Video Life: Ko Nakajima and Kentaro Taki at St Paul St

Video Life: Ko Nakajima and Kentaro Taki opens tonight at AUT's St Paul St gallery. Curated by Phil Dadson, the exhibition runs to 25 March 2011 as part of the Auckland Festival's visual arts programme. Read more...

Image: Ko Nakajima, video stills from Biological Cycle (1971 - present)

Phil Dadson's Deep Water - final week

Phil Dadson's Deep Water exhibition at Starkwhite closes at 3.00pm on Saturday 5 March, 2011.

Image: Phil Dadson, Between Worlds #1 (2011), pigment inks on Ilford paper, 900 x 500 mm

Hector Zamora's White Noise at Bethells Beach

Today 500 white flags will be planted in the sand at Bethells Beach as the first part of Hector Zamora's White Noise, a new work for the Auckland Arts Festival. You can participate in the planting of the flags from 10.45am and they will remain in place until 5pm when they will be removed in preparation for the next stage of the work, an installation at Shed 6, 90 Wellesley Street West, which will be open to the public from 2 March 2011.

Image: from the Auckland Festival website for Hector Zamora's White Noise at Bethells Beach. Photo by Simon Glaister

Earthquake shuts down The Physics Room

The Physics Room in the quake-stricken city of Christchurch is closed until further notice. Director Stephen Cleland says the space is housed in one of the sturdiest buildings in the area and that it hasn't suffered any significant structural damage.

Image: The Post Office building which houses The Physics Room, Christchurch

SCAPE Christchurch Biennale will not go ahead

The 6th SCAPE Christchurch Biennale will not go ahead as planned from 4 March 2011. The Trust and  SCAPE team will meet to discuss the future of the event once the city has settled and the healing process has begun.

Originally scheduled to open on 24 September 2010, SCAPE was postponed last year due to the massive earthquake that hit Christchurch on 4 September 2010.

Seung Yul Oh at ggooll

Seung Yul Oh opens a post-residency show tonight at ggooll, an artist-run space in Seoul founded and managed by artist Choi Jeong Hwa. 

Waiting for news from Christchurch

Over the past 24 hours we have received emails and texts from people around the world asking about friends and colleagues in the Christchurch art community. There's not much we can say. The flow of information from the earthquake-ravaged city is patchy - even people on the ground are in the dark and having to wait for news to circulate via informal networks.

Unfortunately, the news vacuum is unlikely to be filled for a while. Phone networks are still plagued by power outages and people have been advised to text when using cellphones to free up the network for emergency responses.

A dark day in Christchurch

Today our thoughts are with family, friends and the art community in Christchurch.

Image: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu, currently the Civil Defence HQ in the earthquake-ravaged city of Christchurch

Artists support new artist-run space on Auckland's K Road

A fundraiser will be held tomorrow evening for PERSONAL BEST, a new artist-run space scheduled to open on Auckland's Karangahape Road in early March. PERSONAL BEST will raffle artworks donated by Dan Arps, Cushla Donaldson, Peter Madden, Louise Menzies, Dane Mitchell, Rohan Wealleans and others, with all proceeds going to the space to assist with renovation costs. 

Raffle tickets will be available at the door (456d K Road) and online at the PERSONAL BEST website. The fundraiser starts at 6.00pm and the raffles will be drawn at 8.00pm. 

MoMA curator to direct the 30th Sao Paul Bienal

Venezuela-born Museum of Modern Art curator Luis Perez-Oramas will direct the 30th Sao Paulo Bienal, which will be held in 2012. Perez-Oramas is currently the curator of Latin American Art at MoMA and he previously served as a guest curator at the 23rd Sao Paulo Bienal in 1998.

Image: curator of the 30th Sao Paulo Bienal Luis Perez-Oramas

Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Selected by curator Fulya Erdemici, Ayse Erkmen will represent Turkey at the 54th Venice Biennale. The pair will be working with London-based curator Danae Mossman as curatorial collaborator. Erdemici and Mossman co-curated Wandering Lines: Towards a New Culture of Space for the 2008 SCAPE Christchurch Biennial of Art in Public Space. Mossman is also a former director/curator of The Physics Room in Christchurch.

Image: 2001, Shipped Ships, Three ferries from Italy, Japan and Turkey with Crews, Passengers, Ship

Indian art scene on the rise

India is about to launch its first-ever art biennial. Set to debut in 2012, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale will take place in the port city of Kochi on the southwest coast of India, and in neighbouring Muziris, known for its rich historical heritage that reaches back to the days when it was a centre for spice trading with the Roman Empire. The news follows the announcement of India's first dedicated pavilion at the Venice Biennale and reports of the continuing growth of New Dehli's India Art Summit fair.

Image: The port city of Kochi, India

Deep Water review

"Dadson has a long history of being passionately interested in Chinese culture - as evidenced by many of the From Scratch projects - so in Starkwhite the Beachhaven images seem to demonstrate the Taoist view of heaven and earth reflecting each other. Like Yin and Yang they are intimately connected." Read more...

Image: Phil Dadson, Deep Water (2011), video still

UCCA Beijing handover

Guy Ullens is to hand over the management of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing to long term partners and divest himself of the institution. He will also sell in stages the extensive collection of Chinese contemporary art he amassed with his wife Myrian. Once he has done this he says he intends to spend more time on his charitable education work in Nepal and return to collecting young artists, this time with a focus on Indian rather than Chinese artists. Read more...

Image: Yan Pei-Ming, installation view of Landscape of Childhood, UCCA, 2005

Art HK and Art Basel to join forces?

The Art Newspaper reports that the increasingly blue-chip fair Art HK is in talks with Art Basel about a possible collaboration. Tim Etchells, one of the owners of ART HK, has confirmed that discussions are underway, but also says the fair has been approached by other people and that it's definitely not a done deal. 

David Watson: Parade experimental music and multi-media performance

New York-based composer and performer David Watson premieres a multi-media performance piece, Parade, at New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery tomorrow night. Inspired in part by Allan Thomas' ethnomusicological study of Hawera in 1946, Watson's new work is a meditation on New York's traditional street parades. 

Phil Dadson's Deep Water

Phil Dadson's Deep Water installation runs at Starkwhite to 5 March 2011. You can read the exhibition release here.

Image: Phil Dadson, Deep Water (2011), installation views, Starkwhite

Iraq's looted National Museum reopens

The Iraq national Museum, which was vandalised and looted following the US-led invasion of the country, has reopened. At the time, US troops were criticised for not securing the museum. When asked why American forces did not stop the looting, Donald Rumsfeld, then defence secretary, famously said "stuff happens ... and it's untidy and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."

Director Amira Edan has said that the museum's first priority is to bring back antiquities that have been smuggled abroad. The museum estimates that around 15,000 priceless items are still being traded throughout the art underworld. Edan also said an international tour of Iraq antiquities may be planned and (surprisingly) that it would most likely include in venues in Britain (the British Museum) and the United States (Chicago's Field Museum). 

Image: A shot of the newly-reopened Iraq National, Museum

Mona Hatoum awarded the 2011 Joan MIro Prize

The jury of the 2011 Joan Miro Prize has granted the award to Palestinian-British artist Mona Hatoum for her great skill in connecting personal experience with universal values. Awarded biennially, the prize is worth €70,000. Previously it has gone to Olafur Eliasson (2007) and Pipilotti Rist (2009).

Art hoists at JAR

Over the past few months we have been running images of Leigh Davis' Flag Poems in the exhibition Time Text & Echoes. The works are being exhibited at JAR in a series of thirty, ten-day hoists.

JAR exhibitions are presented in a small, single-room building at 589 New North Road, Kingsland. The front of the building has been removed and replaced by a transparent wall, allowing exhibitions to be viewed from the street. Before embarking on the current exhibition, JAR staged projects by Auckland-based artists Stephen Bambury and Peter Robinson.

This link takes you to the JAR website. And click here to see our previous flag posts

Image: Jar, New North Road, Kingsland, NZ