Showing some skin

By LINDA HERRICK arts editor

You can bet the old telephone exchange building, which is now the New Gallery, has never housed anything like this before. Naked adults playing tag in a concentration camp, a stalker video, a couple slapping each other, a finger tattooed to the length of a deadly weapon, heroin addicts getting a back tattoo ...

Pressing Flesh, the group show which opens at the gallery on Saturday, is all about skin, says curator Robert Leonard. Skin in many forms, and with many uses, abuses and mutations. The show is heavy, funny, strange and bewildering, with around 20 artists participating from New Zealand, Scotland, Mexico, Yugoslavia, Poland, Italy and Australia.

"I've been interested for a long time in images of skin and tactility, skin and privacy," says Leonard. "I began collecting these images with the idea of creating a show that has developed in all sorts of directions as a result of things I found."

Things like Marina Abramovic and Ulay (as they were known during their years of collaboration), whose Light/Dark video from 1977 comprises a sequence of the couple slapping each other on the face, lit in very bright light. No soundtrack: just the sound of the slaps. This was part of their series of risk-taking performances entitled Relation Work.

Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, who represented his country at this year's Venice Biennale but lives in Mexico, is in the show with his controversial video work, 160cm Line Tattooed on 4 People. The four people are female heroin addicts, hired to give their consent to be tattooed for the price of one shot.

"This is one of the heaviest things in the show," Leonard muses. "But his work brings about the question of who is exploiting who and which is the worst type of exploitation."

Australian photographer Pat Brassington offers some images of which Leonard is unsure what to make. "I think that might be a crotch," he says, gazing at one.

Argentinian Lucio Fontana is a clear inspiration in the show, with his "ripped skin canvas" style displayed in Rouge 4 Feubes/ Concetto Spaziale linked with New Zealand artists Rohan Wealleans' Delayed Gratification and Luise Fong's Touch.

From Scotland, Douglas Gordon goes for the jugular, or the heart, with Three Inches, an image of a finger tattooed black over its first 7.6cm, the depth, Leonard explains, of a deadly weapon. "The length you would have to drive into a body to rupture a vital organ."

New Zealand artists are well- (or should that be ill-) represented in Pressing Flesh. Jae Hoon Lee, a recent masters graduate from Elam, specialises in digital photography which is remastered on computer, then shown as video projections. One Hundred Faces shows exactly that: 100 faces scanned and morphed into a single sheet of skin. Camouflage is many images of people with different skin colours collaged together.

Terry Urbahn has perhaps one of the creepiest video works in the show: PS. I Love You, showing footage of him stalking Wellington City Gallery director Paula Savage through the streets of the capital city. It's unclear whether she knows he's hiding in the bushes outside her house, and the overall effect is very funny.

So, too, is Terrence Handscomb's list of People That I Would Have Liked to Have Slept With, a romantic blacklist - or wishlist - of people in the arts scene.

Inclusion on one of the lists is either condemnatory or complimentary. The names are familiar: even Robert Leonard himself is on the list. That's very funny, too.

Not so is Polish video artist Artur Zmijewski's Game of Tag. The participants - adult men and women - are nude. They are chasing each other around a room. It was partly shot in an apartment, partly in a gas chamber in a concentration camp. "It is a very strange piece," Leonard agrees. "You don't know quite how to read it, as some kind of cathartic work dealing with pain and history and trauma by doing something funny. Maybe they are just playing to take the heaviness away."

Exhibition

* What: Pressing Flesh: Skin Touch Intimacy

* Where & when: New Gallery, Saturday to February 29