Sunlighting, Prairie Hatchard-McGill, Angela Pan, Hulita Koloi

Sunlighting, Daylighting, Moonlighting

At first glance these terms call up the essential cycles of the natural world. The passing of a day, the turning of a season, the rising of the stars on the horizon line. Expanding on this, each of these terms has also come to be closely related to transformation within our constructed life: your vocation becoming your primary source of income; revealing the true nature of an urban context by exposing waterways covered over; the need to split yourself (day job, night job, etc.) in order to navigate the complexities of running a life.

Sunlighting, Daylighting, Moonlighting

These terms are all, therefore, deeply connected to processes of navigating the systems and structures of the world we inhabit and the politics that constitutes it. This exhibition presents the work of artists who each scrutinise these politics—honing in on the fields of learning environments, individualism, and online domains—in order to build worlds. This scrutiny, carried out through practice, produces generative forms of friction that play out in the form of sculpture, video, collage, print, and sound.

The work of Prairie Hatchard-McGill deforms codices used in learning environments in order to highlight the border between pedagogical frameworks and the incorporation of a subject to enhance a certain type of society. Hulita Koloi excavates the tension between the individual and the collective: what has been the price of the evolution of cities in late Capitalism where the needs of our bodies and environs are largely ignored? Meanwhile, Angela Pan introduces us to a complex figure carved from the cryonic-like environments of online worlds. Testing the limits and formats of the realm of artificiality, this figure performatively stretches understandings of self-care and self-love.

This impulse to ‘cast light on’ is not so much to show us “what we don’t know” but rather to pointedly insist that we consider precisely what we do know, but may have ignored. Here, standard processes are revealed as arbitrary and ripe for charged deconstruction and reinterpretation. Viewed in concert, these works present an emerging form of social-sculpture that asks: where does my body belong?

Sunlighting is the first iteration of the New Commissions programme, evolving out of the legacy of the annual New Artists show and generously supported by the Chartwell Trust and Stout Trust.

Our programme 2023

This year we explore the question “where does my body belong?” To have a body is a pre-existing condition we all live with and in, and spend our lives coming to know what this could mean. While we are all born with a body, each body comes with its own unique capacity and limitations. The whether or how these capacities and limits unfold is greatly determined by the society into which we emerge. We consider the vast range of what it is to have a body, be a body, and participate within the systems that enlarge or confine us in the dynamic friction of our daily life.

Biographies

Prairie Hatchard-McGill was born and raised in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, where she lives. Hatchard-McGill gained her BFA (Hons) from the Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts and Design in 2021. She has presented her broad ranging practice spanning sculpture and performance that draws from countercultural histories, glamour, and sexuality in several public contexts including: Signature Print (2022), Neo Gracie, Hatchard-McGill and Ward (2021), SaatchiSaatchi&Saatchi both in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland; and Prairie’s Drama Club (2022-2023) a workshop organised with multiple collaborators, culminating in a film of the same name directed by Finnbar Porteous.

Hulita Koloi is a Tongan-born artist working as a kaiako at Tāmaki College in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She graduated from Whitecliffe College of Fine Arts and Design in 2021 with a Masters of Fine Arts with First Class Honours. Her primarily sculptural practice often engages with her community by, for example, including open call processes or by borrowing furniture from specific contexts. In 2023 she participated in Material Instinct at Depot Artspace and Tukufakaholo at Bergman Gallery, both in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

Angela Pan is a Chinese-New Zealand artist born and living in Tāmaki Makaurau. Pan completed a Master of Fine Arts with First Class Honours at the Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Arts and Design in 2023. Her wide practice spans 3D-animation, film, fashion, sculpture, photography, game art, and painting where she fragments and layers existing representations to incite opportunities for epistemological slippages and transcendence. This year she presented How to Become a Magical Girl: 少·法·魔·女 at play_station, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.

Hanne Lippard lives in Berlin and works across performance, reading, sound recordings, and installations. Within the variation of these formats, the voice is her main medium. Most recently she has concentrated on the use of the female body as a vessel for sound, the conscious as well as unconscious automatisation of speech and language. Recent solo exhibitions include The Myths and Realities of Achieving Financial Independence, CCA Berlin-Center for Contemporary Arts, Berlin; Le langage est une peau, FRAC Lorraine, Metz; SUPERHOST 2021, MUHKA -Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; and Flesh, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. In 2023 she received the Preis der Nationalgalerie hosted by Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

Joanna Cho / 조은선 is the author of People Person, published by Te Herenga Waka Press, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She was born in Korea, moved to Tāmaki Makaurau at the age of two, and currently lives between Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Tūrangi. She studied for a BA, a graduate diploma in publishing, and a master's in creative writing.

Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari are Iranian artists, filmmakers, and long-time collaborators who live in New York.  As well as co-directing Land of Dreams they collaborated on Women Without Men (2009) which received the Silver Lion Award at the 66th Venice Film Festival (2009). Their film Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), was based on the life of the legendary Egyptian singer. Neshat works in the mediums of photography, video installation and film, has exhibited widely most recently at Tate Modern, London and was the recipient of the Golden Lion Award at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Neshat directed her first opera, AIDA, at the Salzburg Music Festival in 2017. Azari has directed several feature films including K, (2000); Windows (2006); Simple Little Lives (2015); and Badria (2017).