Fiona Amundsen The First City in History
John Lake The Campus
Simon Starling Autoxylopyrocycloboros
Kohei Yoshiyuki The Park

This festival season the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington presents a suite of four solo exhibitions that offer different takes on photography. Recording people and places, these artists’ projects model strikingly different documentary approaches, offering viewers a provocative opportunity to ask what it means when a camera is used to capture a subject, both in the moment and for posterity.
New Zealand International Arts Festival 2012

Artist talks and mid point party: Saturday 17 March 2012, 7pm.
For more details on the Camera Work public programme including a series of documentary film screenings at the New Zealand Film Archive please review our calendar

The Park is a joint project with the Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne and IMA, Brisbane. Fiona Amundsen’s The First City in History is supported by Asia New Zealand Foundation, New Zealand Japan Exchange Programme and Auckland University of Technology. John Lake’s project was commissioned for the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection in 2011. Simon Starling’s work is staged in partnership with The Physics Room, Christchurch.

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.

(A Film Called) Ellipsis, Anna Sanderson in residence 2011

4 June–10 July 2011 
g. bridle
The Inimical: A Selection from the Retreat
g.bridle collects objects and images and then brings them together in new configurations using the gallery as a ‘sanctuary’ where different connections can be made. By such means the artist proposes a model of practice whereby the lines between making, collecting and arranging are blurred and questions are raised about how things acquire or are imbued with aura and thus granted meaning. 

16 July - 21 August
Richard Frater, Chris Prosser, Anna Sanderson
(A Film Called) Ellipsis
In Continuous Project Altered Daily (October Books, 1993) American artist Robert Morris proposes how sculpture can accommodate time and the environment. Inspired by this collection of writing, three different practitioners took up residence in the gallery to produce an accumulative environment—akin to a film in the making—to reflect on the act of collecting as a process in time. Musician and composer Chris Prosser sampled material from his personal archive of musical scores; artist Richard Frater presented a compilation of New Zealand moving image on the natural environment; and writer Anna Sanderson responded to the ceramic collections held at Victoria University of Wellington.
Curated by Laura Preston. 

27 August - 2 October
Leonid Tishkov and Boris Bendikov
Private Moon
Utilising humour, satire and poetic tenderness, Moscow-based artists Leonid Tishkov and Boris Bendikov provide poignant insights into the human condition, particularly the relationship between personal will and state control as experienced in Soviet Russia. This exhibition presented their most recent series of large-scale colour photographs. Each depicts an intimate and evolving relationship between a man and his Private Moon.
Exhibition organised by Marcus Williams, Unitec, Auckland. 

8 October - 13 November
The Victorian Album, the Feminine and the Personal
During the Victorian era, photography became remarkably popular and accessible, stimulated in part by the technological innovation of the carte-devisite process. This exhibition examined the way in which New Zealand women utilised this new medium, presenting work that has rarely—and in many cases never—been displayed or reproduced, to provide a fascinating window into Pakeha and Maori women’s experience of modernity and the complex cultural interweavings of late colonial society.
Curated by Dr Sandy Callister, Resident Scholar, Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. 

19 November - 18 December
Shadowgraphs: Photographic Portraits by Len Lye
Drawn primarily from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery collection, this exhibition presented almost all the photogram portraits made by Len Lye in 1947, a body of work that until recently was neither well known nor fully understood. Here Lye’s works will be contextualised in relation to the tradition of the silhouette portrait and the camera-less photograph. This is the Adam Art Gallery’s biennial student-led project which enables students to research, write about and present an exhibition on a unique body of work.
Curated by Professor Geoffrey Batchen and his Art History Honours students.

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.

Dane Mitchell, Untitled (Flag) from The Barricades 2007 and Daniel du Bern, Protection: Pure (2/5) 2005-6

From June to December 2011 the Adam Art Gallery presented, Behind Closed Doors: New Zealand Art from Private Collections in Wellington, a major exhibition that set out to canvass selective ‘moments’ in a history of New Zealand art from 1946 to the present, drawn exclusively from private collections in Wellington. 

This revealing exhibition provided a rare opportunity to see works that complement and extend the holdings of New Zealand’s public and corporate collections. The paintings, sculptures, and works on paper are simultaneously significant works by major figures and tributes to the often close relationships that accrue between artists and their patrons. 

Many of the selected works are physically and psychologically ambitious, supporting the claim that it is possible to stage a ‘museum-quality’ show drawn exclusively from private sources. There are also works that are modest and delicate, testament to the intimate and personal relationships developed by living with art. 

The exhibition includes paintings by renowned artists Toss Woollaston and Colin McCahon, seldom-seen works by Michael Smither and Rita Angus, along with provocative multimedia art works by Peter Robinson and Ronnie van Hout. 

Behind Closed Doors also became a portrait of Wellington city. Working like a sleuth, curator of the exhibition and Gallery Director, Christina Barton uncovered a surprising number of committed art lovers in the city, whose collecting endeavours discreetly nourish Wellington’s cultural life. 

The exhibition is complemented by a book documenting a selection of the works as they appear at home, with photographs by leading New Zealand photographer Neil Pardington and texts by writer Lara Strongman. This is designed to offer an intimate alternative to the ‘institutional’ framing of works at the Adam Art Gallery.

A public programme of floor talks, panel discussions and film screenings provided a platform for critical discussion on the issues raised by the exhibition. For more details please check here 

Behind Closed Doors: New Zealand Art from Private Collections in Wellington is supported by Creative New Zealand.

Jim Allen Space Plane, Environment No. 1, 1969 (2010 reconstruction)

The exhibition Points of Contact: Jim Allen, Len Lye, Hélio Oiticica traced the historical and conceptual connections between New Zealand artist Jim Allen (b.1922), a significant figure in the development of post-object art in New Zealand, and two of his key contemporaries: expatriate experimental filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Len Lye (1901-1980) and Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980).

Points of Contact drew together bodies of work which share certain material and conceptual qualities, most especially their engagement with light, movement, colour, and the body.

Central to the exhibition was the reconstruction of Allen’s pivotal 1969 Small Worlds exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland, one of the earliest instances of environmental sculpture to be presented in New Zealand.

These installations were joined by other works by all three artists that are variously originals, reconstructions and photographic documentation. The re-staging enabled viewers to dwell on the challenges and possibilities posed by the re-presentation of ephemeral or conceptual works of art, and therefore to explore the complex legacy of the ‘post-object’.

This exhibition presented Hélio Oiticica’s work for the first time in New Zealand.

Points of Contact joins a number of recent surveys that challenge the European and North American art historical paradigm, proposing and examining instead parallel and specific art historical trajectories outside these centres, in both their local and global dimensions.

News article on Jim Allen’s Contact at ARTSPACE, Auckland March 2011

Organised and toured by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with assistance from Creative New Zealand and Michael Lett and curated by Tyler Cann and Mercedes Vicente. Thanks to the New Zealand Film Archive and the Len Lye Foundation.

1. Re-Modernism
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Wednesday 23 February 2011

What promise does the modern hold for artists, architects, designers, social and cultural thinkers? Or is our contemporary fascination with modernism merely nostalgic—a doomed attempt to reconstitute something that has passed? What does modernism mean for the present? How can we even critically reflect upon such questions if we are still living within modernity? These and other questions were debated by a panel of speakers in the first of a new series of discussions designed to engage key topics galvanising thinkers and practitioners.

Speakers included: Artist Lisa Crowley, film theorist Minette Hillyer (Victoria University of Wellington), art historian Ann Stephen (University of Sydney), design historian Christopher Thompson. Chair artist Gavin Hipkins.

Related Readings
Raymond Williams: When was Modernism? [PDF]
Okwui Enwezor: Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence [PDF]
Mark Lewis: Is Modernity our Antiquity? [PDF]
Boris Groys: Comrades of Time [PDF]

2.  Re-Construction
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Wednesday 18 May 2011, 5.30-7.30pm

What status does the reconstruction of an original art work have? If it is not an authentic artefact, then can it have value? Is it indeed an artwork? Why is there a need or desire to reconstruct, and what kind of relationship to the past does it enable? How does our contemporary impulse to make things over tally with a new need for resourcefulness in addressing questions of sustainability? These and other questions will be debated by a panel of speakers in the second of a new series of discussions designed to engage key topics that are galvanising thinkers and practitioners.

Related Readings
Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History [PDF]
Dieter Roelstraete: After the Historigraphic Turn: Current Findings [PDF]
Sven Lütticken: (Stop) Making Sense [PDF]
Lyle Rexer: A Fire Destroyed the Archive [PDF]

3. Rehearsal
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Wednesday 17 August 2011, 5.30-7.30pm

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 include: 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).

Related Readings
Steve Rushton: Tweedledum and Tweedeledee resolved to have a battle [PDF]
Philip J. C. Dark: Of old models and new in Pacific Art: Real or spurious? [PDF]
Judith Butler: Performative acts and gender constitution [PDF]
Francis Alys: Politics of Rehearsal

4. Re-Locate
Adam Auditorium, City Gallery Wellington
Tuesday 29 November 2011, 5.30-7.30pm

As the final forum in the series, this discussion brings the conversation closer to home. Reviewing the fervent interest in community driven endeavours and creative pursuits, this discussion will question 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?

Related Readings
Naomi Klein: Reclaiming The Commons [PDF]
Amanda Yates: Micro-urbanism–Regenerative buildings and the architectural landscape of the pa [PDF]
Lucy Lippard: The Lure of the Local–All over the place [PDF]

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

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.

Richard Francis (Auckland)
and Jason Kahn (Zürich/Los Angeles)
Sunday 30 January 7pm
Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, Bats Theatre, 1 Kent Terrace

Campbell Kneale (Wellington)
and Alan Courtis (Buenos Aires)
Thursday 3 February 6pm
James Smith Carpark, 162 Wakefield Street

David Watson (Auckland/New York)
and the New Zealand School of Music
Sunday 20 February 12noon-1pm
Parade commencing from the Adam Art Gallery 12 noon, culminating in a performance at the Embassy Theatre,
10 Kent Terrace 1pm

Annea Lockwood (New York)
Wednesday 27 April 11am-5pm
Peter McLeavey Gallery, 147 Cuba Street

What and where are the commons today?
The commons is a space where resources are collectively owned or shared. Deriving from pre-industrial agrarian times, the commons was a demarcated site that could not be commodified. It was neither public nor private. The commons was managed by the local community which advocated for inclusivity and shared activity.

This project seeks to establish the commons again within the fabric of Wellington city. It calls on the community to gather in our urban environment and to claim space outside the market paradigm. It advocates for a common ground and collective experience.

To locate a space between public and private is to acknowledge that our environment is determined by power relations. The difference between what is private and what is public is marked by who is given access and for what ends. Finding somewhere between these definitions is to open up possibilities for action and to enable new meanings to take shape.

Right now we are living in a time of commercial contradiction: between hyper-capitalism and economic instability. There is also renewed investment in developing communities based on effective conservation and resource management. Here, in the space of negotiation—between community needs and capital enterprise, between the commercial agenda of the street and the city’s endorsed behaviour as a creative capital—a commons can be established. The proposition of this event is that this can be effected through sound.

Music is a popular medium. It creates shared states of being. It is undeniably pervasive. It cannot be ignored. People who make music do so together in the spirit of community and without regard for the structures of class. Music for this project is a tool, a means to explore an alternative to today’s rampant culture of consumption and propose other ways of communicating.

The Commons Project will not simply deliver music freely. It will challenge expectations of what music can be—delving into electronic sampling, score-based instrumentation and processional sounds—and where it should be performed. We have set a challenge for participants, by inviting them to work in city sites that are either unfamiliar or that test expectations of where one might hear sounds performed.

This series is based on collaboration. The collective dynamics explored by each performance will not only build relationships between sound and site but will also connect local practitioners with artists from other places with potentially long-term effects. The aim is to establish common ground not only in the public and private spaces where performances will be staged but in the connective threads that will stretch in many directions from this point.

Through the pervasive and popular medium of sound, this series of performances aims to empower an understanding of community and to re-imagine the commons as a public space to be re-claimed In Our Name.

Laura Preston – Curator

The Adam Art Gallery staged this series between January and April 2011. The Commons Project is the second off-site series to be staged as part of the Adam Art Gallery’s Sound Check programme focus, which sets out to explore the overlap between the visual and the aural.

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.

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.