“Sights and Sounds: New Zealand” Exhibition

The Jewish Museum

poster for “Sights and Sounds: New Zealand” Exhibition

This event has ended.

The four works selected for this program come from a remarkably broad set of artistic interests, reflecting the diversity of New Zealand video art since the 1970s. Together, they present an intertwined set of concerns. A new generation of video artists in New Zealand has focused on the environment—a subject that for some decades appeared to have been forgotten. In these provocative works, the land is seen less within the framework of the picturesque or the touristic than through the lens of contemporary issues of ownership, subjectivity, and personal freedom within public, commercial, or politicized spaces.

In 1975 the innovative and globally influential Waitangi Tribunal was established, a unique forum for hearing indigenous claims to land taken by the Crown. The tribunal stimulated a deep questioning of land use and value that goes to the core of society. The discussion began during the period when these four artists were growing up, and they are now operating within that conversation. Whether consciously or not, New Zealand artists are bound to think about the visual occupation of land in ways that ask larger questions, which are infinitely transferrable to geopolitical contexts locally and globally.

Language is also emphasized in these works through notation and spoken commentary. The words are not always tightly linked to the visual narrative; the dislocation of subject, text, and environment suggests the complex dialogues among them, establishing an open forum for viewing.

Natasha Conland
Curator

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Schedule

from July 31, 2015 to August 27, 2015

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