The friendly face of the Gallery

Last week I spent two days in Wellington at the National Digital Forum having my mind blown. Some of the most brilliant minds in the international galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector were there, talking about the wonderful ways we can reach our visitors and improve access to our collections online.

Courtney Johnston, director of The Dowse and the Petone Settlers Museum (and who blogs over at Best of 3), gave an especially inspirational talk that reminded me of the importance of making emotional connections with our visitors.

At one point Courtney mentioned a friend who’d felt lost and confused while visiting a gallery. She compared these feelings to the online experience of getting a 404 (page not found) or 403 (access forbidden) message while browsing. The best way to prevent or counter them? Make your front of house staff the ‘fail whales’ of your organisation – the friendly reassuring face who explains what’s going on and gets you back on track.

As I sat in Te Papa’s lecture theatre listening to Courtney’s talk, I felt so proud of our guide team back home. We have 50 friendly gallery guides on staff, from many different backgrounds, but all with an astounding knowledge of the visual arts. If you do find yourself wandering in circles, they can help with that, but more importantly, they love to talk about the stuff on the walls. If you’re wondering what on earth you’re looking at or why it’s important, have a chat with one of them.

The guide team don’t roam the galleries to keep you in line. They exist to enrich your experience.

Guides are easy to spot – they all have the same t-shirt or jacket (right now they’re sporting ‘CREW’ t-shirts in conjunction with our exhibition Who Shot Rock & Roll), and most have a handy bag with an ‘i’ on it that’s packed with useful things like maps and brochures.

If you’re adventuring in our galleries and realise you need some direction – be it physical, intellectual or emotional – look around you. There’ll be a guide nearby who can give you what you need.

I should also mention the stellar job done by the volunteer guides who give our free daily tours – another crucial part of the visitor experience we provide.

We’re constantly getting feedback from our visitors about the amazing work our guide team does:

•    ‘Thanks for being so helpful and informative about the gallery.’
•    Visitor commented on how much she enjoyed having guides to discuss art with, as she was travelling on her own, and said it was a great initiative, something she hadn’t come across elsewhere.
•    ‘The guides bring this space alive! It’s great to hear the stories.’
•    ‘You were wonderful – you really opened it up for us.’
•    ‘Thank you! Our guides and guards don’t talk much. What an absolute pleasure to talk with you – it has made our visit!’ (Couple from New York)
•    A visitor said she had been told at the entrance to ask guides about the art in each of the rooms, and she had found it very rewarding: ‘I’m very pleased I did!’
•    ‘It’s great how the guides have encouraged us, and facilitated us around the gallery.’
•    ‘Thank you for all your knowledgeable information. It makes it so much more enjoyable when people explain things.’
•    ‘The guides are an asset to the gallery, and all so lovely to talk to.’

I’m so proud to work in an organisation with such a friendly face. Hurrah for the guides!

The fascination with the savage ‘Other’

A look at the Lounge room Tribalism series of paintings by Graham Fletcher in Home AKL by Gallery Guide Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh

Western cultures have always had a fascination with the ‘other’. The term ‘other’ is derived from the concept of Orientalism and the Arabesque, with the West colonising the ‘savage’ and indoctrinating them into the new world, supposedly civilising them towards global integration. Unfortunately, Colonialism still exists in complex forms today.

Graham Fletcher’s series of paintings and sculptures Lounge Room Tribalism combines the familiar and the unknown, the primitive and the modern. Home AKL includes two paintings and five sculptures from this large body of work. By introducing the ideas of the fascination with the ‘other’ to the audience in the first room, the curators set the tone for the exhibition.

Graham Fletcher, Untitled, 2010
from Lounge Room Tribalism
oil on canvas, The University of Auckland Art Collection

Within the Untitled paintings, there is a juxtaposition of two cultures in one composition. You see fertility and God-like totems next to psychedelic patterns of fabric, wallpaper and furniture. What is striking is that they are ‘Tribal’ objects’ set inside a modernist interior.

Holding onto the past and keeping its memory is what is interesting with this painting series. It is as if these worlds have always co-existed  (coloniser, colonised) within these living room compositions. These paintings tell a visual story. They slowly reveal themselves and prompt many questions. What is behind the desire to domesticate the primitive? What are these indigenous artefacts, which disturb modern design doing in suburban homes around the country?

Graham Fletcher, Untitled, 2010
from Lounge Room Tribalism
oil on canvas, courtesy of Melanie Roger Gallery

The objects demand attention and command a physical presence, may it be just curiosity or a sense of bringing the spiritual back to the suburbs. They are taken out of their original use and context and placed in a new ‘home’. There, they become inactive and join the vases, picture frames and coffee table books. Now these objects of culture and tradition are transformed into exotic household interior design. Detached of cultural significance, they have lost their function and are fetishized.

For a more comprehensive look into the ideas behind Graham Fletcher's paintings, I recommend the publication produced by Mangere Arts Centre. It is a well-executed catalogue in design and writing content, well worth a read.

Read Shahriar's previous posts on Home AKL here.

Janet Lilo: the poetics of home

Gallery Guide Zara Sigglekow responds to Janet Lilo's work in Home AKL. Zara Sigglekow is a photographer with a developing interest in curatorial practice. She recently curated a contemporary photography exhibition, Presence in Absence, at Black Asterisk gallery.

Charles Baudelaire, the French art critic and poet, wrote in 1846:

‘The life in our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as through in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.’

Janet Lilo’s video work Beneath the Radar in the current exhibition Home AKL brings to our attention to what we, according to Baudelaire, often pass by. The city and communities Lilo inhabits are artistically refigured and communicated in semi-documentary style.

Janet Lilo, Beneath the Radar (scenes 1-3), 2012
video, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2012
courtesy of the artist

Lilo focuses on her local urban Pacific community – seen, for example, in the hip-hop figures that grace the screen like graphics from a music video. Yet aspects of the work communicate a broader regional experience extending beyond her Pacific community. The volcanic cones that dot Auckland feature in and act as vantage points from which to film the expanse of suburbia and the city. Like earlier New Zealand Landscape artists, such as Rita Angus, characteristic geographical features (here of volcanic hills and suburbia) are highlighted and linked to our notions of local identity. This is enhanced by the symmetrical layout of the video: the pieces of landscape are mirrored reinforcing their visual prominence. Digitally altered fluorescent colours of sky and land, which change later to luminous blue tones with twinkling lights at dusk, add a sentimental and ‘marvelous‘ atmosphere. The steady flow of cars, another characteristic of Auckland, appear soothing, an impressive feat.

Janet Lilo, Beneath the Radar (scenes 10-12), 2012
video, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2012
courtesy of the artist

Three months ago, on the same wall in the gallery sat John Fergusson’s work Dieppe, 14th July 1905: Night, as part of the Degas to Dalí exhibition. A group of fashionably attired folk stroll the streets in the city fireworks erupting in the night sky. This work was part of the avant-garde backlash (of which Baudelaire was part) of artists who found their inspiration and subjects from the city and landscape around them, rather than historical, literary or religious scenes. The painting is a record of time and fashions and reveals a particular beauty of the period.

As I see it, Lilo continues the tradition of painters of modern life (the school to which Baudelaire and Fergusson can loosely be ascribed) albeit in the contemporary medium of video. Turning her eye to the city and communities around her, Lilo transforms what often seems banal, due to the everyday viewing of our city, into the marvelous, and reminds us of our unique place of home.

Janet Lilo, Beneath the Radar (scenes 13-15), 2012
video, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2012
courtesy of the artist

- Zara Sigglekow

Reclaiming Representation

Gallery guide Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh returns to the blog with a look into the artworks of Angela Tiatia in Home AKL.

Pacific artists working in Auckland are in search of art that can represent their identities and new national consciousness. Home AKL at Auckland Art Gallery is asking critical questions related to this: What is contemporary Pacific art? How should it be critiqued? How does Diaspora affect art making? Why is there a need to reclaim representation?

Pre-conceptions about what Pacific art ‘should’ look like are being broken down. These pre-conceptions result from positioning artists of Pacific heritage as ‘others’. The use of new media and imagery that does not rely on clichéd visual representations of Pacific people has helped to break down pre-conceptions, and Pacific artists seek to ‘reclaim their representation’ in order to counter those imposed on them. The movement to reclaim representation attracts a new audience. The audience can relate to the works on a personal level and it can engage with the audience’s lived realities.

Angela Tiatia is a Samoan artist living in Auckland and Sydney. She has two artworks in Home AKL, both of which work to reclaim representation through acts of subtle protest. Her research-based art practice, which incorporates the video, internet and found objects, makes an important contribution to the exhibition. Material Culture, 2012 collects photographs and objects from online auction websites such as eBay. These were located over a year by typing in keyword search phrases like ‘sexy hula girl’ and ‘hunky Polynesian man’.

Angela Tiatia, Material Culture (detail), 2012
found photographs and objects, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2012

What is presented within the two glass vitrines is a collection of historical photographs. They range back over 100 years, maybe longer. Most photos collected are homogenised depictions of Pacific life from a tourist’s point of view or created for a tourist market. A majority of them are snapshots of tourist interactions with ‘locals’. Material Culture critically views cultural signifiers, underpinned by the idea of otherness, which are used to create the representations of Pacific people.

Angela Tiatia, Material Culture (detail), 2012
found photographs and objects, commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2012

Tiatia’s video performance, Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis also looks at issues of representation. The hibiscus flower, a Pacific icon, is a focus of the performance. The flower along with the combination of Tiatia’s partially clad body serves as an ultimate point of reference similar to the phrase ‘Hula girl’.

Angela Tiatia, video still from Hibiscus Rosa-Sinensis, 2010
courtesy of the artist

Tiatia slowly eats the hibiscus, literally consuming the stereotype. Her eyes, looking directly at the camera, challenge the audience to question the legacies of colonialism placed upon Pacific women. The work is humorous and subtle, unusual and effective. Definitely, the audience ends up watching this video more than once.

Read Shahriar's previous posts on Home AKL here.

Migration, Diaspora and Trans-experience: Part II

Last week, I blogged about how the concept of the homeland is not a memory of a fixed place in time. Rather it is discourse that engages the past, present and future all at once.

Trans-experience is a development of the term diaspora. It emphasizes an identity in flux constantly changing and responding to influences both past and present simultaneously. This term, trans-experience, describes an evolving identity that can change any time due to the memory of the homeland while being in the new environment.¹

Rejecting any fixed representations, the artists within Home AKL propose hybrid identities. They negotiate an art practice where past, present and future memories of the homeland simultaneously influence the new ‘Home’ they live in, Auckland. This is evident in Siliga David Setoga’s Blackboard Work and Greg Semu's self portraits with his pe’a tattoo.

Siliga David Setoga, Blackboard Work, 2010-2012
blackboard, chalk, courtesy of the artist

Setoga’s work is universal in commentary and applicable to any minority group migrating to New Zealand and the struggles they face assimilating as young students to the New Zealand ‘norm’. The first Blackboard Work addresses the issue of replacing a child’s birth name, from Samoan culture with a first name to assimilate into a primary school classroom. Setoga is displaying a hybrid cultural memory of his childhood, where tradition just as important as assimilation.

Greg Semu, Self-portrait with side of pe'a, Sentinel Road, Herne Bay, 2012, digital print, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2012

In contrast, Greg Semu celebrates his ritualistic roots of pe’a through documentary photography. Semu fully reveals all and documents publicly his tattoos for the world to see. Semu is asking; what are the politics of identity? Do my tattoos define who I am? Alternatively, is it a critical interpretation of the self and the ‘other?’


- Shahriar Asdollah-zadeh

1. Chiu, Melissa, “Breakout Chinese art, outside China.” Milano, Italy: Edizioni Charta, 2006.

Migration, Diaspora and Trans-experience: Part I

We asked our Gallery guides to respond to the artworks in our current exhibition Home AKL. Our first poster, Shahriar Asdollah-Zadeh, is of Iranian/Filipino descent, born in the Philippines and raised in New Zealand. He completed a BFA in 2009 at Elam School of Fine Art, an PGDIP in fine art with distinction at Elam in 2010 and has been a practising artist since. Asdollah-Zadeh's art practice and academic research has mainly focused around diaspora and trans-experience of local and global displaced communities in the Middle East and the West. His website is www.therevolutioncontinued.org

Diaspora plays a major role in the history of Pacific contemporary art. Theories of the phrase can be both regional and global in definition. Historically, the term has been used to describe what has happened to the Jewish race for over two millennia. Diaspora is a dislocation and a sense of longing for one’s homeland. The notion can be temporary or permanent and addresses cultural displacement because of migration.  Modern usage of the term diaspora within contemporary art raises questions about the politics of identity, context, place, exile, hybrid cultural memory, and a critical interpretation of the self and other.

This departure from history’s position of diaspora referring only to the past is necessary – the pacific has changed due to globalisation and migration over the last half century so the definition needs to evolve. Melissa Chiu, a director of contemporary art and author of Breakout Chinese Art; Outside China, writes about the term Trans-experience. Trans-experience is a development of the term diaspora.

There is common ground these Pacific artists from Home AKL draw inspiration from – it is a memory of the homeland be it one that affects their past, present or future. The Pacific homeland itself is an evolving influence for these artists rather than a fixed moment when migration occurred.

Trans-experience is strongly evident in the art practice and paintings of John Pule. He was born in Niue, at the age four he moved to New Zealand and only returned to his homeland as a young adult. His paintings create a conversation of how one’s cultural roots, religious communities and childhood upbringing is continuing to influence him now and possibly in his  future, as it did in his migration to New Zealand when he was young. Moreover, it may have been the reason which drew him back to his homeland many decades later. The composition of his painting Motu Keheaga shows many different varying images and subject matters. What ties it all together is how it is all one story of his life. His paintings can be read as a self-reflection, a chronicle of the journey of finding himself and his roots.

John Pule, Motu Keheaga, 1998
oil on unstretched cotton, courtesy of the artist

Tales from the Cloakroom

The majority of our blog entries come from back-of-house staff. But if you're after 'better work stories' the best place to go is our talented team of Gallery Guides. With visitors from all walks of life coming through the doors every day, they've all got stories to tell of an unusual encounter or a truly bizarre question.

Just as a taster, here's a list of the strangest things visitors have checked into the cloakroom:

• An empty bowl of noodles
• Half a beer
• A large bowl of hummus
• A herb garden in a bucket
• Shoes
• A ceremonial axe
• A giant helium balloon
• Many bunches of flowers
• A whole raw fish

I guess we should be grateful none of these made it into the galleries! Thanks to Bella Burgess for compiling the list to date.