I meet Nandita Kumar in a park, since despite Covid-19 being officially over, numbers are rising. The viral context that frames our meeting and determines its location is not trivial in this instance, but an essential part of Kumar’s work, which stretches the idea of art not only into sound but generally into the invisible and the in-between, from where it illuminates the complex relationships and interdependencies that define a current ecology and its crises. Meetings, collaborations, and conversations are essential to Kumar’s working methods, through which she produces works of art, as well as processes of discovery generative of what I would term “information models.” These “models” create a portal into complex scientific data sets that enable the sensing, rather than simply the understanding of, the interwoven global challenges facing us today.
The park as bionetwork sets a fitting scene for a discussion of Kumar’s most recent works. One of them, The Unwanted Ecology, is “a futuristic self-sustainable sound biosphere that consists of plants classified as weeds” collected from paddy fields within a twenty-minute radius of her studio in Guirim, North Goa; a hot-spot for biodiversity, and where she lives and works since 2015. The work is a mesmerizing diorama of weed plants, powered by solar energy and controlled by humidity sensors, visually nostalgic of nineteenth century display cases and their botanic-colonial aesthetics yet leading us into a digital future that values the property and healing power of weeds in a decolonial and truly global sphere. The soundtrack reframes the weeds’ local undesirability by linking them to their medicinal properties, sounded through their healing frequencies which Kumar developed with her long-term collaborator from CalArts, Kari Rae Seekins. Creating a sonic sphere that is at once scientific and imaginative of a “science fiction”: a multi-sensory narrative that reflects on a collaborative and inter-disciplinary working, and offers transformative ideas for how science, the everyday, and art can meet to rethink truths’ possibilities.
The other work, Osmoscape, is a graphic “datascape-score” that sounds and shows “several aspects of water through its scarcity, politics, and interdependency.” The work-in-progress consists of a sculptural installation, a book, street art, and an app, made from forty-eight datasets that explore water to reveal the complex political, social, and infrastructural interdependencies of the devastating and pressing “water wars.” The score is beautiful and urgent, juxtaposing information, imagination, and sensorial engagements to manifest what water can tell us about climate, pollution, and its own disappearance. In that sense, the work is a great example of Kumar’s multi-genre, interdisciplinary process, that extends and performs conversations and investigations across disciplines and cultural boundaries to create a different imagination from the in-between.
“The Dematerialization of the Art Object” (Lucy R. Lippard), a text of great aesthetic importance to conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s, occurs in the works of Dane Mitchell in a new way. Born in 1974 and still based in Auckland, New Zealand, for Dane Mitchell, it is less about a consequential rejection of the commodity character of a work – as it was for many first-generation conceptual artists – but more about a broader research into the nature of art in general.
Dane Mitchell’s work “Conjuring Form” for Art Statements at the Art Basel 2008 remains unforgotten – where he employed the help of a ‘witch’ to study the spiritual powers of the exhibition space. What may at first appear like yet another evocation of an antiquated folk mysticism, proves to be more of a profound analysis of the modern “white cube” (Brian O’Doherty). Here Mitchell effectively poses questions not only about the irrationality of the here displayed artefacts but also about the societal conditioning and construction of aesthetics and their (still) ritualistic functions. The fact that the contradiction of rationality and belief is a social construction is something we know from Michel Foucault. The fact that in art this construction is configured in a particular way – through the assumption that particularly an artwork needs the inexplicable in order to reveal its ‘sublimeness’ (Immanuel Kant), is something Dane Mitchell brings to a foreground with his work.
So, for example, the artist makes contact with Rita Angus, a famous New Zealand painter, through a ‘psychic’ in order to interview her. Or he measures the temperature changes in the gallery during the exhibition with the help of sensitive thermometers in order to prove the presence of ‘ghosts’. Modern technology and science are in a strained dialog with a more ‘irrational’ idea of the supposed ‘paranormal’ – and is this not an emancipatory opportunity for art?
The reconstruction of memory constitutes one of the central themes of the complex film and video projects created by the New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong (b. 1979). Trained in classical ballet, Spong is especially interested in modern dance as a vehicle for personal expression and how dances can be passed down over the years, brought back to life, and then re-interpreted. Reconstructing historical dances can be highly problematic, however, due to the paucity of complete documentation and the often-idiosyncratic forms of notation. The few rare extant photographs and films can only give a sense of what the original performance was like. Spong takes this lack as her licence to use the medium of film and an individual physicality in her approach to the myths and traditions of modern dance.
The starting point for the dance sequences in »Costume for a Mourner« (2010) is Igor Stravinsky’s music for the ballet »Le chant du rossignol«, based on the fairytale »The Nightingale« by Hans Christian Andersen. the Ballets Russes first performed the ballet with sets from Henri Matisse and choreography by Georges Balanchine in Paris in 1925. In Spong’s version, the figures form a synthesis with their peculiar movements and ornate costumes. With choreography from Benny Ord, Spong manages to overcome historical distance from the impressionist masterpiece via an approach that is determinedly abstract. In spong’s understanding, the notions of remembrance, creation, and forgetting are all regarded as part of the creative process. The artist continues this train of thought in the double projection »Lethe-Wards« (2010), loosely based on the poem »Ode to a Nightingale« by John Keats. In this piece, she stages the act of remembrance with a story evocative of mythology as a foundation for the work’s form and content. The title alludes to the Lethe river of Greek mythology: located in the underworld, those about to enter the realm of the dead could drink from its water to obliterate memories of their previous lives, so that they could start afresh in the afterlife. Here, the work of remembering demands not just research, archaeology and creating new analogies, but it must also be actively transformed and interpreted. Her films »Beach Study« (2014) and »Learning Duets« (2012) continue this progression by not just illustrating, but by actually recreating one of the artist’s childhood memories in a place now forgotten by the world: Waiheke island near Auckland harbour, whose existence is under threat from changing ownership. With sections no longer accessible to the public, the island may be erased from collective memory and fall into oblivion. Spong confronts the slow process of forgetting with a dance performed on the island, using choreography inspired by nature. Through her use of colour filters, she illustrates the contrast between untouched nature and unconscious mechanisms of repression.
Despite its young age, New Zealand has experienced numerous immigration waves and has a history that was often marred by violence before it achieved independence in 1947. The capricious nature of history, as well as the blurred borders between identity and clan, are inscribed in the DNA of New Zealand’s citizens. This includes the writer Lloyd Jones, who was born in Lower Hutt near Wellington in 1955.
While he seems to re-invent himself by using dramatically divergent subjects for his books, they all share an interest in a few main issues: who are we? What and who can determine the erratic and vaguely-drawn outlines of our identity? And how does a writer use the novel to contend with these issues? He became a writer after first working as a journalist. After studying political science at the Victoria University in Wellington, Jones traveled to Asia, Europe, and the USA as a reporter and foreign correspondent. His 1985 debut Gilmore’s Diary, a prose work teeming with black humor, portrays a young man’s conflicts with the traditions of his small New Zealand hometown. Since then, he has regularly published books that continue to offer surprising form and content, such as his 1988 volume of short stories Swimming to Australia, and his 1991 Biografi: An Albanian Quest, based on the author’s trip to Albania; although it is based on the research from his trip, it also doubles as a genuine fiction about the invented doppelganger of the overthrown dictator Enver Hoxha, who in this version of the tale is denied his own life story. The Book of Fame, a novel published in 2000, follows the New Zealand national rugby team “The Blacks” during their legendary series of history-making victories in Europe in 1905. Originally published in 2002, in Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance he directs his gaze towards the world of Argentinean tango: the novel ties together two love stories that unfold over time and across continents. The plot begins in New Zealand as the First World War is coming to a close. There, the young Louise Cunningham meets the piano tuner Paul Schmidt, who teaches her to tango. Because of his name, Schmidt soon comes under suspicion of being German and must flee. She then follows him to Buenos Aires. Years later, Schmidt’s granddaughter Rose, who is also an avid tango dancer, follows her grandfather’s footsteps and eventually falls in love through tango. Jones’s character does not ride into the sunset at the end of the novel, however, because Jones flatly rejects facile narrative solutions. This outright rejection is also evident in his award-winning novel Mister Pip (2006), which was his international breakthrough novel and is now considered the most successful New Zealand book of all time. Set during Papua New Guinea’s civil war in the 1990s, the novel takes place in the small village of Bougainville. Based on his first-hand experiences of the civil war as a journalist, Jones’s novel is a marvelous, heart-breaking tale, an insightful parable of humanity. The main character is Mr. Watts, the village’s last white inhabitant. With a little help from Charles Dickens, he teaches the village’s traumatized children values of humanity and empathy as well as literature’s power to create meaning. Soon, the boundaries between fiction and reality begin to blur, especially when Mr. Watts uses the Dickensian nom de guerre “Mr. Pip” as he is sought by soldiers for being a rebel; by the end, the character becomes a kind of masculine Scheherazade of the present day, a vehicle Jones uses to break out of the traditional framework of post-Colonial discourse. Jones also undermines the Manichean worldview and ways of thinking in Hand Me Down World (2012), originally published in English in 2010, in which he shows his mastery of the lyrical tone as well as a more plastic orality. The book recounts the story of a fictitious young African woman as she journeys from Tunisia to Germany without papers. There she searches for her son, who had been kidnapped by his father. Jones narrates the woman’s journeys in frightening scenes that are striking for their realism, detailing everything she must sell, including her body, to reach her goal. Based on the fact that she is black, a woman, and illegal, she is considered fair game by all. But the scenes also show others who come to her aid – only to be seemingly robbed and lied to in return. “Seemingly” is the key word, because Jones tells the woman’s story not only from a future vantage point, when the character is in an Italian jail accused of murder, but from a variety of perspectives: her story is first told by characters she encountered on her travels, including a truck driver, a group of hunters, a street artist, and a woman who makes documentary films; the character finally tells her side of the story at the very end of the novel. The effect of this narrative construction is disorienting: slowly but surely, the individual parts of the woman’s identity come together like a mosaic, and it soon becomes clear that the novel will not allow one valid version of the truth. Composed like a dossier, the novel’s structure offers an elegant symbol for the basic dilemma shared by illegal aliens – that is, that they are whoever we want to believe they are. In Jones’s novels, they are never merely victims or criminals, or simply good or evil. The child’s father, for example, is not a racist white man, but a black German who doesn’t feel at home in his own skin. The woman consciously objects to being a victim, just as she refuses the reader’s sympathy; she does not feel superior merely because she is a black and an African refugee. Thus, Jones’s novels make life both easy and difficult for the reader: easy, because of the powerful exuberance of his storytelling; but also difficult, because their complexity demands our full attention as readers.
New Zealand artist Amy Howden-Chapman is the 2017 guest artist of the “Artists in Residence at PIK” program of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), organized in cooperation with the DAAD’s Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program and the state capital Potsdam.
Howden-Chapman’s work focuses on the effects of climate change. Founded by Amy Howden-Chapman and Abby Cunnane, “The Distance Plan” platform provides an interface where artists, writers and designers can exchange ideas and network on the topic of climate change. To this end, the project works with exhibitions, public forums, and publishes, among other publications, the magazine “The Distance Plan,” whose last issue was dedicated to the topic of climate and precarity. Her artistic works, performances, installations and videos, are also often based on many years of research and textual works, for which she finds strong images in the material realization, including audiovisual and haptic impressions. For example, in the performance “You can’t unring a bell,” she marked the area in the New Zealand city of Wellington endangered by rising sea levels through the consecutive ringing of historic ship bells.
