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Breath of life

Now in its 4th edition, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial is a successful Japanese art experiment with large-scale contemporary works installed in rice paddies, closed-down schools and refurbished old houses scattered across a rural region about three hours from Tokyo. It's a region where snow falls for eight months of the year, earthquakes occur frequently and violently, and where local youth are being lured away to better jobs in big cities, leaving an aging population and a stagnating local economy. In short, the region is an increasingly depopulated disaster area.

The Triennial was established as a last-ditch effort to save the region by revitalising it with contemporary art. More than 250,000 visitors are expected to attend the 4th edition, which runs to 13 September 09, bringing with them fully-booked hotels, invigorating all types of business in the local economy and helping to put the rural region on the world art map.

The abandoned houses of the region with their noble wooden structures and links with the past seem to offer the greatest source of inspiration to the artists. The Triennial has saved and restored 50 of these heritage buildings over the last four editions. “Here the artists work with time and memory and they are happy to do so because it rekindles their inspiration” says Fram Kitagawa, curator of this year's event. For instance, visitors to the Triennial can sleep in a House of Light, a traditional house transformed by James Turrell into a lightbox with a roof that opens up to allow guests to contemplate the changing sky. Or they can curl up in another old house redesigned by Marina Abramovic as a Dream Hotel, complete with crystal pillows.

Images (from the top): Christian Boltanski & Jean Kalman, The Last Class; Chiharu Shiota, House Memory; Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Storm Room; Qiu Zhijie, The Thunderstorm is Slowly Approaching; Cai Guo-Qiang, Dragon Museum of Contemporary Art. All images from the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial website

A novel way to wind up a collection

Over the past decade we've seen a growing interest in art co-ops – groups of art lovers forming collections purchased collectively and rotated around their homes. When the collections are wound up they generally go to one of Auckland's auction houses to be sold into the secondary art market. Recently the Auckland-based group behind the 2nd Collection took a more novel approach to the dispersal of their collection of 32 works formed over a 10-year period. The works were appraised by an independent valuer giving an estimated value for the entire collection. The sum was divided by the number of members in the art co-op giving each member credit they could use to bid for works at a silent auction held at Starkwhite. Through a process of paper bids and rounds that allowed each member to get a work before moving to the next round, the entire collection was picked up by members who were all delighted to have a work or two that they couldn't bear to part with.

Images (from the top): works by Neil Dawson and Julian Dashper, dispersed from the 2nd Collection, Auckland, New Zealand

Coming up at Starkwhite

Matt Henry's exhibition Flatline opens in our Project Space on 7 September and runs to 3 October 2009.

Image: Matt Henry, Duochrome No. 3 from the series “16:9, 2008, oil on linen

Fazed from the street

Grant Stevens' exhibition Fazed closes this Saturday (29 August '09). You can contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz if you'd like more information on Fazed or images of works in the exhibition.

Image: Grant Stevens, Fazed, installation views from Karangahape Road, Auckland, New Zealand

Featured Work

As a masters student at Auckland University Lee began using a flatbed scanner to record changes in his skin. He documented sore, pores, freckles and hairs in gross detail, pressed up against the glass, then collaged the scans to create sheets of skin, deranged diaristic bodyscapes, which he presented as photographs and videos. The work combined the organic and the technological in a way that was surprising at the time. Simultaneously beautiful and repulsive, intimate and abject, it unsettled one's familiar sense of the body. Over the next few years Lee made numerous works expanding on his idea of the skin portrait, increasingly using scans of other people's bodies. By fusing different people's skin he played off the assumption that our skin defines us as individuals, separating us from others.

From this base of concerns and strategies, Lee's work has expanded in the last few years, into a range of video and photographic works, including lightboxes, that embrace pornography and religion, the abject and the spectacular; that engage the natural sublime and the technolgical sublime; that conflate high-tech artifice and monstrous bodily organicism; and that fuse vernacular experience with a sense of the religious or spiritual. The work continues to hint at new forms of visual experience as he combines a photographic logic with the isometric perspective-free gaze of the scanner and the 'planiverse' collaging tools of the computer.

If you want to know more about these works, including price, or others by the artist you can contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Images by Jae Hoon Lee (from the top): Becoming (2003), Salvation #2 (2006), Two Holes (2008), all digital prints, editions of 8

Rethinking arts journalism

A National Summit on Arts Journalism is a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communications and the National Arts Journalism Programme. The Summit organisers say there are many new projects in the US aimed at reinventing arts coverage. Journalists, arts organisations and media entrepreneurs are trying to create interesting new models of arts journalism. They have gathered up some of the best of these projects to see what looks promising and bring them to a wider audience. The five best projects will be announced on the summit website on 28 August 2009.

Arts journalism in the New Zealand media has been in decline for a while (there are no visible signs of rethinking/remodeling) and is being superceded by on-line projects that are expanding the field of possibilities. The new entrants are bringing different interests and perspectives to arts news, stories and reviews. We are also seeing more artists' blogs that provide entry points to their practices and projects. Here are a few blogs that are worth checking out: Art, Life, TV, Etc; Best of 3; eyeCONTACT; Outpost; over the net and on the table; Peter Peryer; et al.

Out with the old and in with the new

Recently the Christchurch Art Gallery moved the last remaining work from their collection galleries to storage. The departure of van der Velden's Otira Gorge marked an important moment in the Gallery's history – the end of the old and arrival of a new approach to collection shows. All will be revealed in the forthcoming exhibition Brought to Light, but at present it is under wraps. Expectations are high as a new crew at the Gallery has been ringing in the changes, notably with an edgier programme of contemporary art. The current exhibitions include: Seraphine Pick; Ronnie van Hout: Who goes there; et al. that's obvious, that's right! that's true!; Gary Hill: Up Against Down; and Subsonic: sound art in the bunker. You can track progress on the new exhibition at the Gallery's aptly named blog site Brought to light.

Image: Courtesy of Brought to light, Christchurch City Gallery

Underground cinema

We are pleased to announce that we will be working with Jim Speers, an Auckland-based artist with a long and distinguished record of projects and exhibitions staged in New Zealand and internationally. Rather than running with what he has done so far, we thought we'd open with an outline of one of his great unrealised ideas – a proposal for an underground cinema dedicated to the constant screening of Sam Peckinpah's classic western Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia. Starring Warren Oates, Kris Kristofferson and others, the film represents a weird 70s moment when American cinema went to Mexico – a foreign movie staged in a foreign landscape.

Speers wants to build his cinema in the great outdoors – the kind of landscape we often refer to as cinematic – creating a series of adventures: first to the location (one that is foreign to the idea of cinema) and then, having been drawn to a minimal, modernist folly (sitting somewhere between art and architecture), below and into the ground for the cinema experience. Here visitors would encounter Peckinpah's Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia in a home theatre-scaled cinema connected to the surface by a transparent roof allowing a view of the cinema's internal space and the activities of the cinema-goers.

Images: concept drawings for Jim Speers' Underground Cinema

BREATH OF WIND

Phil Dadson's BREATH OF WIND has its first outing at the Tauranga Art Gallery from 22 August to 15 November 2009. You can see a video clip here.

Images: Phil Dadson, BREATH OF WIND (2009), 17 hotair balloons and a brass band, video/sound installation

Featured work

This artwork is from Gavin Hipkins' Empire series, started in 2007. This body of work takes as its starting point the appropriation of line illustrations from children's Empire and Commonwealth annuals dating from the 1950s. The original images were used to illustrate stories of adventure and historical drama in accord with the formation and ideological sustainability of the British Empire and Commonwealth including New Zealand. The illustrations also record a post-war nostalgia for colonial discovery and adventure, as well as a sense of the unifying spirit forged by the war effort, coupled with the optimisms for the shared rebuilding of Commonwealth nations in the wake of World War Two. The backdrops have been overlaid with scanned patches purchased in music store and markets creating photographs that sit somewhere between history painting and t-shirt art. If you would like more information on this work, or others by the artist, please contact us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz

Image: Gavin Hipkins, Empire (Track) 2009, C-type print, 1200 x 1650mm, edition of 3

Wall painting reviewed

John Hurrell's review of Andrew Barber's Wall Painting #3 at the Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts is published here. Barber's project runs at Te Tuhi to 27 September 2009.

Image: Andrew Barber, Wall Painting #3, installation view, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Pakuranga, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009

ART LA

More from LA – this time a video of ART LA 09 where we presented a solo exhibition by Peter Stichbury. You can see video footage of our show here.

Image: Peter Stichbury, Zach Klein, 2008, acrylic on linen, 650 x 850mm

Reframing the recession

Over the past months the art market news from Los Angeles has been pretty grim so it's good to hear that even in these difficult times some in the LA art world remain optimistic, saying they are in for the long haul.

“Earthquakes, riots, fires,” says art dealer Thomas Solomon, ticking off challenges of doing business in Los Angeles. Now a global recession has deflated the international art market sending auction house prices into a downward spiral, shuttering galleries, squeezing collectors' confidence as well as their budgets. Recently, against all odds, he opened a new gallery in a storefront on Chinatown. “I've been through these ups and downs,” he says. “I'm not going away. Art is in my blood. This is what I do.”

In an article published in the Los Angeles Times Suzanne Muchnic says art prices may be weakening, yet opportunities exist amid the challenges, Indeed, she says, a surprising number of galleries have been able to grow. You can read the article here.

Glass Stress Review

The Collateral Events Programme for this year's Venice Biennale includes Glass Stress. The exhibition, which includes work by Hye Rim Lee, has been reviewed in the International Herald Tribune. You can read Contemporary Reflections in Glass by Roderick Conway Morris at the New York Times/Herald Tribune website. The exhibition runs at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettre ed Arti to 22 November 2009.

Image: Hye Rim Lee, from the Crystal City series, 2008

Snow Tussock

Described by the artist as New Zealand's slowest artwork (it will take decades to reach maturity), Snow Tussock (2003) was commissioned by Starkwhite for a heritage park in East Otago. The work by John Reynolds comprises 854 tussocks planted in a 70 x 70 metre grid in a field situated between an historic church and a small cemetery that traces the post-contact history (farming and mining) of Macraes Village and its surrounds. Reynolds chose to work with the species Snow Tussock because it is a native plant under threat from annual burn-offs carried out by the local farming community.

Images: Snow Tussock (2003), Macraes Village, East Otago, New Zealand

Looking back to Wonderland

Those with an interest in the history of New Zealand photography should visit Outpost, the Auckland Art Gallery staff blog. Curator Ron Brownson has posted a selection of photographs by Alfred Burton – some from a journey he took through the King Country to Wanganui in 1885 and others from The Wonderland Album – New Zealand, which Brownson considers to be one of our most important assemblages of 19th century topographical photographs. The photographs and Brownson's informative notes are published here under Alfred Burton – the man who makes likenesses and The Wonderland Album – New Zealand (Pt 1 and Pt 2).

Image credits:

Alfred Burton, Our canoe and crew, Ranana, Whanganui River 1885, silver gelatin print, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1999 (1999/5/3)

Alfred Burton, Gigantic cabbage tree, Papakai, King Country (1999/18/63); Lake Taupo from Motutere (1999/18/66). From The Wonderland Album – New Zealand, circa 1898-1899, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. The Ilene and Laurence Dakin Bequest, purchased 1999

VVORK Collection

Boris Dornbusch's Involving All Members features on VVORK, a daily website that offers a curated collection of contemporary art. You can visit VVORK here.

Images: Boris Dornbusch, Involving All Members, 2008, aluminium blinds, box of panadol, dimensions variable

Around the Water Cooler at THE OFFICE's Far-Flung Performances

Throughout the month of July the curatorial team of Ellen Blumenstein, Katharina Fichtner, Maribel Lopez and Kathrin Myer – known collectively as THE OFFICE – staged a series of 11 performances in Berlin. The last one in the series was a collaborative work by Matt Keegan and Dane Mitchell. You can read Kari Rittenbach's review of the project (Around the Water Cooler at THE OFFICE's Far-Flung Performances) on the Art in America website.

Image: Matt Keegan & Dane Mitchell, 2009

Fahrenheit window project

Matt Henry's Fahrenheit window project is showing at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery to 31 August 2009.

Image: Matt Henry, Fahrenheit, 2009, installation view, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand

Review of Fazed

John Hurrell's review of Grant Stevens: Fazed is published here at eyeCONTACT and Nicola Harvey's review of WORD at the Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney (which includes a video work by Stevens) is published here in Frieze magazine.

Image: Grant Stevens, Flow (2009), lambda print, 290 x 410 mm, 1/8

Experiments in Celluloid

Experiments in Celluloid screens at Artspace, 300 Karangahape Road, on Thursday 6 August from 7.30pm. Curated by Derek Gehring and Nova Paul for Floating Cinema and The Film Archive, it provides an opportunity to see some rare and groundbreaking films by Phil Dadson, David Blyth, Gregor Nicholas and Alex Monteith.

Phil Dadson's EARTHWORKS is described as a simultaneous performance / recording event – co-incident with autumn and spring equinixes – to be realised at 1800 hours G.M.T, at 15 diverse locations on the 23/24th of September 1971, aiming to capture a temporary instant in the continuum of universal ebb and flow. Eight of the fifteen recipients of invitations to participate responded and performed the instructions to shoot stills and make a synchronised audio recording. The New Zealand part in the 10 minute event, at 6.00 am sunrise, on the volcanic plateau, was filmed continuously onto 16mm film, into which stills from other locations were later edited. The audio track is an unedited mix of tape-recordings.

You can visit Phil Dadson's website here.

Images: Phil Dadson, EARTHWORKS, 1971/72, 16mm film (also available as video version)

Fazed

Three works from Grant Stevens' Fazed exhibition. For further information on these works and others by the artist you can email us at starkwhite@starkwhite.co.nz.

Images (top to bottom): Grant Stevens, Blow Out (2009), lambda print, 1510 x 950 mm, edition of 8; Dormant (2009), lambda print, 760 x 1010 mm, edition of 20; Crushing (2009), digital video, edition of 9

Grant Stevens: Fazed

Grant Stevens exhibition Fazed runs to 29 August 2009. The show includes blue fluorescent tubes and audio, guitar by David Cretney.

Images: Grant Stevens, Fazed, installation views, August 2009, Starkwhite, Auckland NZ

21st-Century Art History

The latest issue of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art considers the future face of historiography addressing questions such as: What will the discipline of art history look like in the 21st century? What will its subjects be? With the decline of Eurocentric models of art history and the end of postcolonialism, what ways of writing art history will be possible? What would a non-national, international, or even transnational history look like? Is it a 'global' art history that we should be aiming for?

The issue opens with Curating the World, a conversation between Rex Butler and Okwui Enwezor, who is recognised as one of the major contributors on and thinkers about art in the world today. It closes with Reviews Etc, a section that includes Robert Leonard's no-punches-pulled review of The Big Picture: A History of New Zealand Art from 1642, a six-episode TV series and accompanying book by cultural commentator Hamish Keith.

The Journal of The Art is published by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand and the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) Brisbane, with managing editor Robert Leonard. More information on the 21st-Century Art History issue is published here.

Image: Cover of Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art/21st-Century Art History, Volume 9 Number 1/2, 2008/9. Available from the IMA, price AUD20

So close yet so far away

The 2009 International Incheon Women Artists Biennale, So close yet so far away, runs from 1 – 31 August 2009. It's the world's only biennale devoted exclusively to the creative endeavours of women. The programme includes The 21st Century, The Feminine Century, and the Century of Diversity and Hope curated by Heng-Gil Han and featuring the work of Hye Rim Lee (further information on this exhibition is published here) and an international symposium on the subject Women Artists in the 'Post-Feminism' Era, which takes place on 2 August 2009. (See programme here)

Images: Hye Rim Lee, Lash, 2005, single channel video; and venue for the Incheon Women Artists Biennale, Incheon, Korea

Art History

Rita Angus: Life & Vision opens tomorrow at the Auckland Art Gallery. Curated by William McAloon and Jill Trevelyan, the exhibition celebrates the life and work of one of the great pioneers of modern painting in this country. Trevelyan is also the author of the biography Rita Angus: An Artist's life, which was the non-fiction winner and biography category winner of this year's Montana Book Awards. Further information on the exhibition is published here.

Image: Cover of Jill Trevelyan's book Rita Angus:An Artist's Life

Julian Dashper 1960-2009

et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true!

et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true! is showing at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu to 22 November 2009. You can visit the artists' website here and mail them at etal@etal.name.

Images: et al. that's obvious! that's right! that's true!, installation views, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, NZ, July 2009. Photographs by David Watkins and courtesy of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu

What is Contemporary Art?

Art fairs on our side of the world are engaged in a tussle to become the Art Basel of Asia. We're less interested in whether there is a clear winner – we hope several emerge in the Asia/Pacific region with the potential to rival the great fairs of Europe – than the moves they make to raise the stakes.

What is Contemporary Art? is the subject of a conference organised by Anton Vidokle for ShContemporary09. The conference will be structured as a four-day series of short lectures and contents will be published in e-flux journal. The lineup of speakers includes: Hu Fang, Hal Foster, Boris Groys, Jeorg Heiser, Raqs Media Collective, Carol Yinghua Lu, Cuauhtemoc Medina, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Martha Rosler, Gao Shiming and Jan Verwoert. The lecture series takes place as part of the special section Discoveries, an exhibition curated by Wang Jianwei and Mami Katoka that includes artists such as Marina Abramovic, Heman Chong, Joseph Kosuth, Susan Norrie, Shinji Ohmaki, Martha Rosler, Anri Sala, Fiona Tan, Xu Zhen and others. The conference programme description and schedule is published here.

Image: Shanghai Exhibition Centre and venue for ShContemporary09

Barber Wall Painting #3

Andrew Barber's Wall Painting #3 is currently showing at the Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts to 27 September 2009. This work follows wall paintings presented in Country Painting, Starkwhite (2007) and HEADWAY: New Artists Show, curated by Laura Preston and Brian Butler, Artspace (2006).

Images: Andrew Barber, Wall Painting #3, linen on stretcher, installation views, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Pakuranga, Auckland (2009)

Escape artists

Today's issue of Canvas in Auckland's Weekend Herald has a story on artists living and working overseas. The lineup of artists featured in the story includes Martin Basher (New York), Alicia Frankovich (Berlin) and Dane Mitchell (Berlin).

Image: Canvas cover (Martin Basher), Weekend Herald, July 25, 2009

Screening at Blue Oyster

Boris Dornbusch is one of three artists presenting work at Dunedin's Blue Oyster Project Space “that explore lives lived through, constructed by or remembered because of the screen.” (Blue Oyster website). Dornbusch's single channel video Paviljon Marinum depicts a chance meeting in a former Yugoslavian Children's camp. The video was recorded on an island off Croatia during the artists visit to his home country in 2008. Paviljon Marinum runs to 8 August 2009.

Image: Boris Dornbusch, Paviljon Marinum, 2008, video still

Dark Water heads south

In Cho Duck Hyun's Dark Water project, a container is fictitiously transported through the Earth, hoisted up from the ground or water and opened to reveal its treasure of the artist’s photo-realistic portraits and other images on canvas. It is a Wunderkammer, revealing and reflecting on the history of individuals as well as general patterns of migration.

The original container was unearthed at the 1994 São Paulo Biennial after seemingly having travelled from Seoul. After featuring in Living Room 09: My heart is where my home is (curated by Pontus Kyander) and then Starkwhite's Project Space, Dark Water: The Antipodes Project is travelling to Dunedin. (Watch the Dunedin Public Art Gallery website for further information on the Dunedin leg of the journey.) Later it will continue its journey to another antipode, Liverpool, UK. Click here for shots of Dark Water surfacing at Auckland's Princes Wharf.

Images: Cho Duck Hyun, Dark Water: The Antipodes Project, 2009, Princes Wharf, Auckland. Photographs courtesy of the artist

40 years on

The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery is the latest recipient of an Arts Foundation Governors Award. The Award recognises a person or organisation that makes an extraordinary contribution to the arts in New Zealand – in this case the gallery's unwavering commitment to working with contemporary art over a period of almost 40 years. (The Gallery celebrates its 40th anniversay in 2010.) The previous recipients of the Governors Award are Otago University for its commitment to the Robert Burns, Frances Hodgkins and Mozart Fellowships and Radio New Zealand Concert for its support of New Zealand Music.

Later in the year the Arts Foundation will announce the recipients of the 2009 Laureate Awards. Five Laureates are selected each year with each one receiving $50,000. You can find out more about the Arts Foundation here.

Alicia Frankovich at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum

Alicia Frankovich's SEMPRE MENO, SEMPRE PEGGIO, SEMPRE PIÙ was performed today at Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel with Oliver Vogt, head organiser of the exhibition Rundgang 09 Spaziergang, which includes a performance programme.

Rethinking public art

Like many international cities, Auckland has a lot of public art – some good, some bad, some very very bad. The city's public art programmes are administered by the Auckland City Council which proudly proclaims: “Throughout central Auckland city there is an extensive collection of public art works including sculptures, statues, monuments, fountains, water features, mosaics and murals.” Not a very promising start. Nor is there much comfort to be gained from other aspects of the ACC's public art positioning statement on its growing collection of over 200 works “reflecting the city's unique identity, its cultural heritage, telling its stories.”

Storytelling about place, culture and identity is now associated with Te Papa The Museum of New Zealand and the privileging of social history exhibitions over contemporary art, so the art world gets jumpy whenever it encounters this kind of Te Papa-ish rhetoric. However there is a new broom in the Council's public art locker and things are about to change. Recently Pontus Kyander took up the position of Manager of Public Art for the city, supported by an advisory committee of artists and independent curators/writers chaired by art consultant Trish Clark. Kyander's background as an art critic, independent curator, editor of FORMAT (a contemporary arts programme for Swedish Television) and guest professor at EWHA University, Seoul suggests we can look forward to a less pedestrian art commissioning programme in the future. We'll keep an eye out for Kyander's public art interventions, but in the meantime Neil Dawson's Echo at the Christchurch Arts Centre continues to provide a great benchmark for NZ artists and commissioners working in the public art arena.

Images: Neil Dawson, Echo, 1982, installation views, Christchurch Arts Centre

eyeCONTACT

You can read a review of Seung Yul Oh's current exhibition Oddooki here. The show runs to Saturday 25 July.

Image: Seung Yul Oh, Oddooki, 2009, installation view, Starkwhite, Auckland

Coming up at Starkwhite

Sydney-based artist Grant Stevens is next up in our downstairs space (3-29 August 2009). This is Stevens' second exhibition with us (the other being Going Steady, 2007) and he was one of four artists we presented at ShContemporary 08.

Image: Grant Stevens, Crushing, 2009, digital video, 4 min 13 sec

Teststrip (1992-1997)

With the proliferation of artist-run spaces in Auckland, along with occasional offshore extensions (see our previous posting on HIRSCHFELD), it's timely to look back to Teststrip, the great artist-run space that continues to influence the development of publicly funded contemporary art spaces as well as artist-run spaces in New Zealand.

In 1992 eight artists (a mix of recent graduates and more experienced artists) frustrated with the lack of exhibiting opportunities from public institutions and dealer galleries took on the lease of a modest floor at 10 Vulcan Lane in the heart of Auckland's CBD and opened Teststrip gallery with a group show of their work. The collective followed this with a series of solo shows and short-run publications. Encouraged by the response they resolved to extend the programme by inviting other artists to exhibit in exchange for a nominal fee to help pay the rent. At the end of 1994, due to the growing gentrification of the CBD, Teststrip was forced to move to a new building at 454 Karangahape Road, Newton, which gave the opportunity for the collective to reconsider opportunities. With funding from Creative New Zealand the group upgraded the two-gallery space, formalised the publication series – the Teststrip micrographs, employed an administrator and worked with a designer to develop a graphic identity. Teststrip broadened the kind of projects they undertook in particular working with Australian artists and curators and holding a series of shows by Los Angeles artists. In their final year the collective strengthened their connection to the wider arts community with the inclusion of music, theatre events and exhibitions of work in jewellery and ceramics. The Teststrip model has influenced subsequent artist-run spaces around New Zealand and several members are still part of these collectives. From the introduction to Teststrip: a history of an artist-run space (1992-1997), published by Clouds (The book can be purchased from Clouds. Price: NZD50)

Image courtesy of Clouds

HIRSCHFELD Berlin: a new art project space

Along with Genevieve Allison and Justus Kinderman, Boris Dornbusch (a recent addition to Starkwhite's lineup of artists) has started HIRSCHFELD, a new art project space located in the former archive of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Zentrum, which was part of the Institute for Sexual Research of the Humboldt University in East Berlin. HIRSCHFELD is committed to developing a critical programme with primarily early-career artists. Exhibitions will take place intermittently for the length of the opening night only. We'll post further information on the space and the programme as it comes to hand.

“Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) was the founder of The Institute for Sexual Science, first of its kind worldwide. The Instititute was established under the more liberal atmosphere of the newly founded Weimar Republic and was oriented towards progressive social and scientific developments.” (HIRSCHFELD press release.)
Image: HIRSCHFELD art project space, Berlin