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APT9 provides readers with an opportunity to discover the extraordinarily creative output of a diverse selection of artists from Asia and the Pacific including New Zealand in an attractive, informative and compact volume, rich with full-colour illustrations, including large-scale installations and newly commissioned works.
Features: Tungaru: The Kiribati Project.
Tungaru is a collaborative project inspired by the strong connections that New Zealand born artist Chris Charteris has made quite recently with his ancestral homeland and extended i-Kiribati family. Raised in a Pakeha family, Charteris initially believed he was of Maori heritage and trained as a carver. Later discovering he was of Kiribati and Fijian heritage reinforced his sense of the importance of knowing who we are and where we come from. The indigenous name for Kiribati is Tungaru, which means to gather together in a joyous way. Returning to this name for their project, Charteris and collaborating artists come together to celebrate the resilience of the islands' ancestral culture as well as the contemporary concerns faced by its people. Drawing on knowledge held by community elders and museum collections and creating artworks in response to these, this group reflects on the nature of culture and identity in a global world.
and Peter Robinson:
Peter Robinson initially trained in sculpture but is also known for his installation, drawings and paintings. He began referencing Maori cultural concepts and forms during the 1990s in response to bicultural politics in New Zealand. Robinson's practice has evolved over time as he engages with his materials, and his creations are, in part, driven by the form and function of his chosen media. He is also interested in how art can occupy and test the gallery space. His works range from monumental installations that exploit the material and sensory qualities of polystyrene, to site-specific interventions in felt, Perspex and wood. His recent practice explores more modest and subtle forms made with everyday materials, such as wood, wire, paper, metal, nails and magnets. Playfully engaging with the visual and physical language of materials, Robinson draws on histories of modern and contemporary art to question and critique formal and conceptual art-making.
Anne Noble
A practising photographer since the 1970s, Anne Noble creates bodies of work through what she refers to as essays or narratives of photographic images. Working against the usual idea of the rapid and instant snapshot, hers is an immersive act of looking, resulting in unexpected and thought-provoking work that gets inside her subject matter. Her wide-ranging subjects include a London convent, Antarctica, the coastal and river landscapes of New Zealand, elderly disabled people and their carers, and depictions of her father at his funeral. In recent years, she has turned her attention to the honeybee, a small creature symbolic of our ecosystems wellbeing. In her engagement with the bee, Noble has worked with a range of media, from moving image and microscopic photography, to installation, sound and community engagement. She has also become a proficient beekeeper.
Gavin Hipkins
Gavin Hipkins photographs, photo installations and moving image works strategically deploy various techniques and styles of image-making to interrogate how images create meaning. Over the last two decades, his work has been concerned with photography and architecture as modernist technologies, as well as the nation state particularly in colonised countries in an era of reimagined communities and ideas of social and political utopia. In 2010, he began making non-linear narrative films, which frequently reference nineteenth-century texts. These films adapt selected writings to contemporary settings that relate to both the past and to possible futures. His recent moving image works engage film as a cinematic art that blurs conventional genres of essay film, documentary and experimental narrative structures.
Featured in the 1 October 2018 New Zealand newsletter.
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