CIRCUIT CAST

Yuki Kihara leads Mark Amery on a walkthrough of her exhibition ‘A Study of a Samoan Savage’ at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery. Examining historical and contemporary depictions of the Samoan body, Kihara discusses the show’s links between Samoan spirituality, Eadweard Muybridge and Sonny Bill Williams. Curator Ioana Gordon-Smith joins us briefly to discuss the shows resonance in West Auckland.

Image: Subscapular with Skinfold Caliper' (2015) From 'A Study of a Samoan Savage' (2015) series Yuki Kihara Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries Dunedin

Cinema of splendour or 'be-numbed ego-centrism'? Martin Patrick, Thomasin Sleigh and Mark Amery review Matthew Barney's epic cine-opera River of Fundament. The pod discuss Barney's interplay between sculpture, cinema and visual art, his positions on gender and women, and his many references to celebrated figures of the 20th century avant-garde. Is this a film for our times? All this plus J Hoberman and James Lee Byers.

Image: River of Fundament (2014) Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler

How does a gallery best serve it’s public? How does a gallery best serve an artist? In this podcast Ema Tavola, Judy Darragh and host Mark Amery find many resonances in the work of Angela Tiatia, but lament the missed opportunities in a survey at Māngere Arts Centre.

Image credit: Angela Tiatia, Walking the Wall, 2014, Digital Video, Duration 13:04 minutes. Courtesy of the Artist & Alcaston Gallery, Melbourne.

Curator George Clark and Writer Martin Patrick discuss Camille Henrot's Grosse Fatigue, Sol Le Witt's assertion that conceptual artists are not rationalists but mystics, and how we mediate the claims of the internet to represent the world.

George Clark is CIRCUIT's 2016 curator at large. Martin Patrick is a writer and academic based in Wellington, NZ.

Grosse Fatigue is at City Gallery Wellington until 13 March

2016.

Image: Camille Henrot ,Grosse Fatigue, 2013. Courtesy Silex Films and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris

From moving images to gang portraits to wonky pots; in this podcast our panel consider the most interesting events in the New Zealand art world of 2015. Host Mark Amery is joined by regulars Martin Patrick and Thomasin Sleigh plus newbies Emma Bugden and Reuben Friend.

How do we talk about what can’t be spoken? Thai artist Sutthirat Supaprinya (Som) discusses her recent installation at Toi Pōneke Arts Centre in Wellington entitled STEAL THIS BOOK. Reflecting on censorship, misinformation and buried histories, she talks about art’s role in illuminating the past and present.

The WARE (Wellington Artists Residency Exchange) is a collaboration between Wellington City Council and The Asia New Zealand Foundation.

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Image: Installation Shot: STEAL THIS BOOK, Sutthirat Supaparinya, Toi Pōneke Arts Centre, 30 October - 14 November 2015

Women appear, but on whose terms? In this recording from the 2015 London Film Festival Lucy Reynolds (artist, writer and Course Leader of MRes Art: Moving Image, Central Saint Martins) chairs a discussion on how women artists are represented in the histories of experimental film.

Panellists include Charlotte Procter (Collections Manager of LUX & Member of the Cinenova Working Group), Maud Jacquin (independent scholar and writer) and Mark Williams (Director of CIRCUIT Artists' Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand), and co-curator of the LFF screening Joanna Margaret Paul: I am an open window.

Introduction

0 – 4.35 Lucy Reynolds. Quote from Lis Rhodes’ essay Whose History? (1979).

Panel Presentations

4.35-13.10 Maud Jacquin on women film-makers working in the London Film-makers Co-Operative from the mid 1960s to the mid 1990s; alternative conceptions of the body, subjectivity and history

13.49-27.00 Charlotte Procter on Cinenova; a distribution agency formed in 1991 from merger of two feminist film distributors Circles and Cinema of Women; questions of archiving

27.26-37.10 Mark Williams on working with the collection of Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003), a New Zealand film-maker and artist working across disciplines whilst living in the geographical margins

Panel Discussion

37:00 LR to MJ: Why show this work now? What drew you to the work? How to bring it into dialogue with contemporary artists?

41.50 LR to CP: What are young practitioners finding in the Cinenova collection?

43: MJ/MW: on inter-disciplinary nature of women working in the 1970s

44:42 LR: cites Guy Brett’s observation that for women the distinction between life and art is more porous

46:00 LR: On having to continually answer the question of why it was necessary to establish distribution and representation that was/is women only

47:40 LR: How to find women’s work? MW on working with Archives and issues with cataloguing

48:50 LR: Why the struggle for institutional advocacy? Corresponding danger of work being subsumed into institutions.

52:30 Is the museum a good space to show experimental film works?

55:00 How does the contemporary art market support the preservation, distribution and accessibility to historical film works? How do female moving image artists feel about their relationship to the art market and the collecting institution? How does this differ from their relationship to self-determined (and feminist) models for exhibition and distribution?

Audience Questions

58.30 (Question 1) How do we represent historical feminist work in a contemporary institutional context and innately embody feminism?

52:00 (Question 2) With Joanna Paul’s work how do you release something so personal to the marketplace? MW on market potentially providing funds for restoring the Joanna Paul archive

65:32 (Question 3) In the 1970s structuralist movement how did women extend the paradigm of experimental film?

68:30 LR: What does contemporary feminist scholarship project on the past?

73.00 (Question 4) How did women artists in the 1970s support themselves financially?

76:00 (Question 5) What other parallel histories and genealogies of Women’s experimental film-making await scholarship?

79.30 (Question 6) Does exclusion from official histories and movements offer a kind of freedom from ‘the baggage’ of other histories?

81.21 (Question 7) What kind of challenges are associated with archiving and preserving video as a medium?

86:00 (Question 8) How do we prioritise what gets preserved?

88:28 (Question 9) How do we introduce the work of older female artists to younger female practitioners?

93.30 (Question 10) What kind of writing accompanies the works and in what form, be it essays, cataloguing or other?

101.00 (Question 11) What other contemporary resources exist for the promotion of film works by women?

106:00 Ends

Thanks to LUX, The London Film Festival, Benjamin Cook and Stuart Heaney.

What is an artist-run space today? Mark Amery talks to Chloe Geoghegan, Director of Dunedin's Blue Oyster about the evolution of the gallery, her previous role at Dog Park in Christchurch and Dunedin's new City Council-led arts precinct.

On the phone from Sydney, Jae Hoon Lee talks to Mark Amery about showing his work in a hotel at the Spring 1883 art fair, how his practice draws on Eastern spiritual philosophy and his recent residency at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Art vs Architecture? Ego vs Id? In this pod we review Demented Architecture at City Gallery Wellington and discuss whether the show really sets out to show the two disciplines as the best of enemies. Host Mark Amery is joined by regular guests Martin Patrick and Thomasin Sleigh.