Lisa Reihana’s electronic Maori art at Anna Landa new media biennial 2009 Australia – video

NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL ART AUSTRALIA

Combining ancestral culture and slow art with new media

Mâori artist Lisa Reihana (born New Zealand 1964, lives  Auckland) has produced an intriguing and inspiring body of work collectively called Digital marae (2001,2008) which is now on show in Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of the new media biennial, the Anna Landa award.

Reihana by her own admission likes to work slowly so she is giving herself until 2020 to complete this piece which will comprise life size prints of female, male and transgender figures/deities who will be exhibited  between panels of digitally-manipulated patterns taken from 70s textiles and recombined to form Maori patterns.

She believes that there is “far too much stuff” in the world and that each work that she makes must have a strong reason for being.

As well as a fascination with gender, Reihana’s works reference the inclusiveness of the Maori culture in which there is space for everyone.

The marae is an ancestral home for Mâori people, a meeting space and a site for exchange. Her life-size digital prints depict friends and family dressed as male deities (atua) that appear in Mâori creation stories. This Digital marae is a double of the original meeting house, but it is also a transformation.

See the works being hung and listen to Reihana explain how Maori idiom acts as inspiration for her contemporary new media artworks: the surfboard under the feet of Maui, the stream of city lights in the background of Urban warrior, the astronomical imagery in Ranginui and the 19th-century suit in the cross-gendered Dandy.

Video Anna Landa award 2009 Lisa Reihana

See also the excellent 10 minute video made in 2007 for the Elizabeth A. Sackler foundation for Feminist Art in which Reihanna talks about the Mahuika, the fire goddess and other works.

About the Anna Landa Award

Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Domain, Sydney, Australia – 7 May – 19 July 2009

The Art Gallery of New South Wales is currently exhibiting Double Take, the third Anne Landa Award, which was the first biennial exhibition in Australia for moving image and new media work, with an acquisitive award of $25 000. The award was established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW who died in 2002.

The artists in this year’s exhibition consider what it means to transform the self into another persona – as a doppelgänger, a karaoke performer, an avatar, a robot or a fantasy alter-ego.

• TV Moore, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano create private performances on video
• Lisa Reihana’s digital photographs present friends and family posing as ancestral Mâori spirit figures
• Mari Velonaki creates robotic avatars
• Cao Fei and Phil Collins bring together loose collectives of people around a desire to adopt imaginary identities

These performances are not the pure fantasies of popular digital culture, where it is so easy to masquerade as another persona. These artists are more circumspect. Real time lurks within. This is the ‘double’ – because while the performances have a presence in our everyday world, they also take an imaginary guise. They shuttle between two worlds: reality and fantasy.

The exhibition includes video, interactive robotics and digital photography.

Watch curator Victoria Lynn talk on video about Double Take

Related posts:

• First of its kind in Asia – Taiwan’s Digital Art Center officially opens – Jul 09
• Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto – 4 fascinating video interviews – May 09
• New roles for art collectors created by Cao Fei on Second Life – Jan 09
• Emerging Taiwanese artist Huang Hsin-Chien at Shanghai Biennale 2008 – Oct 08

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Emerging Taiwanese new media artist Huang Hsin-Chien at Shanghai Biennale 2008

Huang Hsin-Chien

TAIWANESE ART SHANGHAI BIENNIAL

In Huang Hsin-Chien’s work, Shanghai, Shall We Dance? located in the public space of the Shanghai Museum of Art, viewers are invited on to a typical Shanghainese dance floor for a spontaneous dance. As the dancers move the images of foreboding highrise buildings surrounding them melt and transform into the images of the viewers dancing together. The direct real time link between the dancers’ movements and the artwork allows viewers to be participators in the creation of the artwork and according to Taiwan Contemporary Art Link explore their perceptions of and connections with urban space.

Huang Hsin-Chien has an unusual background. Having studied Mechanical Engineering at National Taiwan University and Art at the Art Center College of Design at Pasadena USA he has become fluent in both technology and traditional art. He has exhibited work at the Hong-Ga Museum, Taipei Artists’ Village and the National Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan as well as the MiArt Contemporary Art Fair in Milan.

Fascinated by interactive art using digital media, Huang exhibited a work called Experiment Exchange in the Natural Circuits show at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York in 2007. Experiment Exchange consists of a screen showing a silhouette of animated white birds which move in real time according to the actions of the viewer, a form of collaborative art in which viewers work together with technology and remotely from the original artist.

Click here for more on digital art, biennials, Taiwanese artists or collaborative art. Examples of Huang Hsin-Chien work available on youtube. Dealer, exhibition information on artfacts.net

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Russian new media artists at MOMA Moscow where interest in electronic art grows

 

 

SURVEY NEW MEDIA ART RUSSIAN ARTISTS to 19 October 2008

CRITI-POP

Dates: September 19 – October 19, 2008
Location: Moscow Museum of Modern Art at Ermolaevsky lane, 17 (floors 2-5)

“It seems incredible, but interactive and communicative art in Russia is practiced only by Chernyshev, Shulgin and Efimov, working together or individually” says curator and gallerist Elena Selina. “Recently, interest in new media art has increased in Moscow. Not only professionals, but also collectors and the public, have overcome inner barriers that prevented (their acceptance) of the new media language”.

Presented by the Moscow Department of Culture, Russian Acacademy of Arts, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art with XL Gallery, the CRITI-POP exhibition showcases three artists, two creative groups, forty works and plenty of themes including information overflow, reconstruction of identity, genetic pop-engineering, the poetry of stock-exchange deals and news broadcasts, aesthetics of data transmission and science art.

Interactive installations by Vladislav Efimov and Aristarkh Chernyshev, who worked together from 1996 to 2005, bring us art that deals with genetic engineering, statistical modeling of processes, computer games and robotics. The viewer becomes a hero of the work — a colleague of an insane scientist modeling DNA, a creator of 3-D avatars, a conqueror of robots or a terminator hunting for artists.

Electroboutique  (Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin since 2003) is a unique art group that unites artists, developers of electronics, programmers and designers. Using techniques taken from social psychology and perception theory, the artists transmit their critical message directly into the unconscious of the viewers and entertain them with bright colors and garish forms. In his solo projects, Aristarkh Chernyshev creates art from information streams like TV-channels, Internet-news or stock-exchange tapes while the solo work of Alexei Shulgin  looks at our addiction to technologies and gives variants of creative rescue. One of the historic exhibits is a legendary rock band 386 DX, made of an outdated computer playing ever-young hits of British-American and Russian rock.

Related:

• Website of Moscow Museum of Modern Art
• More stories about contemporary Russian art
• More on new media art in Asia
• Other significant museum shows of Asian artists
• Latest events on now and events coming

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