through the speaker array, human voices replace the soft sine tones, and may follow them as they pass through. The space becomes a siren-like trap as the beauty of the harmony motivates the listener to stay. This may also make for a potentially uncomfortable experience.

Jason Post is a Wellington-based composer and a recent graduate of the sonic arts programme at the New Zealand School of Music. He is currently undertaking an honours degree in this same field. This work is the third in a series of four sound installations he has produced that attempt to engage with space as the primary compositional material.

Altmusic presented a performance by Hildur Guðnadóttir
with Seth Frightening

Saturday 20 August 2011, 8pm
Adam Art Gallery

Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir (b. 1982) is a cellist and composer based in Iceland. Best known for her collaborations with múm and guest appearances with Pan Sonic, she has a rich catalogue of collaborations and varied projects behind her, the most recent being the critically acclaimed album Mount A (Touch 2010).

“Her themes and melodies are simple, rarely more than a few bars, but the way she overlaps and combines them or pits them against long held tones, gives her music a tension between restless activity and quiet stasis, as well as an intuitive, almost improvised feel” – Dusted magazine.

Guðnadóttir explores the nature and movement of sound, and often turns her experiments into sound and visual installations. She recently co-composed a live soundtrack to Derek Jarman’s 1980 film In The Shadow of The Sun with legends, Throbbing Gristle in Austria and London. Guðnadóttir is also a member of Storsveit Nix Noltes (The Nix Noltes Big Band); a rotating cast of Icelanders playing traditional Bulgarian and Greek dance music. The group has toured the United States twice supporting Animal Collective. As a composer she has written music for plays, dance performances and films, pieces for chamber orchestras, various instruments, voices and electronics.

Altmusic is a programme administered by the Audio Foundation.

In 1974 Jim Allen presented the performance Contact at the Auckland City Art Gallery. Famed for its dramatic focus on live action rather than the static object, Contact is acknowledged as a pivotal work in the development of post-object art in New Zealand. The work elaborates a release from social alienation through collective activity whereby performers move within a structured framework, shifting from tentative interaction to cooperation to possible transcendence. Re-performed at ARTSPACE in Auckland as part of the Auckland Festival over three weekends in March 2011, Contact was simultaneously re-presented as a ‘live feed’ in Wellington via the capabilities of the internet.

DISCUSSION
Jim Allen and David Cross
Two Artists: Two Educators
Adam Art Gallery
Thursday 7 April 2011, 5.30-7pm

Artists and educators Jim Allen and David Cross teased out the connections between pedagogical processes and art making, and considered how the educational environment has influenced their artistic practices particularly in light of the networks of influence and ‘points of contact’ it necessitates and enables.

TALK
Paul Elliman
Designer/Typographical Developer
Adam Art Gallery
Tuesday 12 April 2011, 6pm

Paul Elliman is an artist and designer based in London. He is renowned for his typeface Found Font (aka Bits), an ongoing collection of found ‘typography’ drawn from objects and industrial debris in which no letter-form is repeated. More recently he has been combining an interest in typography and the human voice. This body of work instrumentalises the human voice as a form of typography, engaging the voice in its various social and technological guises.
Elliman’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London; New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York; APAP in Anyang, South Korea, and Kunsthalle Basel, Germany. In 2009 he was commissioned for the New York biennial Performa09 to produce Sirens Taken for Wonders, a project which took the form of a radio discussion about the coded language of emergency vehicle sirens through the city. Elliman is a visiting critic at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, and a thesis supervisor at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands. He visited New Zealand through the Artist-in-Residence programme at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. 

SOUND CHECK
In Our Name: The Commons Project
Annea Lockwood (New York)
Peter McLeavey Gallery, 147 Cuba Street
Wednesday 27 April 2011, 11am-5pm

Although Annea Lockwood was born in New Zealand, she is better-known internationally for her performative explorations into the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments. The Adam Art Gallery, in facilitating her return visit to New Zealand,  invited her to present an installation at the Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington. Entitled The Sound Map of the Housatonic River the installation articulates her fascination with the multi-layered complexity of sounds created by fast flowing rivers. Presenting an alternative sonic map this work traces the course of the Housatonic River, from the sources in the Berkshire Mountains to the river’s mouth at Milford, Long Island Sound. The piece follows the river by recording both the surface and underwater sites of the riverbed, in turn alluding to the inevitable changes that are occurring to the natural environment.

Lockwood’s sound installation is part of the In Our Name: The Commons Project, a series of performances which sought to establish an experience of ‘common ground’ within the fabric of Wellington city. Through a belief in art’s potential, particularly the pervasive and popular medium of sound, the project aims to occupy public architectural sites and enable new community formations.

Annea Lockwood was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939 and moved to England in 1961 to study composition at the Royal College of Music, London. She attended summer classes at Darmstadt, The Netherlands and completed her studies in electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig. During the 1960s she collaborated with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and also created a number of works such as the Glass Concerts which initiated her lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources. During the 1970s and 1980s she turned her attention to performance works focused on environmental sounds and narratives, often using low-tech devices. Since the early 1990s, she has written for a number of ensembles and solo performers, often incorporating electronics and visual elements. More recent exhibitions at public galleries, museums and festivals include: Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Sonic Acts XIII, Amsterdam; Other Minds Festival, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Los Angeles; Donaufest, Ulm, Germany;  Donau Festival Krems, Austria;  Totally Huge New Music Festival and Ruined Piano Convergence, Perth, and the Ear To The Earth Festival, New York.

We acknowledge the generous support of  the New Zealand School of Music and Wellington City Council through its Cultural Grant Funding Programme towards the realisation of this project.

LECTURE
Paulo Venancio Filho
Hélio Oiticica’s Time and Place
Adam Art Gallery
Thursday 19 May 2011, 6pm

Brazilian art historian, curator and writer Paulo Venancio Filho presented his research on the artist Hélio Oiticica, whose work was part of the exhibition Points of Contact: Jim Allen, Len Lye and Hélio Oiticica (organised and toured by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery) at the Adam Art Gallery. His lecture summarised Oiticica’s role in the Brazilian artistic context of the late 1950s and 1960s, which saw him synthesising the legacy of modernism with pioneering avant-garde experiment, which he expanded in his brief stay in London that led to the breakthrough exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1969 and the late projects and experiments made in his 1970-1978 period in New York.

WORKSHOP
Paulo Venancio Filho
Professor of Art History, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
New Time, New Temporality: Contemporary Art in Brazil
Room 319, Old Kirk Building, Gate 3, Kelburn Parade, Victoria University of Wellington
Friday 20 May 2011, 3-5pm

Brazilian contemporary art is receiving greater attention than ever on the international stage. Are the creative endeavours coming out of Brazil hitting a chord with contemporary issues? Or is it that Brazil is a new terrain to be claimed? What is Brazilian art’s position in mapping out contemporary art of the early 21st century? How are younger artists working in Brazil engaging with global processes of the art circuit yet also acknowledging that their work is shaped by local conditions and histories? Brazilian art historian, curator and writer Paulo Venancio Filho convened a two hour workshop on the current art scene in Brazil and its propositions for international discourse on contemporary art.
Presented by the Art History Programme, School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, and the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington.

Paulo Venancio Filho is an art critic, curator and full professor of art history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of essays published in the following catalogues: Tunga/Cildo Meireles, Kanaal Art Foundation, Belgium; Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists, New York and London; Inside the Invisible, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Experiment/Experiência – Art in Brazil 1958-2000, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Oiticica in London, Tate Modern, London. He curated Rio de Janeiro 1950-1964 for Century City, Tate Modern, London 2001 and Soto: The Construction of Immateriality, Centro Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro 2005.

Paulo Venancio Filho’s visit to New Zealand was supported by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington; the National Institute of Arts and Industry, University of Auckland, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth.

New Zealand artist Mladen Bizumic, currently based in Vienna and in Wellington discussed his latest project, From Cube to Ball (Chapter 2), pays tribute to the modernist designs of Ernst Plischke, an Viennese architect who made a significant impact on Wellington’s built environment. In conversation with Robin Skinner, architectural historian at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Architecture and Design, they posed questions about the relocation of European modernist principles to New Zealand as first undertaken by Plischke in the mid-20th century and as now performed by Bizumic in the second decade of the 21st.

DISCUSSION
Ready-made Homes: The Prefab in New Zealand
Adam Art Gallery
Friday 5 November 2010, 6pm

From ticky-tacky boxes to custom designs, prefabrication has evolved from the mid-twentieth-century modern era of mass-standardisation to an emerging future of mass-customisation. This discussion with leading New Zealand architecture experts questioned: How is the legacy of modernism’s ‘architecture for all’ fulfilled by the prefab? And what possibilities does it present to today’s burgeoning green movement?

Speakers included: Roger Walker (architect), Robin Skinner (architectural historian), Daniele Abreu e Lima (architecture lecturer) and Guy Marriage (writer, architect and lecturer).

BUS TOUR
Late Modern Wellington
Saturday 4 December 2010 1-5pm
Commenced from the Architecture and Design School, 139 Vivian Street, finished at the Adam Art Gallery

Julia Gatley, architectural historian and curator of Long Live the Modern New Zealand’s New Architecture 1904-1984, took a tour of late modernist buildings in Wellington. A rare opportunity to get a close view to some of Wellington’s best modern buildings of the 1970s and 1980s.

SYMPOSIUM
The Problem of Plischke
Alan MacDiarmid Building, Rooms 102 + 104
Kelburn Campus, Victoria University of Wellington
Saturday 19 February 2011, 11am-5pm

A collaboration between the Adam Art Gallery and the School of Architecture at Victoria University of Wellington, this one-day symposium examined the work and legacy of Ernst Plischke. Uncovering the controversy surrounding Plischke, this series of discussions aimed to re-assess his architectural and cultural impact in New Zealand both while he lived here and from our perspective now.

11.00am
Introduction
Diane Brand, Head of School, School of Architecture and Design, Victoria University of Wellington.

11.10am
Keynote: “Too much Blut und Boden”: Ernst Plischke’s views on homegrown New Zealand architecture
Linda Tyler, Director of the Centre for New Zealand Art and Discovery and Director of the Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland, presents the keynote lecture followed by Q&A.

12.00 – 1.30pm
Panel discussion: The problems then
Christine McCarthy, Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Design, Victoria University of Wellington; 2010-11 Stout Fellow John Newton, and Robin Skinner, Associate Dean at the School of Architecture and Design, Victoria University of Wellington, re-visit the myth of Plischke. Chaired by Julia Gatley.

1.30 – 2.30pm
Lunch
Conversations with those who remember the Plischkes
Convened by Peter Shaw, this lunchtime conversation draws out re-collections and thoughts from the floor.

2.30 – 4pm
Panel discussion: The problems now
An in-depth discussion of contemporary re-workings of Plischke projects that considered how and why Plischke—the man and his work—continues to loom large, with architectural historian Linda Tyler and architects Alistair Luke and John Gray.
Chaired by Gregory O’Brien.

4pm
Closing remarks
Christina Barton, Director, Adam Art Gallery.
Followed by drinks in the exhibition Designs for Living at the Adam Art Gallery.

PERFORMATIVE LECTURE
Louise Menzies
Essential Lessons
Adam Art Gallery
Wednesday 2 March 2011, 6pm

Auckland-based artist Louise Menzies’ lecture elucidated on the School of Radiant Living, a mid-twentieth-century movement based in Havelock North that taught holistic philosophy, spirituality and physical health. She drew on the educational material produced by the School including a set of audio recordings of lectures delivered by the School’s leader Herbert Sutcliffe, the journal The Radiant Messenger, as well as her own digressions. Menzies’ performative lecture focused on the School’s principles of self-education and how these ideals can be located within a broader historical context of alternative living practices during the twentieth century.

A substantial book project conceived by the artist and published by Clouds to be launched in May 2011.

A 2011 Victoria University of Wellington Orientation event organised with assistance from the J. C. Beaglehole Room, Victoria University of Wellington Library.

Wellington based artists/musicians involved in the exhibition project Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction presented a floortalk to discuss their work and relationship to the scene of independent music production and its distribution.

WORKSHOP
For the Record
Adam Art Gallery
Wednesday 1 September 2010
6-8pm

Roger Shepherd founder of Flying Nun Records, Annabel Youens and Jeff Mitchell from MusicHype, and music writer Simon Sweetman along with Thomas Lambert from Sonorous Circle, Giles Thompson and James Stutely from Papaiti, and Alex Mitcalfe Wilson from Teepee Magic discussed the future of music distribution, particularly in relation to the possibilities of the online environment. This event brought consideration to the role of the record label now.

FILM SCREENING
New York Conversations
Mighty Mighty
104 Cuba Street, Wellington
Wednesday 8 September 2010
7pm

New York Conversations is a text film. Shot in a Chinatown storefront converted for this occasion into an improvised kitchen/restaurant, the film documents three days of public conversations between artists, critics, curators, and a free floating public. The talks, lunches, and dinners were organised by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nico Dockx, and Anton Vidokle in response to an invitation by Brussels-based art journal A Prior to be the subject of their new issue. Instead of commissioning essays or producing artwork to be printed in the journal, the artists decided to rethink the structure by which an art publication is produced and to attempt to do this discursively in a public setting.

The film is a subjective record of these conversations, which explored various topics ranging from questions concerning precarious and immaterial labour in the field of art, possibilities for non-alienated life and working conditions, the feasibility of artistic freedom, and possible means of reclaiming dignity in the work of art criticism, to more immediate questions concerning whether what was actually taking place throughout the course of the event was in fact an artwork.

In the tradition of underground cinema, essay films, and experimental language-based films from the conceptual era, New York Conversations insists upon a certain degree of participation from the audience—by way of critical reading—over passive spectatorship.

With: Francisca Benitez, Nico Dockx, Daniel Faust, Media Farzin, Liam Gillick, Egon Hanfstingl, Jörg Heiser, Steven Kaplan, Shama Khana, Anders Kreuger, Miwon Kwon, Valerie Mannaerts, Sis Matthé, Hadley Nunes, Saul Ostrow, Marti Peran, Simon Rees, Els Roelandt, Dieter Roelstraete, Martha Rosler, Joe Scanlan, Maxwel Stephen, Monika Szewczyk, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jan Verwoert, Anton Vidokle, Lawrence Weiner, Andrea Wiarda, Louwrien Wijers and others.

PERFORMANCE
Bill Direen
Slowboat Records
183 Cuba Street, Wellington
Friday 17 September 2010
6pm

Most histories of recorded music concentrate on the final product: the crescendo of the classic album. In reality the final product is a small part of a band (or an artist’s) life, which otherwise is dominated by process. Traversing the highways of New Zealand, Bill Direen’s novel Nusquama (Titus Books 2006) focuses on life behind the scenes for an independent rock group on tour in the 1980s; the hours journeying between gigs, the interactions between members, the search for accommodation, transport, food and other items necessary to sustain momentum towards the next gig, the opening up of the landscape and New Zealand people.

Writer and musician Direen was in Wellington to read extracts from his semi-autobiographical novel Nusquama. Staged at the music shop Slowboat Records, Bill accompanied the reading with a performance of selected songs from his extensive back-catalogue. This event exemplified the power of music to transcend forms and become subject for both printed fiction and oral storytelling.

Performance followed by conversation lead by curator Mark Williams.

After a decade based in Berlin and Paris, Bill Direen is in New Zealand from July 2010-January 2011 as the 2010 Fellow at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland. In 1984 he opened a small alternative theatre-gallery in Christchurch, workshopping plays by Artaud, Shakespeare and medieval works; it was also the base for a collective music group working under the name The Bilders. Direen’s work includes poetry, fiction (stories, novels, prose-poems, science-fiction), songs and music-theatre pieces. He is guest editor of New Zealand’s literary journal Landfall 219 ‘On Music’.

FRED’S FAIR
Frederick Street Sound and Light Exploration Society
46 Frederick Street, Wellington
Saturday 9 October 2010
1-4pm

Reflecting on the community of independent producers and utilising the tributaries of distribution already active in Wellington city, this event brought a diverse range of artists together to form an alternative storefront situation for the presentation and dissemination of music production and its visual forms.

Artists involved included: Upper Hutt Posse, Tee Pee Magic: Alex Metcalfe, Antony Milton/PseudoArcana, Sisters of Rupertsburg, Campbell Kneale, Bryce Galloway, Gemma Syme, Matt Whitewell, The National Grid/White Fungus/Hue & Cry, Epic Sweep: Teneti Ririnui, Jeremy Coubrough, Pumice: Stefan Neville, Chris Prosser, and Tim Bollinger.
Poster art: Kerry Ann Lee

Curator, writer and key player in the New Zealand art world of the 1990s, Robert Leonard will consider Julian Dashper’s The Big Bang Theory, a work he helped stage as curator at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.

Robert Leonard is currently Director of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. His trip to New Zealand has been supported by Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.

LECTURE
Gregory Sholette
Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture
Thursday 10 June 2010
Lecture Room 323, Hunter Building
Victoria University of Wellington Kelburn Campus
6pm

Gregory Sholette’s research into politically-engaged artists’ collectives raises the following proposition: cultural economies are secretly dependent upon a sphere of hidden social production involving co-operative networks, systems of gift exchange, unwaged labor, and collective forms of practice that act as a type of missing mass or dark matter, which the art world typically refuses to acknowledge. Thanks in large part to the spread of digital networks, however, this dark matter is getting brighter. By looking at more than 30 years of contemporary artists’ collectives, Sholette’s research attempts to map this materializing missing mass politically, as part of a broader history from below.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and Assistant Professor at Queens College. His individual sculpture, drawing, media, and installation works have been exhibited at the Taiwan Art Biennial, New Langton Arts in San Francisco, Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, and the Dia Art Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, and the Museum of Modern Art. A founding member of the artist’s collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000), he is the co-editor of two books: Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, with Blake Stimson, (University of Minnesota, 2007); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life, with Nato Thompson, (MASS MoCA/MIT Press, 2004, 05, 08). He has contributed critical writings to various journals including Artforum, Third Text, Oxford Art Journal, Art Journal, Journal of Aesthetics and Politics, and October, and is a frequent international lecturer on issues of art and politics. He is currently writing a book on the political economy of art for Pluto Press (UK) due to be published in 2010. Sholette is in Wellington as an artist in residence at the Enjoy Public Art Gallery

PERFORMATIVE LECTURE
Slave Pianos Pianology: A Schema and Historio-Materialist Pro-gnostic
Presented by Victoria University of Wellington, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney and the Remembering the 20th Century Committee.
Adam Art Gallery
Friday 18 June 2010
8pm

In collaboration with the students of the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington, the renowned collective Slave Pianos will activate the installation Slave Pianos (of the Art Cult) 1998-1999 in an entirely new and unexpected configuration. Riffing on the form of the university lecture and playing on the potential of the student community to create an ensemble, this event will present a very different kind of concert experience as another take on acoustic and discursive modes of address.

PERFORMANCE
Tetuzi Akiyama
Adam Art Gallery
Tuesday 6 July 2010
7.30pm

Since the ’90s master guitarist and bastion of the radical Japanese underground Tetuzi Akiyama has recorded and performed with an extensive legion of composers and artists both in Japan and abroad. He is the founder – alongside no-input mixer virtuoso, Toshimaru Nakamura – of the infamous Meeting at Offsite performance series in Tokyo, which has played host to some of experimental music’s most recognized icons.

Akiyama’s idiosyncratic and arresting vocabulary contains often volatile shifts between microtonal prepared guitar, folk pastoralism, country raga and weirdo boogie shred. His eclectic but consistently focused body of work – which also employs viola and electronics – has appeared on labels such as Locust Music (Espers, Henry Flynt, Matmos, Josephine Foster), Staubgold (To Rococo Rot, Vladislav Delay, Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, Faust), Bottrop-Boy (DAT Politics, Nobukazu Takemura, Sunroof!), and Antiopic (Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke).

As Improvised Music from Japan writes, Akiyama ‘specializes in creating music with elements of both primitivism and realism by connecting his own aspirations, in a minimal and straightforward way, to the special instrumental qualities of the guitar. Sometimes delicately and sometimes boldly, he controls sound volumes ranging from micro to macro, in an attempt to convert the body into an electronic entity’.

Akiyama’s performance at the Adam Art Gallery will exploit the special instrumental qualities of the guitar to create an aural environment that attempts to convert the body into an electronic entity. His one-hour performance will be staged alongside Michael Parekowhai’s Patriot: Ten Guitars 1999.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Where is New Zealand Art History Now?
Adam Art Gallery
Saturday 10 July 2010
3-5pm

What is the current state of play for New Zealand art history? What (if any) are the discursive frameworks within which it is taking shape? Is it possible or worthwhile to write a history of art in New Zealand and is this the same as writing New Zealand art history? What are the opportunities and drawbacks of being involved with the production of a localised history? Does contemporary art need a history? These questions and others will be put to a panel of art historians with a view to setting an agenda for activating the discipline.

HOW DO WE MAKE OURSELVES A STUDENT BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?
Victoria Student Media Lecture Series
Mile-End Hipsters and the Unmasking of Montreal’s Proletaroid Intelligentsia; or How a Bohemia Becomes Boho
Dr. Geoff Stahl
(Lecturer, School of English Film Theatre and Media Studies)
Adam Art Gallery
Tuesday 16 July 2010
5pm

FORUM
Models of community
Facebook Group – Adam Art Gallery
Commences Wednesday 2 June 2010.
Discussion continues until the end of exhibition on Sunday 25 July 2010.

Prior to the emergence of relational aesthetics as a catch-all for thinking about art as a socially directed activity, the 1990s saw artists abandoning the idea that art was a solitary activity, the product of a unique, creative individual, and turning instead to the notion that a host of cultural, sexual and social forces give shape to the self. As a result new allegiances and standoffs developed that saw artists and cultural commentators banding together. Being Maori or a Pacific Islander, white and working class, an art world insider, subscriber to a particular subculture, or observer of the larger machinations of power, were all manifest in the art of this time; a sure sign that artists were rethinking identity in collective terms rather than in relation to the individual.

This discussion will address the cultural landscape of the 1990s and consider what shaped it as well as its legacy for the present, asking whether models of community still function in the way they did then or whether new ones have evolved to replace them. Recognising the different era in which we now live, it will take place via the forum of Facebook. Artists, musicians, cultural commentators and academics will share their thoughts, recollections and prognoses with the public online.

Denis and Verna Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Wednesday 24 February 2010
6pm

On the occasion of his exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light, New York-based artist Anthony McCall will present a lecture that canvasses the works he produced in London and New York in the 1970s and his practice since 2001, in which he has returned to the ‘solid light’ form to create installations that utilise projected light in space. Crossing between these two bodies of work, McCall will reflect on what it means to shift film from image production in time to sculptural manipulation in space; the consequences of which he is still exploring today. This is a rare opportunity to hear a pioneer of expanded cinema speak about his work and to engage with an artist who is gaining widespread critical attention for his interrogation of the film medium and its wider implications for art practice in general.

BUS TOUR
Adam Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington and TheNewDowse, invite you to take the Art Bus connecting three International Arts Festival visual art programmes across Wellington.

Commencing from the City Gallery, Wellington
Saturday 6 March 2010
10-1pm

Short on time and transport, but want to see some world class art? Hop on the Art Bus this Festival Season and let us take you to three outstanding international art exhibitions in just three hours. Starting and finishing at City Gallery Wellington the tour takes in Janet Cardiff’s immersive sound piece Forty Part Motet. This is followed by leading video artist Bill Viola’s The Messenger at TheNewDowse, and finishes at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery, where you will encounter Anthony McCall’s extraordinary immersive ‘solid light films’ and related works. Curators will be on hand at each venue to offer insights into each work.

PERFORMANCE
Special performance of Line Describing a Cone in conjunction with the New Zealand Film Archive

Wellington Town Hall
Monday 15 March 2010
Performance commences promptly at 7pm

Line Describing a Cone (1973) is famous in the history of avant-garde film for its reduction of the cinematic experience to its core ingredients: projected light in physical space. For 30 minutes a beam of light from a 16mm film projector draws a perfect circle on a distant screen. In the space between, a solid cone takes shape as light particles cling to a haze filled room. Transforming the viewer’s usual passive relation to the film medium, this work invites an active engagement with the cinematic experience.

FILM SCREENING
Messages from the Co-op: British Avant-garde Film 1967-76
An evening of British avant-garde film of the 1960s and 1970s, introduced by Mark Williams, Curator, New Zealand Film Archive.

Mediatheatre, New Zealand Film Archive
84 Taranaki Street
Wednesday 31 March and Thursday 1 April 2010
7pm

The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video. As collective and informal groups flourished worldwide, personal film makers were challenging cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, an artist-led organisation that incorporated a distribution agency, projection and film workshop.

In search of new and critical ways of working with film, several of the Co-op artists made the materiality of celluloid their subject. Other works undercut audience expectations for cinematic escapism with duration, repetition and humour. This programme collects several films which embody the critical and creative spirit that informed the work of Anthony McCall and his contemporaries.

This special screening of filmic explorations has been brought to New Zealand courtesy of LUX, London. Duration 60 minutes.

FILM SCREENING
“Are you making sculpture or are you making films?”
A curated screening of film works that document sculptural encounters in the city, introduced by Laura Preston, Assistant Curator, Adam Art Gallery.

Mediatheatre, New Zealand Film Archive
84 Taranaki Street
Thursday 15 April 2010
7pm

As a direct homage to Anthony McCall’s ‘solid light film’ Line Describing a Cone (1973) the film document of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s sculptural intervention Conical Intersect (1975) is a fascinating study on urban re-development, the power of architecture and the loss of community. This 16mm film will be shown along with the works of British film maker John Smith and German duo Clemens von Wedermeyer and Maya Schweizer. Like McCall, these artists question what cinema can be. They also test documentary conventions and use the architectural spaces of the city as a stage for weaving historical and socio-economic narratives. This programme will be a unique opportunity to consider what film offers both as a moving document and as a form of sculptural practice.

HOW DO WE MAKE OURSELVES A STUDENT BODY WITHOUT ORGANS?
Victoria Student Media Lecture Series

Foucault, Ethics & Fearless Speech
Tony Schirato
(Associate Professor, School of English Film Theatre and Media Studies, MA (Sydney) PhD (Sydney))
Adam Art Gallery
Tuesday 23 March 2010
5pm

“The Groundings with my Brothers”: Knowledge Production Outside of the Academy in the Academy
Robbie Shilliam
(Senior Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, MA (Sussex) DPhil (Sussex))
Adam Art Gallery
Monday 29 March 2010
5pm

Students, the University, Social Contestation, and the ‘60s
Chamsy El-Ojeili
(Senior Lecturer, School of Social and Cultural Studies, MA (Hons) PhD (Massey))
Adam Art Gallery
Wednesday 21 April 2010
5pm

Nomad Thought, Global Capital and The War Machine in Deleuze and Guattari
Robert Deuchars
(Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, MA (City U London), PhD (VUW))
Adam Art Gallery
Thursday 22 April 2010
5pm

Shoji Hano
Adam Art Gallery
3 October 2009
6pm

Born in 1955, based in Tokyo, Shoji Hano is one of free-jazz, noise and psychedelic rock’s most preeminent percussionists and brilliant all-round sages. Widely regarded on the same consecrated plane as celebrated jazz heavyweights, the late Rashied Ali, Milford Graves, and his own mentors Max Roach and Art Blakey, Shoji’s solo drumming is a mesmerizing feat to witness, and displays a bewildering dexterity that’s both physically and psychically difficult to attribute to the motions of one individual player.

Sketching and tracing moiré-like patterns with his limbs, Shoji’s flurrying percussive vernacular is disciplined and virtuosic, while remaining spirited and idiosyncratic. Intricate cross-patterns and superimposed timings bubble up and collide with furious detail, subsiding in cyclical and funky grace before erupting again with colourful exuberance.

His adroit Octopus-like beats and fizzy punk rhythms have been heard in a countless array of collaborative recordings with the esteemed likes of late pioneering guitarist, Derek Bailey, Acid Mothers Temple’s Kawabata Makoto, Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino, Eugene Chadbourne, and cult Japanese psychers High Rise. His work has also appeared on renowned labels, P.S.F. and Improvised Music from Japan.

PERFORMANCE
SOUND CHECK

Chris Watson
Sound Recordist
Saturday 10 October 2009
Adam Art Gallery
8pm

Chris Watson’s work as a wildlife and environmental sound recordist is unparalleled. He has worked with the BBC recording and editing sound for many of David Attenborough’s great wildlife series such as The Life of Birds (1998), The Life of Mammals (2001), Life in the Undergrowth (2005) and Talking with Animals(2001) and has won numerous awards for these and other TV and radio documentaries. As well as his work as a documentary sound recordist, Chris Watson is an artist in his own right and has produced three solo albums and many collaborative sound works. He constructs collages of sounds, which evolve from a series of recordings made at the specific locations over varying periods of time.

Watson’s exploration of sound environments has taken him all over the world and has led to many bizarre and unconventional recording situations. He has recorded glacial shifts in Iceland, massive storms in the Baltic Sea, the voices and rhythms of the Humboldt current around the Galapagos Islands. Chris Watson’s performances take listeners to places hidden and inaccessible. It is cinema for the ears.

Chris Watson’s visit was made possible by alt.music and kindly supported by, Adam Art Gallery, New Zealand School of Music and Frederick Street Sound and Light Exploration Society.

FILM SCREENING
Hercules on screen

Adam Art Gallery
Thursday 12 November 2009
6-7pm
Presented by Arthur Pomeroy, Programme Director of Classics, Victoria University of Wellington

Professor Arthur Pomeroy delved into the history of Hercules (Herakles) on screen accompanying his presentation with movie excerpts, television clips and anecdotal stories from the history of film. This was an opportunity to explore how the character of Hercules has adapted and changed within the evolving context of the moving image.

PERFORMANCE
SOUND CHECK

John Wiese
Frederick Street Light and Sound Exploration Society
46 Frederick Street, Wellington
Wedneday December 9 2009
8pm
$10.00
with Our Love Will Destroy the World

John Wiese is a Californian artist and composer. Both a prolific collaborator and solo performer, Wiese has worked with the likes of Sunn O))), Merzbow, Wolf Eyes, Lasse Marhaug, and C. Spencer Yeh. Well known and highly respected in the ‘noise’ community, Wiese has performed across Europe, America, and Scandinavia at events such as Colour Out of Space (Brighton, UK), DEAF (Dublin Electronic Arts Festival) and the 52nd Venice Biennale.

Wiese’s tour of New Zealand and Australia at the end of 2009 came after the recent release of his solo album Circle Snare, described by one reviewer as ‘yet another stunning example of exacting noise construction’. Supported by Our Love Will Destroy the World, Wiese’s Wellington performance was an unique evening of disrupted musical forms.

www.john-wiese.com

FORUM
Source Material — Five Conversations with the Past

Lost and found?
Understanding history through art
Judy Deuling, Anna Jackson, David Maskill, Glyn Parry. Chaired by Ian Wedde
Adam Art Gallery
Wednesday 3 February 2010
5pm

As the first public programme for 2010 and in conjunction with the current exhibition Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past, the Adam Art Gallery invited four academics to introduce their disciplinary approach to the re-use and interpretation of historical material.

Academics from the fields of literature, religious studies, art history and classics discussed what is at stake in the interpretation of texts and images from the past. Departing from the exhibition Bible Studies (New Testament) by leading New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins, each scholar reflected on their own methodologies and their relationship to the past, raising questions about the creative nature of historical (re)construction and the truth-value of academic discourse.

This forum was chaired by Ian Wedde, Wellington-based poet, writer, and Arts Foundation Laureate.

Thursday 16 July 2009
6pm

Ray Spiteri – Art history and the political
Raymond Spiteri, Lecturer in Art History explored the role of the institution in creating a space for the event to take place, and how in doing so also seeks to contain and incorporate the unforeseen consequences of that event.

Thursday 30 July 2009
6pm

Paul James – Architecture and latency
Paul James from the School of Architecture discuseed two questions raised by the exhibition project The Future is Unwritten. How can artworks activate the latent cultural content of a site? And, how have the artists in this exhibition negotiated the legacy of institutional critique generated by conceptual artists and art theorists during the 1960’s and 70’s?

Thursday 13 August 2009
6pm

Minette Hillyer – Media after modernity
Minette Hillyer, Lecturer in Media Studies asked the question: What is at stake in claiming an ‘after’ to modernity, politically and historically? While modernity, or rather the myth that it has become, depends on the idea of a rupture, or radical break with the past, an experience of the modern also suggests the persistent significance of local interventions. Hillyer used the specific context of New Zealand, founded on a process of colonisation, to consider other ways to represent narratives of historical change.

Thursday 27 August 2009
6pm

Ralph Chapman and Andrew Wilks – The environment and energy use
Ralph Chapman, Director of Postgraduate Environmental Studies, and Andrew Wilks, Environmental Manager of Facilities Management at Victoria University of Wellington discussed how their research and work on energy efficiency, renewable energy and other sustainability actions is both aligned with, and addresses different questions from, the intentions of contemporary art. In keeping with the premise of the exhibition project, this talk considered how the implementation of their work looks to various timeframes – including a long future that we may not get to see.

WORKSHOP
State of curatorial practice in New Zealand

Adam Art Gallery
6 August 2009
4-6pm

Heather Galbraith, Megan Tamati-Quennell, Mercedes Vicente, Hamish Win
Chaired by Christina Barton and Laura Preston

This workshop on curatorial practice was intended for students of Art History and Museum and Heritage Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and Critical Studies, Massey University. It was also open to students from other programmes, as well as members of the public interested in the subject.

The aim of the discussion was to bring together a range of perspectives and approaches to the role of the curator, and provide insights into the practicalities, theoretical concerns and developing methodologies that inform curatorial practice in Aotearoa, New Zealand today.

WEB CAST
Ice Melt

Adam Art Gallery
Sunday 30 August 2009
7pm

“What’s the alternative to optimism? Unless we act as if we can sort this out you might as well just get a hat and some sun tan lotion and write a letter of apology to your grandchildren.” Nicholas Stern

A series of performances at the Adam Art Gallery featuring Martin Poppelwell (Napier), Murray Hewitt and Andy Hummel (Wellington), Sarah Jane Parton (Rarotonga) and Sam Hamilton (Auckland).

Curated by Sophie Jerram and Dugal McKinnon.

Salamanca Lawn, Botanic Gardens
Saturday 28 March
12am-12pm

For One Day Sculpture – a New Zealand-wide series of temporary public art works, conceived by British curator Claire Doherty for the Litmus Research Initiative at Massey University – Billy Apple engaged with Henry Moore’s Bronze Form (1985-6) – one of Wellington’s best known public sculptures and the only outdoor work by this legendary British modern artist in New Zealand – in a manner characteristic of his practice and its intentions. Treating this work as his subject, Apple drew attention to a set of issues specific to Moore’s work in its Wellington location to raise vital questions about the role and fate of art in public space. For further information and documentation check www.onedaysculpture.org.nz

DISCUSSION
Is less more? Debating Apple on Moore
One Day Sculpture discussion

von Kohorn Room, Museum of Wellington
Thursday 23 April 2009
5.30-7pm

Following on from Billy Apple’s One Day Sculpture, this discussion picked up on Apple’s project, to assess the validity of his proposition “Less is Moore” and canvass the history of Moore’s sculpture and its place in his oeuvre. In association with the Museum of Wellington, this public forum provided an opportunity for a range of key stakeholders to share their points of view and involve the public in debating the issues raised.

Panel speakers included: Christina Barton (Director of the Adam Art Gallery and curator of the exhibition Billy Apple New York 1969-1973), Vikki Muxlow (Parks and Gardens, WCC); Jack Fry (Freelance conservator); Neil Plimmer (Wellington Sculpture Trust); Jeanne Macaskill (artist), Carolina Izzo (art conservator) chaired by David Cross (Litmus Research Initiative Director, Massey University)

ARTIST’S TALK
Billy Apple on New York
Adam Art Gallery
Friday 24 April
12-1pm

Billy Apple is a conceptual artist who is known for his rigorous investigation of the sites, systems and social relations that structure the art world. After studying graphic design in London and contributing to early pop art in Britain he left for New York in 1964. Apple lived there until 1990 before returning to New Zealand, where he continues to work and exhibit widely. Over a career spanning 50 years he has produced objects, text pieces, photographs, installations and undertaken actions that test definitions of art, challenge the structuring suppositions of artistic identity, expose the workings of the art system and demonstrate art’s permeability to larger social, political and economic forces.

Billy Apple and exhibition curator and Director of the Adam Art Gallery, Christina Barton, gave a tour of the exhibition Billy Apple New York 1969-1973, which focused on the short but intense period in which Apple ran a small not-for-profit gallery at 161 West 23rd Street as a venue for his own work and for others who shared his ambition to test the definitions of art making and find new models that would serve as an alternative to the commercial gallery system. This was a rare opportunity to hear first-hand what it was like to be in New York at this time and to gain insights into the alternative art scene that fostered the radical practices that were galvanising the art scene in New York in the early 1970s.

FILM SCREENING
Conceptual Paradise

New Zealand Film Archive
84 Taranaki Street
Wednesday 6 May
7pm

The documentary essay Conceptual Paradise: There Is a Place for Sophistication directed by Stefan Römer traces out the debates that allowed the intellectual art movement of conceptual art to emerge in the 1960s, and which has subsequently led to the most relevant questions in contemporary art.

Featuring some of the most interesting and dynamic artists and art theorists alive today, the documentary presents a diversity of voices to show conceptual art as a socio-historical development of various movements; that it has no one valid definition. Yet there are several ideas that are framed throughout the documentary; the fiction and ideal of art as political engagement; the history of art as a history of struggles around strategies of representation, and, in making a film about conceptual art, the trope of reflexivity that produces a study on the documentary as a genre in itself.

Artists:
Vito Acconci, Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden), Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Hartmut Bitomsky, Mel Bochner, Gregg Bordowitz, Klaus vom Bruch, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Luis Camnitzer, Jan Dibbets, Mark Dion, Sam Durant, Valie EXPORT, Stano Filko, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Shilpa Gupta, Hans Haacke, Július Koller, Joseph Kosuth, Sonia Khurana, David Lamelas, Sol LeWitt, Thomas Locher, Marcel Odenbach, Yoko Ono, John Miller, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Peter Weibel, Lawrence Weiner, Stephen Willats, Heimo Zobernig

Curators/Theorists:
Alexander Alberro, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, Charles Harrison (Art & Language), Geeta Kapoor, Geert Lovink, Seth Siegelaub, Gregor Stemmrich.

PERFORMANCE
SOUNDCHECK
Silent Spring

Adam Art Gallery
Friday 3 April
9-10pm

Silent Spring presented a roaming sound performance throughout the gallery spaces of the Adam Art Gallery to directly engage the audience in an alternative form of audience/performer dynamic within this setting. The audience sat within a murky forest of sound, built up by the orbiting performers, who in mapping out the site used acoustic sounds looped and layered to reflect the work’s accumulative state based on actions over time. By displacing the expected directional focus and continuity of the evening concert format, Silent Spring sidestepped the usual focus on the individual performer and tested the temporal nature of traditional sound performance in a collaborative project designed specifically for the critical forum of the Adam Art Gallery.

Silent Spring includes:

Tim Coster, Auckland sound artist and curator who works with installations, performances and audio releases.

Shannon O’Brien, artist and facilitator of sound and performance-related projects in Christchurch.

Joshua Rutter, artist, freelance dancer and choreographer from Auckland.