London-based art collective and 2010 Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group are showing their work for the first time in New Zealand at the Adam Art Gallery. Their trilogy of film works and book project A Long Time Between Suns sympathetically re-orientates our perception of history by treating the past as an archival resource to re-envisage the future. Theirs is no utopian imagining, but a sceptical image of a ‘global’ future built from a disjuncture of sounds and images that tap into ideas of futurity and trans-national histories.

Their work is being staged alongside Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction, an exhibition curated by Laura Preston and Mark Williams that also investigates the past in the interests of engaging the future. Five artists/collectives, who all operate between the spheres of music and the visual arts—Fitts & Holderness, DJ $1 Record aka Bryce Galloway, Caroline Johnston, Torben Tilly & Robin Watkins, and Ronnie van Hout—have been invited to produce new works that take as their starting point the idea of “the record”.

The record is a dissemination device and a visual object, a record of the event in time and a commodification of a moment in history—Bruce Russell

Object Lessons has been conceived in the wake of the digital download. The project investigates the visual forms of music as a way to address issues of documentation and distribution. It is curious about how histories accrue around this object as a material artefact and as a commodity. Intriguingly the music record provides access to the past and yet it implies an inevitable distance from the contexts and circumstances of its production. Therefore the lesson of this object is that while the past may be ultimately unobtainable, stories, memories, values, and beliefs assemble around it.

The exhibition explicitly focuses on independent music production as a site where the social, economic and political effects of recording are re-negotiated by artists eager to work outside “the system” and usually “off the record”. Here questions of commodification are critically addressed and social and cultural codes are inventively reworked.

The works presented by the artists forecast the future by reconnecting with the past, to resist by reorienting the “impending tsunami” of the digital download and the modalities of communication within which music now circulates.

Object Lessons is the second project to be curated for the Adam Art Gallery’s Sound Check research initiative that explores the intersections between music and the visual arts. It is accompanied by a public programme of talks, workshops and performances.

This exhibition project is accompanied by an illustrated publication with an essay by theorist and musician Bruce Russell and a CD interview with Campbell Kneale and Anthony Milton.

Exhibitions supported by LUX, London, VideoPro, ImageLab and Coopers Creek.

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 will be in Wellington to read extracts from his semi-autobiographical novel Nusquama. Staged at the music shop Slowboat Records, Bill will accompany the reading with a performance of selected songs from his extensive back-catalogue. This event will exemplify 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’.

FAIR
Scene of Independence
Music Art /Art Music
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 will bring a diverse range of artists together to form an alternative storefront situation for the presentation and dissemination of music production and its visual forms. Come and join in the festivities as local musicians, writers, artists and publishers present their wares.

FLOORTALKS
Bryce Galloway, Caroline Johnston and Torben Tilly
Adam Art Gallery
Tuesday 24 August 2010
6-7pm

Join the Wellington based artists/musicians involved in the exhibition project Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction in a discussion on 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

Join 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 in a discussion on the future of music distribution, particularly in relation to the possibilities of the online environment. This event will workshop ideas and provide practical tools to consider the role of the record label now.

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

Julian Dashper
Michael Parekowhai
Ava Seymour
Slave Pianos
Terry Urbahn

Play On was the first in an occasional series of curated exhibitions designed to investigate the relationships between sound and art, generated from the Adam Art Gallery’s unfolding Sound Check research programme. For this exhibition curator Christina Barton brought together four major works produced in the 1990s by leading New Zealand contemporary artists, and staged these referentially-rich installations alongside a newly commissioned work.

Julian Dashper’s The Big Bang Theory (1992-1993), Michael Parekowhai’s Ten Guitars (1999), Slave Pianos’ [Michael Stevenson, Danius Kesminus, Rohan Drape & Neil Kelly] Slave Pianos (of the Art Cult) (1998-1999), and Terry Urbahn’s The Karaokes (1995-1997), were joined by Ava Seymour’s 11 Bars of Oboe (2010). Each work uses an aspect of music as a metaphor for thinking about art and art history.

Considering the significant ways these installations reflect the social, cultural and critical turns of the 1990s and beyond, and drawing connections between them in terms of their use of music as both subject and form, Play On raised important questions about what art is and how culture works.

Supported by Creative New Zealand, Piano Shop Plimmerton and the VBC

Anthony McCall, Installation view of Breath (The Vertical Works) at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2009 (Photograph: Giulio Buono). Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

[A solid light film] exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other…every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form. Anthony McCall, 1974

Anthony McCall is a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema. He has carved a unique position in contemporary art by bridging the gaps between the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial by means of his extraordinary ‘solid light’ films, which manifest as immersive installations made by drawing in real space with projected light.

The Adam Art Gallery is bringing McCall and his ‘solid light films’ to New Zealand for the first time. Anthony McCall: Drawing with Light, a major exhibition timed to coincide with the 2010 New Zealand International Arts Festival, will be an opportunity to experience McCall’s ‘solid light ’ installations in the complex and labyrinthine spaces of the Adam Art Gallery, and will offer insights into the full range of his output and working process showing a range of drawings, films and photographic works produced across the entire history of his practice.

A public programme of artist talks, film screenings, and discussion will expand on the exhibition to place the works of this British-born, New York-based artist in context.

A highlight of this programme includes the one-off opportunity to view Line Describing a Cone (1973), McCall’s first ‘solid light film’. This will be presented at the Wellington Town Hall, in conjunction with the New Zealand Film Archive, at 7pm on Monday 15 March 2010.

You will also be able to hear the artist speak about his work. The first lecture in McCall’s tour of New Zealand and Australia will take place in Wellington at the Denis and Verna Adam Auditorium, City Gallery, Wellington at 6pm on Wednesday 24 February 2010. This will be followed by lectures at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth at 6pm on Thursday 25 February; the Conference Room at the University of Auckland hosted by Auckland City Council’s Public Art Team at 6pm on Tuesday 2 March, and at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane at 6pm on Thursday 11 March 2010.

Anthony McCall’s works feature in major international collections including Tate Gallery, London, England; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany.

Anthony McCall currently lives and works in New York. He is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Thomas Zander, Cologne and Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris.

This exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of Chartwell Trust; Keystone Trust; David and Libby Richwhite; The Clark Collection; Fulbright New Zealand; Spyglass; Interface; Metro Productions; John Herber Ltd; Auckland City Council Public Art Team; Atlantic Pacific American Express; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; the New Zealand Film Archive; LUX, London and the New Zealand International Arts Festival.

Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past was a suite of five discrete projects, each with their own approach to the re-visioning of historical material.

The Labours of Herakles, the touring exhibition of lithographs and etchings by Marian Maguire which casts the archetypal Greek hero as New Zealand colonist was replaced in December 2009 by a group show of recent acquisitions from Victoria University of Wellington’s Art Collection. Featuring work by Vivian Lynn, Hye Rim Lee, Gavin Hurley, Daniel Malone, Billy Apple and Mary-Louise Browne, this diverse group show provided a snapshot of the current collecting activities of the University.

Alongside this, the Adam Art Gallery was proud to host seven precious Attic vases, illustrating scenes from the life of Herakles and selected from various collections by Victoria University’s Senior Lecturer in Classics, Judy Deuling.

Downstairs an exhibition curated jointly by David Maskill, Senior Lecturer in Art History at Victoria University, and his honours-year postgraduate students looked closely at the artist prints published in the 19th-century French journal Gazette des Beaux-Arts from 1859 to 1933, held in the university’s library. This curatorial project was the first to address the journal’s key role in the survival, revival and dissemination of European printmaking.

The fourth exhibition presented Bible Studies (New Testament) a major new body of work by leading New Zealand artist Gavin Hipkins that brought literary and religious sources into play to produce a rich commentary on the lasting power of iconography as its shapes us personally and collectively.

Finally the Adam Art Gallery paid tribute to New Zealand artist Julian Dashper by presenting two recent acquisitions to the Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection which also recall the past in unexpected ways.

The Adam Art Gallery published two catalogues to accompany the exhibitions. One has been prepared by David Maskill and his students to accompany their selection of prints from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The other documents Gavin Hipkins’ Bible Studies (New Testament) and features a new essay by leading Australian art historian Rex Butler and an interview with the artist conducted by contemporary art writer Allan Smith.

On 3 February 2010, the Adam Art Gallery held a forum to complement Source Material: Five Conversations with the Past. Academics from the fields of literature, religious studies, art history and classics shared their disciplinary approach on the re-use and re-interpretation of historical material to discuss what is at stake in the interpretation of texts and images from the past. Panellists included Judy Deuling, Anna Jackson, David Maskill, Glyn Parry. Chaired by Ian Wedde

In realising these projects the Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa, Photography by Woolf, Victoria University’s School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Exhibition Services, and Coopers Creek.

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.

David Cauchi, Michael Harrison, Patrick Lundberg, Julia Morison. Simon Morris, Reuben Paterson, Kim Pieters, Jeena Shin

To mark the occasion of the Adam Art Gallery’s first ten years, eight artists were invited to spend ten days working directly on the walls of the gallery. Their works provided a context for the Gallery’s 10th birthday party on 19 September 2009.

The gallery doors opened to the public on the first day the artists started work, allowing visitors to see the wall works in process. The exhibition provided an opportunity to see how artists respond to a space and go about realising their work within the tight constraints of a particular timeframe and an actual context.

The exhibition provides an opportunity to celebrate the gallery’s history without dwelling on our past; the temporal projects and their relationship to the site will present instances of the mobility and responsiveness to which the Adam Art Gallery aspires.

Review David Cauchi’s blog for insight into one of the artist’s working process http://pointlessandabsurd.blogspot.com/

In keeping with the format of the Wall Works exhibition, students from the New Zealand School of Music were invited to produce a new sound installation between the two sets of sliding doors at the entrance of the gallery. They took field recordings and developed their composition while the wall artists were at work. The finished sound work was on exhibition from 21 September-4 October 2009.

The gallery officially celebrated its birthday with a party on Saturday 19 September. The evening was orchestrated by the performance collective Full F**king Moon of Bek Coogan and Torben Tilly, along with acts by Double Ya D.

On the night the gallery was filled with specially-commissioned temporary structures designed and built by interior architecture students of Victoria University’s School of Architecture and Design.

The student radio station VBC broadcast the event live to the city of Wellington.

Adam Art Gallery 10th birthday party
Saturday 19 September 2009
8-11pm

Thanks to Resene, The Watusi, Coopers Creek, The International Office, City Timber, Ullrich, PSP, Murray & Taylor, Bungy Extreme, Calvert Plastics, Coastal Fasteners and Anton Berndt for the Wall Works artwork at the Kelburn Parade lightbox and reproduced on all the exhibition posters.

Christina Barton on Wall Works Upbeat Radio New Zealand September 2009 [mp3]