Video art to brighten waterfront
Video artworks will brighten the Wellington waterfront after dark for the next three weeks.
Into the Open is a programme of movingimage artworks, free to the public, projected along the waterfront until March 14.
This three-week series shows what it means to be human, relating to the weeklong programmes curated by Lemi Ponifasio, Laurie Anderson and Bret McKenzie.
Week one, until March 1, is curated by Ponifasio and will feature works about movement, rhythm and stillness. The artists include three New Zealanders – Yuki Kihara, Ahilapalapa Rands and Ana Iti.
Samoa-based Kihara works in performance and sculpture. Invocation layers personal and art-historical elements to show love, desire and loss, at times directly imitating Salvador Dali’s 1939 painting Ballerina in a Death’s Head.
Kihara said she hoped people would see ‘‘how the wisdom of the past can inform how we might be able to engage in present-day issues for a better future’’.
Rands is a Hawaiian/Fijian/European curator, writer and artist. Her work investigates ways that settler colonisation continues to inform narratives and power dynamics in the Pacific. In Lift Off, animated satellites bounce to the beat of the Hawaiian ipu drum, eventually bursting into digital confetti in a spectacular obliteration of colonial-scientific structures on the summit of Hawaiian volcano, Mauna Kea.
Lana Lopesi, one of the curators of The Commute, wrote: ‘‘Not only does Rands imagine Mauna Kea clear of telescopes, she imagines Hawaiian epistemologies – specifically that of hula – to be the powerful forces by which the telescopes are removed.
‘‘The work is close to my heart, talking about Hawaiian sovereignty and the issues Kanaka Maoli are currently facing to protect our sacred Mauna Kea . . . I hope people take away from this an interest in Mauna Kea and to all indigenous people a reaffirmation of the power of radical imagination.’’
Wellington-based Iti explores the practice of history-making through shared and personal narratives, using sculpture, video and text. In Treasures left by Our Ancestors, the artist crouches in front of the exhibition’s dioramas, positioned in response to the huddled way the Ma¯ ori figures have been depicted. While museum visitors pass by, she continues to crouch in quiet acknowledgement, restoring a sense of sophistication and dignity.
‘‘I want people to see it and understand that the museum isn’t a neutral space. The information that is presented there shapes how we understand ourselves,’’ Iti said.
The second week will feature expressions of sentience and empathy from local artists Hye Rim Lee, Nathan Pohio, Aliyah Winter and Denise Batchelor, and international artist Sasha Huber. The final week features art based on whanaungatanga, or community relationship, by local artists Mike Heynes, Christopher Ulutupu, Elisabeth Pointon and Steve Carr, along with UuDam Tran Nguyen of Vietnam.