Postcards to connect
NZ Postcards to NZ is a socially engaged art project embracing, celebrating and bringing together New Zealand’s 200 ethnicities and 160 languages.
Presented at The Performance Arcade in Wellington, a festival all about engaging the community through experimental art and performance, NZ Postcards to NZ is an opportunity to connect with fellow Kiwis through art.
“Calling all Kiwis to share your own unique culture using #nzpostcardstonz. It’s the creative idea that when we go travelling we approach it with an open heart and with a sense of curiosity and wanting to engage in something new,” artist Adibah Saad said. “We wanted to help create a way that could bring all these feelings and raise awareness within our own country.”
Celebrating the diversity and inclusivity that New Zealand stands for today, this interactive artwork takes New Zealanders on a visual journey through travel postcards that use photographs and text to demonstrate and reveal, that those who we might unthinkingly perceive as the ‘other’, are in fact ‘us’.
At The Performance Arcade viewers are invited to be photographed into a “live postcard” with their chosen backdrop and props.
They can then post into a post-box at the venue to a fellow Kiwi.
Additionally you can pick and post from an exhibited collection of postcards created by the artists if you don’t want to be photographed.
NZ Postcards to NZ was born out of the tragic events at the Christchurch Mosque shooting last year.
“Like our nation, I was devastated by the violence that could compel one to attack another based on their cultural identity — simply because they were different.
“I could no longer sit and watch on the sidelines as so many people in our beautiful country view people ‘the other’. There is an undertone of fear if people are different from us rather than embrace our uniqueness and recognise the beauty that each one of us is in fact different, and this is what underpins us as human beings and actually makes us one — the same.”
The free festival is from February 27 to March 1 on Wellington Waterfront featuring live art, music and performance by New Zealand and international artists.