Exhibition - Sweet Punch: recent Nordic video

Robert Johansson and Vanna Bowles, still from Pugnae Spectaculum, 2002, DVD of performance.
Courtesy of the artists and BONO.

Raakel Kuukka, still from Drummer, 2003, two channel DVD. Courtesy of the artist.

NEW EXHIBITION AT THE PHYSICS ROOM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Sweet Punch: recent Nordic video

Gun Holmström, Robert Johansson & Vanna Bowles, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen & Tellervo Kalleinen and Raakel Kuukka
Curated by Emma Bugden

25 October – 25 November 2006

Opening preview: Tuesday 24 October 2006, 5.30pm

Documenting real events and people, the artists in Sweet Punch take emotion and relationships as their raw material, whether it is through pleasure or pain. In Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleinen’s work The 1st Complaints Choir of Birmingham (2005) the artists collaborate with the citizens of Birmingham, whose complaints about their city are transformed into a feel-good singalong anthem, while Pugnae Spectaculum (2002), by Robert Johansson and Vanna Bowles, records a live boxing match between the artists. The emotions displayed range from joyous to meditative to heartfelt and painful, but all offer an honesty of approach and style.

Emma Bugden, Curatorial Director of te tuhi, curated the exhibition after being the first New Zealander to undertake a curatorial residency at the Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art. She says: “we’re delighted to bring the work of these acclaimed artists to New Zealand, giving viewers a unique chance to experience the recent explosion of moving image practice in the Nordic region”.

Sweet Punch is a partnership project between te tuhi, Manukau and The Physics Room, Christchurch and will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue published with assistance from FRAME-FUND, Helsinki. The initial research for this exhibition was undertaken with funding assistance from the Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibition will premiere at te tuhi, open at The Physics Room on 24 October 2006 and tour to the New Zealand Film Archive in early 2007.

Curator Emma Bugden will talk with artists Robert Johansson and Vanna Bowles about the exhibition and their broader artistic practice on Wednesday 25 October, 5.30pm at The Physics Room.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Calling New Age Power (remix)
Robert Hood
27 September – 21 October 2006

Opening preview: Tuesday 26 September 2006, 5.30pm

Perennially enigmatic, deferrals, stand-ins and new age refluxes proliferate throughout the various incarnations of Robert Hood’s artistic practice. Tracing reflections carefully through a mire of everyday assumptions and material dependencies Hood’s past work offers empty promises, doublings, absences and a dubious brand of authorship that retains a succinctly sentimental appeal.

Borrowing its title from the song New Age Power by Auckland band King Loser, Hood’s video is transfixed by cultural nuances, conduits and memorial flows, Calling New Age Power (remix) immerses the audience within a delirious ebb of reverberating existential conceits. Hood’s entropic investigations and suggestively surreptitious creativities promise to make the most of this remix version’s altered cadence and modified authorship.

Currently operating from Christchurch, Hood offers over six years of hands-on, real-life visual results. He used to specialise in remote visual healing via email and telephone sessions, but he stopped doing this. He now works as an unnatural optics intuitive guide specialising in working with people and their objects from a very long distance. His work is here to remind you that the universal life energy is everywhere and that it’s inside the DNA of each of your cells. Hood holds a BFA from the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury.

ENDS

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