Outdoor art: Living Room 2010 - A Week of Goodness
Where and when: Auckland CBD, April 9-17
Aucklanders need to be brave and open their minds to an art spectacle coming up in the city, says curator Pontus Kyander.
Living Room 2010 - A Week of Goodness is a week-long free event which matches artists with choreographers to create live installations and dance works on the city's streets.
It also includes two film programmes: MIC Toi Rerehiko has curated a selection of short home-grown animated works, while Living Room curator Kyander has put together a programme of short films about and by local and international artists. The films will screen in the evenings in shipping containers at QEII Square and Freyberg Place.
Participating artists in the film programme include choreographer Shona McCullagh and musician Phil Dadson, with Sally Tran, Eve Gordon, Jill Kennedy and Deborah Teh, plus Nevin Aladag of Germany.
New Zealand artists Carol Brown, Sarah Jane Parton, Isobel Dryburgh, Mark Harvey and the et.Al collective take part in the wider Living Room programme, with Britain's Paula Roush and Danish artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen as international guests.
Choreographer Charles Koroneho joins forces with Rasmussen for two works: The Future is already way behind the Present doesn't exist in my Mind, exploring lust, sexuality and the subjugation of women; and A Night of Goodness, featuring Unitec dance students and graduates.
The project is funded by the Auckland City Council ($100,000) and Creative New Zealand ($7500), while the British Council is supporting the festival to the tune of $15,000 plus associated costs. Kyander, who used to be the city council public art manager and is now the director at Norway's Sorlandets Kunstmuseum, says the "week of goodness" theme allows artists to examine ideas about giving and kindness.
et.Al and dancer Sean Curham, for example, are producing one-to-many and many-to-one, a temporary installation in Khartoum Place which questions why we do things for others, the connection between individual and social giving and the importance of reciprocity in social situations.
"I always consider art and artworks to be an act of giving regardless of any economic transaction," says Kyander. "There is a generosity that lies behind art and I like to explore this idea. This event is an act of giving and even though people might not have asked for it, they may need it."
He adds that passers-by may need to be brave by watching things they might not normally linger over, placing them in a context and forming an opinion rather than being quick to judge.
"If you just decide something is not for you and walk away, you might miss out on something that changes your day."
The event also allows for artists and the public alike to think about the place of art in municipal spaces which become, as the name suggests, living rooms. Freyberg Place, Khartoum Place, Pier 3 on Quay St, QEII Square and St Patrick's Square are the main venues for the festival.
The week of goodness theme was inspired by surrealist artist Max Ernst's 1934 graphic novel Une semaine de bonte (A Week of Kindness) which consists of seven sections named after the days of the week and then linked with an element: mud, water, fire, blood, blackness, sight and unknown.
Ernst cut up and reorganised images from Victorian encyclopaedias and novels to create 182 collages which depict a dark and surreal world of transformation and imagination: human characters with huge animal heads sit in Victorian drawing rooms, giant hands reach into bedrooms, birdmen sweep across the sky, women grow wings and snakes and serpents crawl out from the curtains.
The book is central to London artist Paula Roush's piece, A Field of Interconnected Realities. Two artists - Roush, who'll be in Auckland, and Maria Lusitano in Sweden - will use a webcam to develop a series of interconnected drawings inspired by Ernst's collages.
Each session is performed live, mixing hand drawing with the use of sketch-a-graph, a machine that can enlarge and reduce an image while copying it. The drawing performance is networked with webcams and streamed live on the net and projected at QEII Square. After the performance the audience will be invited to participate and experiment drawing using the sketch-o-graph.
Roush will do one live drawing every day for five days and from these sessions, material will be produced for a revised "semaine de bonte" artists' book.
