Past Event
Thick Cinema presents five new works by contemporary New Zealand artists Fiona Amundsen, John Di Stefano, Sam Hamilton, Kim Pieters and Joyce Campbell exploring the role of the body and sensorial experience in cinematic intelligibility and meaning.
Shot in New Zealand, Japan, USA and Italy, the five resulting works engage variously with the legacy of fascism, the sexual union of eels, public gardens, the sunset and memory.
The CIRCUIT Artist Cinema Commissions are an annual programme produced by CIRCUIT with the support of Creative New Zealand. Each year an internationally-based curator is invited to devise a theme and select 5-6 New Zealand artists to respond.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Mark Williams and George Clark.
Presented by Circuit Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand.
John Di Stefano, Murmurations (Rome) (2017) Digital Video, Sound 10.51 minutes
Joyce Campbell, Company Stream (2017) Digital Video, Sound 10.23 minutes
Fiona Amundsen, A Body that lives (2017) Digital Video, Sound 13.54 minutes
Sam Hamilton, FOR THIRTY YEARS, NANCY WOULD SIT OUT ON THE STREET CORNER AND WATCH THE SUNSET (2017) 16mm film transferred to Digital Video, Sound 11.25 minutes
Kim Pieters, Philosophy (2017) Digital Video, Sound 8.38 minutes
(Total running time: 56 minutes, Digital Video, DCP)
Fiona Amundsen is a New Zealand based artist, who utilises photography and moving-image to question paradigmatic socio-cultural histories and narratives associated with how the Asia Pacific Theatre (WWII) is officially memorialized across parts of Asia and the Pacific. She is particularly interested in what is left out of official/state memorialization, along with how historical narrative is constructed. She works with archival and present day imagery to question what it might mean, along with how, to make sense of such narratives now. Her practice asks who gets the right to remember, along with what it means to remember ethically, as well as what this might look like via lens-based imagery. Fiona is senior lecturer in the School of Art and Design at AUT University. She has exhibited and held residencies/fellowships both nationally as well as internationally in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, the United States and Europe.
Dr John Di Stefano is a Canadian-born artist/filmmaker, writer, and curator whose creative practice is focused primarily in video, installation and photo-based media. His interdisciplinary research focuses on how concepts and perceptions of memory, space/place, and time shape the articulation of subjectivities so as to reconcile the personal with the social, the everyday with history. Much of his current research examines notions of temporality and disappearance in hybrid forms of documentary practices and material forms. His video work has been broadcast on American public television (PBS), and has won several awards, including the New Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival. He is an Associate Professor at Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney).
Sam Hamilton (b 1984 Aotearoa New Zealand) is an interdisciplinary artist from Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, currently based out of Portland, Oregon, USA.
Hamilton describes their practice as ‘more like an ecology than a discipline. A pluralistic, modular complex, with an ever evolving nomadic center of gravity that periodically comes to fruition – depending on circumstance and conditions – as concrete works of film and video, sound works and performance, painting, installation, photography, and writing.,
Recent exhibitions include Standard Candles a five month solo survey exhibition at the Portland Art Museum (2017). His 2016 feature film Apple Pie has has screened widely in the United States, New Zealand and elsewhere, most recently at Coaxial Arts Foundation Los Angeles (2018).
Kim Pieters (1959) lives and works in Dunedin, New Zealand. She is predominantly a non-representational painter. For many years she has also produced photographs, experimental film, writing and music, from her Dunedin studios. The ethical implications surrounding the enigma of the thing itself, is a fundamental premise that informs all of these practices. Her work is represented in private and public collections including the Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery, Toi O Tamaki, Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna O Waiwhetu, Victoria University Collection, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Circuit.
Joyce Campbell (b. 1971 New Zealand) is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent work utilizes anachronistic photographic techniques to examine the collision of natural and cultural systems. Campbell’s interest in biological and physical systems has led her to develop a set of photographic techniques that render visible the minute and incremental emergence of complex form, be that the growth of a microbial colony, crystals in the process of formation, the migration of glaciers into the ocean or of silver from an electrode into colloidal suspension. She is an associate professor at the University of Auckland Elam School of the Arts and has lectured at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she lived for a decade. She has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and overseas. Recent key exhibitions include the Biennale of Sydney 2016; Heavenly Bodies, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2014; Che Mondo: What a World, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 2013; Te Taniwha/Crown Coach, Nichols Gallery, Pitzer College, Claremont, California, 2012; and The Liquid Archive, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2012. In 2016, she was a Walters Prize finalist, nominated for her work Flightdream 2015.
Mark Williams is the founding Director/Curator of CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa New Zealand (established 2012). He has curated numerous screening and exhibition projects including Moving On Asia: Towards a New Art Network 2004-13 (City Gallery Wellington 2013, with Aaron Lister) and at venues such as Len Lye Centre and London Film Festival. In 2014 Williams was Media Arts Fellow at WINTEC, Hamilton, curating the installation Jim Allen’s News. From 1999-2010, Williams worked at the New Zealand Film Archive programming over 50 contemporary artists installations and touring curatorial projects to LUX (London), Anthology Film Archives (New York), Other Film (Brisbane), WORM (Rotterdam), and Arsenal (Berlin). Williams is a musician who has released over a dozen albums in the rock/experimental vein on labels in New Zealand, Europe and the USA. He has written sound for installations by Joanna Langford (NZ) and Josette Chiang (UK/HK). He runs the micro label Burning Log.
George Clark is an artist, curator and writer. His films have shown at festivals and museums internationally. Recent exhibitions include Living Archive (Jatiwangi Art Factory, 2017; Yunseul Museum, 2018) and A Planter’s Art (Soulangh Cultural Park, 2016). His curatorial work has focused on broadening the histories moving image practice globally through projects on Ute Aurand, Julian Dashper, Lav Diaz, Camille Henrot, Vlado Kristl, Luis Ospina, Chick Strand and Japanese expanded cinema (with Julian Ross & Go Hirasawa), L.A. Rebellion and Infermental (with Dan Kidner & James Richards). He has written for numerous publications and exhibition catalogues and is a visiting lecturer in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art.
