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Invited Participants

The invited participants include:

Andy Bichlbaum
Andy Bichlbaum is a member of the Yes Men, a loose-knit group of impostors. In May 2000, Gatt.org (a "fake" Yes Men website often mistaken for the website of the WTO) received an e-mail inviting a WTO representative to speak at a conference on international trade matters. Several such invitations later, "The Yes Men" have represented the WTO at economic and industrial conferences, as well as on prime-time television. Each time, these satirical performances have generated large amounts of press and have helped to publicly question neoliberal economic policies.

Bichlbaum will show video clips of these events, explain in detail how they were accomplished, and describe exactly how others could perform similar actions tailored to their interests and means.

 

Sean Cubitt
Sean Cubitt is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Screen Media, at the University of Waikato. Formerly Professor of Media Arts at Liverpool John Moores University, England, his books include Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, Digital Aesthetics and Simulation and Social Theory. He has co-edited The Third Text Reader and Aliens R Us: Postcolonial Science Fiction and has published widely on contemporary media, arts and culture. He is currently completing a book on special effects cinema for MIT Press. Cubitt's research interests include media aesthetics, media ethics and media democracy.

 

Annie Goldson
Annie Goldson has been producing and directing award-winning documentaries, docudramas and experimental film / video for 15 years in the United States and New Zealand. They include Georgie Girl (2002), Punitive Damage (1999) and Framing the Panthers (in Black and White), 1991 and have screened in film festivals, on cinemas and through broadcast, worldwide. She is also a writer and has published articles in books and journals such as The Listener (NZ), Landfall, Screen, Semiotext(e), and Social Text, and others. She recently received a Marsden grant from the Royal Society of New Zealand to complete a book on human rights documentary, After the Fact: Documentary, Human Rights and International Law which is now under contract with Temple University Press. Annie has been the recipient of video fellowships from New York State, New England, Rhode Island and New Zealand Arts Councils and while living in the United States was nominated for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

Goldson has also been Director of the biannual New Zealand International Documentary Conference held at the University of Auckland in 1996, 1998 and the year 2000 and was part of the organizing committee of the recent Documentary Matters event (2002). She is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland in Aotearoa / New Zealand and is also completing her PhD..

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Jenny Harper
Jenny Harper has worked as a curator and administrator in a number of art galleries in Australia and New Zealand, including the National Gallery of Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery. She was Senior Curator of International Art and then Director of New Zealand's National Art Gallery from 1986 to early 1994, apart from a year on the planning team for the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in 1989. She was the curator of the Boyd Webb touring exhibition (1997-2000).

Harper established a new art history department at Victoria University of Wellington in 1995. As part of making art history distinctive and offering students professional as well as academic opportunities, she initiated and oversaw the development of the Adam Art Gallery, a professionally-run exhibition space on Victoria's campus which opened in September 1999. Having worked in the art field in different roles, Jenny Harper is no stranger to controversy. As Director of the former National Art Gallery, she publicly defended the purchase of two portraits by Charles F Goldie in 1990 and then the sale of a painting by Colin McCahon by Victoria University in 1999. Her work by Peter Robinson, 'Pakeha have rights too!' has caused considerable debate. In 2002 she began researching exhibitions of international art which have provoked public debate in New Zealand and Australia, with a particular emphasis on how art galleries mediate between artist and audience, and the occasions when church and state intervene when art is contentious.

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Te Miringa Hohaia
Te Miringa Hohaia (Taranaki Iwi and Taranaki Whaanui is a traditional custodian (kaitiaki) of Parihaka meeting house Te Pae Pae). As a musician, activist and historian, Hohaia is a prominent figure in the political and cultural affairs of Taranaki, and in the revival of traditional Parihaka waiata and poi. For decades he has been a passionate advocate for Maori land rights. He lives on the Taranaki coast, close to Parihaka Pa. He jointly edited Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance VUP (2001) with Gregory O'Brien and Lara Strongman and played a significant part in curating the exhibition of the same name in the City Gallery, Wellington 2000/2001. Parihaka: The Art of Passive Resistance was joint winner of the History & Biography category in the 2001 Montana NZ Book Awards.

 

Tame Iti
Tame Iti (Tuhoe). Activist, Artist and George FM and Radio Waatea DJ, Tame has been a formidable presence in the Tino Rangaotiratanga movement. Face of the Tuhoe Embassy at Tanetua. "Waitangi Day, and Tame Iti is the manifestation of every Pakeha's worst nightmare. Sturdily built and proudly bearing an intricate moko covering the entirety of his face, he spits in front of the Governor General, Cath Tizard, before delivering his piece de resistance, a whakapohane, a baring of the buttocks - an action hard to top on the list of Maori insults. His face is flashed on news bulletins around the world: beware the dangerous face of Maori radicalism.

The ambassador from Tuhoe, Tame Iti was born 47 years ago.

He has whakapapa links with Te Arawa, Ngati Wairere and Ngati Haua - the Kingmakers of Waikato - but clearly feels most at home in Tuhoe." (Excerpts from Mana Magazine, http://aotearoa.wellington.net.nz/he/tame.html).

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Grant Kester
Grant Kester is an associate professor of art history at the University of California at San Diego. Kester is an art historian and critic whose research has focused on the history of social documentary practice and urban reform culture, aesthetic theory, and community-based art practice. He received a BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and an MA and Ph.D. from the Visual and Cultural Studies program at the University of Rochester.

Prior to joining UCSD Kester taught at Arizona State University, Washington State University, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. He was previously scholar-in-residence and coordinator of the critical studies program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Between 1990 and 1996 he was editor of Afterimage, a visual and media arts journal published by the Visual Studies Workshop. At Afterimage he established one of the first paid internship for writers and editors of color at an arts publication. He has also served as the Washington D.C./Mid-Atlantic Editor of the New Art Examiner. In 1986-87 Kester was a fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, where he collaborated on the exhibition The Viewer as Voyeur at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris. Kester edited the anthology Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998) and the "Aesthetics and the Body Politic" issue of the College Art Association Art Journal (Spring 1997). His forthcoming book, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art outlines a critical framework for recent art practices based on performative interactions with viewer/participants outside of normative art contexts.

Kester has also worked as a curator and curatorial consultant for projects including Expanding Commitment: Diverse Approaches to Socially-Concerned Photography (with Ann Fessler, Maryland Institute, 1986) and two more recent projects for the Center for Exploratory and Perceptual Art (CEPA Gallery) in Buffalo, New York. The first, Ruins in Reverse: Time and Progress in Contemporary Art (1999) explored the cultural, social and aesthetic significance of time and history in contemporary art. The second, Unlimited Partnerships: Collaboration in Contemporary Art (2000), featured a range of projects that explore collaborative approaches to the production and reception of art. Kester's essays have been published in Contemporary Art in Theory 1985-2000 (Blackwell, 2003), Architectures of Globalization: Places, Practices and Pedagogies (forthcoming, 2004), Sub-Versions, (Singapore: The Substation, forthcoming, 2003), Politics and Poetics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martins Press, 1999), the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998), Ethics, Information and Technology: Readings (McFarland, 1997) and Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR (Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1991) as well as journals including Afterimage, Exposure, Mix (Canada), the Nation, New Art Examiner, Public Art Review, Social Text and Art Papers.

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Merata Mita
Activist, feminist and filmmaker, Merata Mita is of the Ngati Pikiao tribe from the Bay of Plenty. Recognised as one of the most significant film-makers in the history of film in Aotearoa, Mita’s groundbreaking documentary Bastion Point Day 507 (with Gerd Pohlmann and Leon Narby, 1980) offered a strongly articulated Maori perspective on Aotearoa/New Zealand’s colonial legacy. “I saw it as expressing one hundred and forty years of anguish over what had happened to Maori people and the land” (Mita). Excluded from mainstream venues, the film was screened in marae, church halls, universities and schools, helping to catalyse major political change. “The land protest and the film were major precipitating factors in the lead up to the government’s recognition of Treaty of Waitangi grievances and the resulting settlements in the 1990’s.” (Deborah Shepard, 2000).

Mita followed Bastion Point with the film Patu! (1983), which documented violent clashes between anti-tour protestors and Rugby fans during the 1981 Springbok Tour of New Zealand. Patu! was the first feature length film directed by a New Zealand woman and was described by Ken Walshin, 1984 London Film Festival director as “a major documentary of our time”. Maintaining her commitment to a distinct Maori vision through both documentary and fiction film, Mita’s other major projects have included the feature film Mauri(1988), and the biography Hotere (2001), which documents the work of Ralph Hotere, New Zealand’s greatest living modern artist.

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Rangihiroa Panoho
Rangihiroa Panoho has affiliations to Te Parawhau, Te Uriroroi and Ngäti Manu. He holds a PhD, MA (Hons) and a BA in Art History and is a Lecturer in Maori Art in the Art History department of the University of Auckland.

Panaho’s PhD thesis Continuum in Maori Art (submitted 2001) used the metaphor of a river to break down the boundaries which currently exist in thinking around ‘contemporary’ & ‘traditional’ aspects of Maori art. Emphasis was placed on creative flow in the arts and not so much its settling pattern. He has explored other issues such as the presentation and interpretation of Mäori cultural material, new work by Maori and Pacific artists, in a variety of publications, lectures and exhibitions both locally and internationally. These include the shows Te Moemoea no Iotefa, Auckland Art Gallery, City Gallery, Wellington (1990) and Whatu Aho Rua for the Adelaide International Arts Festival (1989/1992). Panaho’s current labour of love is a major book on Mäori art. In collaboration with Auckland University Press he is currently reworking his PhD dissertation for projected publication in late 2004 / early 2005.

 

Leonie Pihama
Leonie Pihama of Te Atiawa and Ngati Mahanga tribal affiliation, is a leading Maori academic, filmmaker and activist. Pihama has been a lecturer in Maori education at the University of Auckland, teaching in the fields of policy analysis, Maori women, and the politics of representation of indigenous people. As a writer she has contributed to many visual culture catalogues, is writing her first book and recently completed her doctorate, looking at mana wahine as a theoretical framework for Kaupapa Maori. As a co-director of the video and film production company Moko productions, Pihama has collaborated with Sharon Hawke and Glynis Paraha, using the mediums of film and video to question and challenge various political agendas and issues affecting all Maori, but especially Maori women.

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John Welchman
John C. Welchman is Professor of art history and theory in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale UP, 1997) and Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Routledge, 2001); co-author of the Dada and Surrealist Word Image (MIT Press, 1987) and of Mike Kelley in the Phaidon Contemporary Artists series (1999); and editor of Rethinking Borders (Minnesota UP, 1996). He has written for Artforum, Screen, Art + Text, Third Text, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Economist and other newspapers and journals; and contributed catalogue essays for exhibitions at the Tate (London), Reina Sophia (Madrid), Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the LA County Museum of Art, the Sydney Biennial, and the Ludwig Museum (Budapest).

His current projects include editing the collected writings of Mike Kelley (the first vol., Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, has just been published, Summer 2003); the second, Minor Histories, also, with MIT Press, is due in Spring 2004; volumes on music and sound culture, interviews and performance scripts are in preparation. He is also finalizing two books on the relation between art, film and the representation of faces (The Celluloid Face and Faces and Powers); and a project on World Art Now for Phaidon.

In his spare time Welchman writes on culinary history - he co-authored Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook (Workman, 1989) and Terrific Pacific (1995) with Anya von Bremzen, and did the photos for Fiesta! (Doubleday 1997) - the first and last won James Beard awards.

 

Dr. Kirsten Zemke-White
Dr. Kirsten Zemke-White is a lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Auckland. She teaches Pacific and Popular Musics and has done extensive research on hip hop culture and rap music in Aotearoa. Born in the USA, Kirsten moved to Aotearoa 20 years ago and has also been involved in a range of film, television, and music projects.

 

| outline | the event | participants | sponsors | organisers | registration |