The fifth edition of Aotearoa Art Fair’s Projects, Aotearoa Made, is guided by the promise that visual artists can challenge us to experience the world anew. Using the Fair as a social catalyst, Aotearoa Art Fair has commissioned seven artists from across the country to reflect upon our inherited understandings of land, geography, and national identity.
Through the mediums of carving, print, photography, recording, moving image, and virtual reality, the artists draw upon the rich, complex, and nuanced histories, stories, and personalities of Aotearoa. Referencing place, memory, time, environment, industry, and culture, they broadly ask: How are we a part of, and integrally connected to, the landscape? Can we imagine a relational world in which humans interact with, rather act upon, others? How do we seriously consider te ao Māori cultural knowledge and traditions in the contemporary global challenges of cohabitation? How do we forge sustaining networks of communication and alliance?
By articulating these concerns, the artists offer a forum to explore, critique, and, at times, better our paradoxical relationship to each other and the outside world. They remind us as audiences, and as members of a larger society, that we are not invincible, independent, or self-sufficient. Rather, we are networked, bound to each other, to history and to the planet. With this knowledge the artists ask us to consider an Aotearoa of a slightly different sort: a community that is re-situated and re-focused, with greater complexity, connection, and convergence. This is their invitation to you.
Projects is a curated exhibition designed to showcase the diversity of contemporary practitioners working across Aotearoa and the Pacific. These responses are installed throughout The Cloud, Yu Mei and the Britomart precinct from 16–20 November. This edition is curated by Micheal Do.
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