Reading Room is a peer-reviewed journal of contemporary art and culture published annually by the E H McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. Each issue is themed and features essays from local and international writers, artists' commissions and an archive section.
The theme for the latest issue springs from the idea of the Pacific as a non-place because it cannot claim identity in relation to a land mass. It addresses our liquid state as a problem and a possibility and as a counter to 'solid' thinking.
Reading Room 4 presents essays that treat liquidity as a tool to rethink nation, as a means to envisage new notions of connectivity and mobility, as a metaphor for being, or quite literally to focus on water as both medium and resource, suggesting as Sean Cubitt does in his essay The Ordering of Worlds: Two Recent Video Works by Stella Brennan "that this non-place offers a perspective from which to reconsider the 'order of the world'."
Reading Room 4 presents essays that treat liquidity as a tool to rethink nation, as a means to envisage new notions of connectivity and mobility, as a metaphor for being, or quite literally to focus on water as both medium and resource, suggesting as Sean Cubitt does in his essay The Ordering of Worlds: Two Recent Video Works by Stella Brennan "that this non-place offers a perspective from which to reconsider the 'order of the world'."
The issue also has a section dedicated to Julian Dashper (1960 - 2009) with tributes from friends and colleagues around the world.
Image: Cover of Reading Room 4 LIQUID STATE, 2010, published by the E H McCormick Research Library at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki
