THE HIVE HUMS WITH MANY MINDS

Welcome to the hive, where a global population of seven billion bodies and minds are linked by road networks and rail lines, shipping lanes and flight paths, submarine cables and satellites, electrical grids and server farms. These immense infrastructures are completely dependent upon the plans of engineers, designers, programmers and the countless others who build, maintain or legislate their use. Yet despite its impervious appearance, this hive of civilisation is continually put to the test as terrestrial and human forces seek out weakness and fight for control – be that through social, political, economic or environmental pressure.

THE HIVE HUMS WITH MANY MINDS explores how these vast global mechanisms shape the local reality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Sprawling abundantly over two venues, this exhibition features an eclectic constellation of artworks ranging from large immersive video and sculptural installations to contemplative photographs and drawings.

The selected artworks provide meditations on either industrial, urban or information infrastructures. Using these three subthemes, the 14 featured artists tap into a tangled mass of interrelated issues including information control, global mobility, migration, sovereignty, colonisation, environmental destruction, urbanism, oversaturated mediascapes, social emergence and material residues of the anthropocene.

PART TWO is a Te Tuhi Offsite exhibition held at Silo 6 featuring a large-scale video and billboard installation by Reuben Moss plus a rich variety of video, photographic and sculptural works by Louisa Afoa, Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh, Max Bellamy, Joanna Langford, Suji Park, Mark Schroder, Salome Tanuvasa and Tim J. Veling.

THE HIVE HUMS . . . is supported in part by Creative New Zealand. Te Tuhi would like to thank Panuku Development Auckland; Manurewa High School; Marten Bakker Timbers Ltd; and Central Landscape and Garden Supplies, East Tamaki.

Image: Suji Park, Dols, 2015.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1109157739140319&set=a.1001855303203897.1073741837.100001383091666&type=3&theater

30 April - 29 May 2016

Louisa Afoa // Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh // Max Bellamy // Joanna Langford // Reuben Moss // Suji Park // Mark Schroder // Salome Tanuvasa // Tim J. Veling

Te Tuhi Offsite: Silo 6, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland
open: 11am - 6pm, Tuesday to Sunday

curated by Bruce E. Phillips

http://www.tetuhi.org.nz/exhibitions/exhibitiondetails.php?id=169

Plus: Bowerbank Ninow: Zahra Killeen-Chance, Solomon Mortimer, Suji Park— 647nM, 11 May - 18 June

Occupying a very different kind of space, the suburban contemporary art gallery Te Tuhi (a Maori titled, which broadly means to make a mark) has staged the second part of their exhibition, The Hive Hums With Many Minds in a disused silo in the formerly industrial marine area known as Wynyard Quarter. While the Ports of Auckland still run a substantial international freight operation from one side of Auckland’s downtown wharves, the other side—which includes the venue for the Auckland Art Fair, The Cloud—is undergoing a significant urban transformation. The area around a ‘tank farm’ of large silos once used for bulk petro-chemical storage is now treated as an urban ‘park,’ accommodating everything from music festivals to film nights and art exhibitions.

Image: Te Tuhi Offsite: Silo 6, Wynyard Quarter, Auckland, 2016.

The second part of Te Tuhi’s exhibition The Hive Hums includes a range of video, photography and sculptural works that have been installed within one of these empty silos. Curator Bruce E. Phillips has brought together a selection of works by artists based in Aotearoa-New Zealand that address the expansion of global infrastructure supporting international trade, communication and exchange. The ‘humming hive’ is the network of roading and rail lines, shipping lanes and flight paths, submarine cables and electrical grids whose history has indelibly shaped Auckland’s wharves.

It is no small feat to install a multi-media exhibition in a circular architectural structure whose own industrial atmospherics threaten to upstage the art itself. Nonetheless, Joanna Langford’s banks of beige 90s computer keyboards are particularly suited to this context in being similarly fraught both with technological obsolescence and nostalgia. Named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novelThe beautiful and the damned, Langford’s backlit keyboards suggest apartment buildings in a bustling miniature city: a glitzy Jazz Age New York about to plunge into the boom and bust cycles that continue to characterise many global capitalist economies.

The impact of these economic cycles is being keenly felt in Auckland, a city whose inflated property market and housing crisis has recently caused a dramatic rise in homelessness and social inequity. This is explored in Louisa Afoa’s video that documents her mother’s interactions with a public housing official who threatened to end her tenancy for a series of petty justifications. As a counterpoint, images of Afoa’s mother’s lush and well-tended vegetable garden remind viewers that housing is about more than escalating real estate prices and capital gains.

Lastly, Suji Park’s work Dol—a mound of multi-coloured plaster rocks piled on a coffee table—pulls back from societal specifics to consider the broader long-term impact of human habitation on the globe. Her coloured plaster pieces suggest the strange hybrid of rock, concrete and plastic materials that some scientists predict will become a future marker of this geological era of human activity. A relatively young artist, Park is producing some particularly intriguing work that can also be seen in a concurrent collaborative exhibition at Auckland’s ambitious new auction house and gallery, Bowerbank Ninow. —[O]

https://ocula.com/magazine/reports/exhibitions-to-see-in-auckland/