Monitor 3.0

Monitor 3.0
Curated by Sean Kerr, Michelle Wang, and Jamie Hanton with a new commission by Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane

Exhibition preview: Friday 11 December, 5:30pm
Exhibition runs: 12 – 20 December 2020 and 12 – 24 January 2020
Exhibition talk with Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane: Saturday 12 December, 2pm

Monitor 3.0 re-visits and updates Monitor, an exhibition of moving image work from Aotearoa and abroad curated by Sean Kerr and David Watson in 1996. This new exhibition builds on the original curatorial framework and includes three programmes: a programme of commissioned collaborative work by emerging New Zealand artists, a three-part programme of recent work by national and international moving image practitioners, as well as a selection of work from the original Monitor exhibition.

Monitor 3.0 features a commissioned collaborative moving image installation, As you come down by Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane. In As you come down, Her and Keane embed the feelings of the build-up and empty lurch associated with this year as they find footing—post-university but pre-artist—into a series of installations that draw on fiction, humour, and the collaborative process. Think of a pendulum or a swing: there’s a point at which the person or object momentarily pauses, weightless, at its highest point, before gravity pulls them back, swinging to the next highest point, again and again. At the crux of the work is the phrase, “The time has come”, a theatrical announcement often employed as a rhetorical device in advertisements and by politicians that builds expectation but often leads to very little. Wooden periscopes overcomplicate the viewing of a comparatively simple collection of moving image works, ceramic devices appear functional but are, in reality, impractical, while displaced video and sound resonate uncertainty and discomfort.

As you come down runs until 24 January 2021, before Monitor 3.1 opens with the second commissioned collaborative moving image installation by Qianye Lin and Qianhe 'AL' Lin on 30 January 2021.

The first part of the screening programme features a selection of recent international moving image work by Dean Cross (AU), Karrabing Film Collective (AU), Paul Simon Richards (UK), and YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (KR) curated by Michelle Wang. The second and third parts, curated by Jamie Hanton and Sean Kerr respectively, will open in 2021.

Accompanying these two new programmes is a selection of work from the original Monitor exhibition, including work by: Lisa Reihana and Ani O’Neill, Paul Redican, Nathan Pōhio, Ronnie van Hout, Leigh Houliston, Kirstin Lucas, and Laura Parnes.

We would like to thank Creative Clay Studio and Aridium Designs for the generous support in the making of As you come down.

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Orissa Keane is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi, who graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts University of Canterbury in 2019 with a major in sculpture. With a focus on social commentary, Keane’s work is situated in material and process-based studies. Recent work has explored precariousness and precarity and the way these manifest tangibly and intangibly via social, design, and architectural conventions. By subverting and convoluting these conventions and pushing against constraints of the material subject, Keane interrogates purpose finding humour in redundancy. 

Min-Young Her is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi whose work focuses on using viewer discomfort as a device to explore the tensions in human relationships and to test the limits of our communicative abilities. She often draws on her experiences as a Korean immigrant, growing up with a mix of cultures and learning to grapple with different modes of communication. Her’s immersive and interactive sculptural fibre arts abstract, and modernise traditional Korean sensibilities to create environments that ask viewers to face fear and uncertainty with empathy and productive catharsis. Her graduated from University of Canterbury Ilam School of Fine Arts in 2019 with a major in sculpture.

Qianye and Qianhe ‘AL’ Lin are siblings who work as a duo. Based in Tāmaki Makaurau and graduates of Elam School of Fine Arts, they work primarily in audio-visual installation, writing, and performance. They are interested in language and perspective through re-imagining and re-contextualizing the experiences of presence and immersion, as well as storytelling in the embodiment of a fragmented linguistic experience. Their recent exhibitions include What a Thrill, WHAT A SUCCESS!! (2020), a one night only exhibition at Papatūnga Gallery curated by James Tapsell-Kururangi.

Dean Cross was born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and is of Worimi descent. He is a paratactical artist interested in collisions of materials, ideas and histories. He is motivated by the understanding that his practice sits within a continuum of the oldest living culture on Earth—and enacts First Nations sovereignty through expanded contemporary art methodologies. Cross has exhibited extensively across the Australian continent and around the globe, has been an artist in residence at Carriageworks and Canberra Contemporary Artspace, was the inaugural recipient of the Canberra/Wellington Indigenous Artist Exchange and has numerous works held in public and private collections including the National Gallery of Victoria and The Art Gallery of South Australia.

The Karrabing Film Collective is a media group based in Australia’s Northern Territories that uses filmmaking and installation as a form of Indigenous grassroots resistance and self-organization. The collective includes approximately 30 members—predominantly living in the Belyuen community—who together create films using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Meaning “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatize and satirize the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with corporate and state entities. Composing webs of nonlinear narratives that touch on cultural memory, place, and ancestry by freely jumping in time and place, Karrabing exposes and intervenes into the longstanding facets of colonial violence that impact members directly, such as environmental devastation, land restrictions, and economic exploitation.

Paul Simon Richards (b. 1981, UK, lives and works in London) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London and holds a MA Philosophy from the University of Greenwich, London. Recent solo exhibitions include: Quasi-Monte Carlo, Spike Island, Bristol (2019); L*a*b, Arcade, London (2016); Love’s Hidden Symmetry, AND/OR, London (2016); and Voices at Nile Sunset Annex, Cairo (2015). His work has featured in group exhibitions at venues such as The Showroom, London; Frieze Art Fair (with Lucky PDF), London; Galerie kunstbuero, Vienna; Jerwood Space, London; and Modern Art Oxford; and film festivals such as the BFI London Film Festival, Experimenta section. In 2017, Richards was selected by FLAMIN Productions to make his video work Quasi-Monte Carlo, and in 2015 he was awarded the Fokus video prize, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES (yhchang.com) is Young-hae Chang (Korea) and Marc Voge (USA). Based in Seoul, they have written their signature animated texts set to their own music in 26 languages and shown many of them at some of the major art institutions in the world, including Tate, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Whitney Museum and New Museum, New York. They have been in the Venice and São Paulo Biennials, among others, won the Webby Award for best art website, San Francisco, received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, New York, and been Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellows. M+, in Hong Kong, has acquired an ensemble of all of their past and future work, YHCHANG.COM/AP2: THE COMPLETE WORKS. They gave the 2020 Renato Poggioli Lecture at Harvard University.

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Click here to listen to Art, Not Science Episode 20
Two talks with the artists who created the two collaborative commissions from our exhibitions Monitor 3.0 and 3.1. Min-Young Her and Orissa Keane discuss their moving image installation As you come down and Qianye Lin and Qianhe 'AL' Lin discuss their work Thus the Blast Carried It, Into the World 它便随着爆破, 冲向了世界.