AUT - 2011 Expanding Documentary Conference - Exhibition
- ArionWhere applying and enrolled students can access AUT course information, check your enrolment status, make fee payments, update your personal details and view your academic results.
- AUTOnlineOnline access to course resources and learning activities through AUT's central learning management system.
- UnicentralUniCentral is the AUT University Student Portal. Here you will find useful information about you as a student and quicklinks to all the important online systems you will need to use while studying at AUT University.
Centre Banner
Breadcrumb
Main Content
2011 Expanding Documentary Conference - Exhibition
DOCUMENTARIES EXHIBITION
ST PAUL ST GALLERY, 39 SYMONDS ST
GALLERY HOURS: Tues 6th – Fri 9th December 12.00 – 5.00 pm, Sat 10th December 10-12 pm
GALLERY HOURS: Tues 6th – Fri 9th December 12.00 – 5.00 pm, Sat 10th December 10-12 pm
DOCUMENTARIES
Edith Amituanai, David Cook, John Lake, Janet Lilo, Ant Low, Anne Shelton, and Ans Westra
[Curated By Fiona Amundsen and Dieneke Jansen]
St Paul St Gallery Three, 6th – 10th December 2011
Documentaries (curated by Fiona Amundsen/Dieneke Jansen) is an exhibition that brings together a diverse range of artists, whose work spans five decades (1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s) of documentary photography and moving image practice within New Zealand. The selected artists range from established iconic figures (David Cook, Ann Shelton, Ans Westra) within national and international photographic discourses to more emerging artists (Edith Amituanai, John Lake, Janet Lilo, Ant Low). Documentaries, mounted at St Paul St Gallery Three, runs alongside the Expanding Documentary conference (jointly hosted by AUT and Auckland University).
As an exhibition Documentaries sets out to critique aspects of the dominant rhetoric associated with documentary practice itself, namely the ‘politics of lens based representation’. Rather than focusing on the limits of documentary as inherently biased and politically dodgy, let alone the countless methods of practice that seek to transcend such dilemmas by shifting subjective positions, Documentaries attempts to resist such conventional thinking that presumes representation as a pre-given non-negotiable fixed system. In short documentary does not have a fixed identity (or interpretation) to which all practices must firstly submit to in order to then challenge. Accordingly this exhibition works with a curatorial premise that attempts to conceive of a documentary practice that goes beyond representation, beyond fixed subjectivities. Documentaries questions how a lens based practice can produce an encounter (ie: with the image's subject matter) that effectively acts as a rupture to habitual representational subjectivities, whilst also asking how a documentary practice might work to challenge systems of knowledge, and therefore thought, in a manner that goes beyond a simple power-play reversal based on a preconceived notion of difference (ie: who can represent who).
As an exhibition Documentaries takes Ans Westra’s Washday at the Pa (1964) as its conceptual starting point. Westra’s project attempted to document ‘a typical day in rural Maori life’, which resulted in a body of work that was essentialising in its cultural positioning. Documentaries is interested in using this heavily critiqued work as a way to track the implications this project has had (and continues to have) on local documentary based practice. Although the artists selected for this exhibition don’t necessarily provide an outright rejection of Westra’s work, they do operate within a discursive documentary framework. In short, the artists’ within Documentaries simultaneously manage to critique Westra whilst also resisting preconceived ideas surrounding the practice of documentary.
EXHIBITION OPENING
Monday 5th December 5pm
Last updated: 21 Dec 2011 9:15am