Public Seminars: Semester Two Programme

THURS 25 JULY, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Johanna Zellmer
Sweden Residency and Munich Showcase

I consider contemporary jewellery to be able to function as an analytical tool or instrument of identity politics, with the possibility for it to be used as a medium of socio-political knowledge. This seminar will give an overview of my time as IASPIS grant holder working at Konstepidemin in Gothenburg, Sweden from March-June 2019. During this residency I engaged intensively with regional art communities through seminars, crit-sessions and exhibitionsin both Munich, Germany and Gothenburg, Sweden. 

Johanna Zellmer completed a formal apprenticeship as a goldsmith in Germany and a master’s degree at the Australian National University, Canberra School of Art. She coordinates the Jewellery & Metalsmithing Studio and the Artist-in-Residence Programme at the Dunedin School of Art. Johanna co-founded CLINK Projects with Shane Hartdegen in 2014, a collaborative engagement in experimental and traditional making, writing and exhibition practice in the field of contemporary jewellery. Her research projects are frequently discussed by Indian Munich-based philosopher and cultural theorist Pravu Mazumdar, who examines the nature of art jewellery in relation to contemporary culture.

THURS 1 AUG, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

EMMA BUGDEN
Testing grounds and launching pads: Situating the artist-run space today

“We provide the first step, the interesting step and the step that’s free of constraints.” Jordana Bragg, co-founder, MEANWHILE

Start an artist-run space and get famous.  A group of art school friends rent a cheap building, show their own work and that of their friends and catch the spotlight of the larger art world. Many of the current generation of New Zealand artists on the international scene entered the art world as members of an artist collective and many more cut their teeth exhibiting at one.  Artist-run spaces are sites for creative and intellectual research, workplaces and training grounds, and launching pads for professional development. Because of their role as laboratories for debate and development, artist-run spaces offer a chance to study the art world at its most intense. This seminar presents PhD research on the extent to which new generations of artist/workers have learnt to operate within neoliberal conditions to claim space for themselves and their peers. 

Curator, writer and editor, Emma Bugden has carved out a career in the arts over two decades. Originally trained as an artist, she has worked as a curator for both independent spaces and public art museums, holding key leadership roles within the sector including Senior Curator at The Dowse Art Museum, Director of ARTSPACE, Curatorial Director, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts and Curator, City Gallery Wellington. Currently she is co-founder and Editor of Small Bore Books, a specialist art and design publishing imprint, while completing PhD study at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University. She is the Managing Curator of SCAPE Public Art 2019 in Christchurch, a Trustee of the Blumhardt Foundation and a member of the Public Art Steering Group for the Whanganui District Council. Bugden was New Zealand Nominator for the Signature Art Prize 2018 at the Singapore Art Museum, Judge of the Portage Ceramic Awards 2017 and a Juror for the 2016 Walters Prize at Auckland Art Gallery. She was the keynote speaker for CoLab: Australia / New Zealand glass art conference 2019. 

THURS 8 AUG, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Barbara Graf
Corporeal Explorations. On performative body sculptures and bodily topographies

Barbara Graf is an artist and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in the Textile Department. In her work she investigates body representations and develops flexible sculptures as a second skin. The main media are drawing, sculpture, photography and film. Since 2004 she has been working in artistic research projects dealing with medical issues. She is currently developing her artistic doctoral thesis Stitches and Sutures on the visualization of body perception. 

Graf presents works that deal intensively with the body. Covers, cloths and bandages describe a movement from the surface into the depths of the body. Once it is a solid protective wrapping, it is soon a fine translucent bandage into which physical structures are drawn with the sewing machine. Another time the body is drawn cartographically. The physical space is turned upside down, expanded or rearranged. Textile and physical tissues overlap. The works from the series of the Cloths show vulnerable bodies. Fabrics used in surgery are transformed artistically into membranes that embody corporeal expression and body perception.

THURS 15 AUG, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Udo Prinsen
Visiting Artist

Udo will talk about his profession as a multi-disciplinary practitioner, how his artistic ambitions relate to science projects, and present an overview of the Dutch media and design landscape. His latest project Touch base, arctic solargraphy will be a thread throughout the talk.

Udo Prinsen is a director and visual artist based in the Netherlands. He works for feature films, documentaries and television, and also creates exhibits and presentations for museum and science related institutes and projects. Udo works independently and under commission in a multi-disciplinary field, mostly using tools like animation and long exposure photography to create his imagery.  

THURS 22 AUG, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Paul Brobbel
Pretty good, for the 21stCentury 

Len Lye’s claim that his work will be ‘pretty good, for the 21stcentury’ was a witty but prescient exclamation made in the 1960s at the peak of his career as a kinetic artist. In relation to this notion of the future, curator Paul Brobbel will reflect upon posthumous activities and exhibition making of Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. He will introduce the various concepts at play at the Len Lye Centre, looking closely at the unique opportunities and challenges in building an internationally recognised programme around a single artist in provincial Aotearoa. 

Paul Brobbel is Senior Curator and Len Lye Curator at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre. In 2016 he was a Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Paul has worked at museums throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, including the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Museum and Puke Ariki. He has written extensively on the work of Len Lye including recent publications with the Getty Conservation Institute and Canterbury University Press.

THURS 29 AUG, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Neil Emmerson & Marion Wassenaar
Antipodean Encounters

This seminar reflects on the many diverse encounters with an international, multidisciplinary, print community and with the Cantabria region of northern Spain, its people, history, art and architecture. IMPACT 10 Encuentro (Encounters) is the tenth, biennial International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference initiated and mentored by the University of the West of England and held in this iteration in the city of Santander, Spain, from 1st-8thSeptember, 2018.

Neil Emmerson is a senior lecturer and studio coordinator of the Print Studio at Dunedin School of Art. For over thirty years he has pursued the expanded practice of print through the inclusion of installation and sculptural form, new and unconventional materials and the fusing of traditional and new technologies into his practice. He presented an exhibition titled Flight (370) during the conference at CASYC, Centro de Acción Social y Cultural (Centre of Social and Cultural Action).

Marion Wassenaar lectures in the Print Studio at Dunedin School of Art and graduated with an MFA in 2013. Her research focuses on the collision between humans and their environment through experimental print practices and charcoal production. She presented a paper at the conference on the projects and collaborations undertaken by staff and students from the Print Studio and also exhibited an artist's book in the Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology of Cantabria.

THURS 5 SEP, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Angela Dwyer
Art as Projection, as Distortion, and that the very Act of Drawing and Painting is Abstraction.

Angela Dwyer would like to introduce her work through a selection of her drawings and paintings of ‘ Irregular Squares’, Words, and some Figurative work while talking about Art as Projection, about Distortion, and that the very act of drawing and painting determines that art is in itself abstraction. In her work she wants us to think about what we consider abstraction and the abstract to be. Dwyer defines drawing as the placement of forms within a given space. She brings words into the realm of drawing by removing them from their original context and presenting them as pictorial elements within a pictorial space. She plays with the methods and ideas of distortion, creating subliminal interactions between the sacred and the banal, the intellectual and thepersonal.

Angela Dwyer moves intentionally between style, concepts, and materials within any series of work. She has taken the square as a man-made form, but then distorted it, making it irregular. This should disqualify the form from still being named a square, if it were not for the viewer visually accepting this paradox, and because the form is recognisable, unconsciously the question of the abstract versus the concrete is introduced. Over the last thirty-five years she has been living and working in Berlin, Germany. Angela Dwyer was born in Palmerston North, New Zealand in 1961. She studied Art Conservation at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and Fine Arts at the Otago School of Art, receiving the David Con Hutton Prize in 1981. After working a year in Wellington, she studied Painting at the School of Visual Arts in Gippsland, Australia in 1983 and began travelling around Europe, settling in West Berlin, Germany in 1984. In 1988 her daughter Alice, and in 1996 her son Jordan were born. Angela Dwyer has now had 24 Solo exhibitions of her paintings and drawings in Berlin and throughout Europe. She has taken part in 36 group shows and participated in many international Art Fairs i.e. Moscow, New York, Cologne, Rome and London. In 2009/10 Angela Dwyer was Guest-Professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and in 2013 the Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin showed her installations on two floors in the Farbe Raum Farbe exhibition. 2013 to 2016, she was Lecturer of Drawing and Painting, and developed and taught “Introduction to the Elements of Design” at the Institute of Design, Berlin. She has worked as an Art Director on multiple Film, Video and Theatre productions since 2002 and is Lecturer of Drawing at the Etage Theatre Production School Berlin. She will be the Artist in Residence at the Dunedin School of Art from August to December 2019.

FRI 6 SEP, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Geoffrey Batchen
Light and Dark: A Little History of the Negative  

One of the distinctive characteristics of photography is that most analogue photographs are positive prints that have been made from a negative. Nevertheless, the negative is almost always regarded as a secondary entity in discussions of photography, if it is discussed at all. Looking at work by a range of practitioners, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon, Andreas Gursky and Linda Nagler, this talk will offer a little history of the negative, tracing some of the ways that history complicates our understanding of the photograph.  

A renowned photo-historian, Geoffrey Batchen teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. HIs books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004); William Henry Fox Talbot (2008); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010); and Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016). Batchen has also curated exhibitions for the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne; the Izu Photo Museum in Shizuoka, Japan; the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik; the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, NZ; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, NZ; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. In December, Batchen will be taking up the Chair of Art History at Oxford University in the UK.

THURS 12 SEP, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Grace Lai
Carried Away: Bags Unpacked

The bag, and the handbag in particular, has achieved high fashion status, but what's the cultural and historical significance behind the bag? Why do we use them and not just have pockets? Why don't men routinely use them? Does every culture have a tradition of using bags? The Auckland Museum exhibition Carried Away: Bags Unpacked is a collection of 150 bags from their Applied Arts and Design Collection, a nationally significant research archive of key makers and designers from New Zealand and abroad, and this book serves as both a photographic record and an exploration of the symbolism and power behind bags.

Grace Lai, curator of the collection unpacks issues carried by the bag: of colonialism, the economy, consumption, gender politics, and whakapapa. Issues that remain relevant to not only museums and their collections but also to society today. Guided by a curiosity for the stories told by objects that are overlooked or dismissed, Grace Lai is interested in seeking out the webs of connections between material and immaterial culture. This philosophy was developed during her time as an Alphawood Scholar at SOAS University of London. Today, Grace is an art historian and curator at Auckland Museum, where she leads he exhibition, curation, and development of the Applied Arts and Design Collection. Currently, her research is focused on expanding the collection and discourse of contemporary New Zealand practitioners – which has seen her get carried away by bags.

THURS 19 SEP, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Mark Braunias
Messing about in studios 

Mark Braunias is a New Zealand based artist who has exhibited extensively over the past 30 years. He graduated with a BFA from Canterbury University, Ilam School of Fine Arts, Christchurch in 1988. Mark Braunias was the inaugural winner of the James Wallace Art Award in 1992 and received a Wallace/Fulbright scholarship to complete an artist residency at Headlands Center For The Arts in San Francisco during 2011. Braunias has also completed artist residencies at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (2002), William Hodges Fellowship, Invercargill (2005), and Tylee Cottage, Whanganui (2007). He has appeared in curated public gallery exhibitions including A very peculiar practice (City Gallery, Wellington, 1995), Gruesome (Robert McDougal Art Gallery, Christchurch, 1999), The Cartoon Show (Auckland Art Gallery, 2002) and Field of Vision: A survey of Mark Braunias (Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland, 2016) and also exhibited work at Sydney Contemporary Art Fair (2015) and Hong Kong Central  Art Fair (2015) in association with Bath Street Gallery.

Braunias has published a number of art catalogues including Praha (1992),  Gank (2001),  A Day In My Life (2003),  My New Art God  (2004),  Congo (2006), Waterfront Industry Commission Report  (2006),  London Town (2008) and Encyclo-Dimensional (2015). His work is held in public gallery and private collections including : Te Papa Museum, Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Sarjeant Art Gallery, Tauranga Art Gallery, Invercargill Art Gallery and Museum, Ashburton Art Gallery, Auckland University, Canterbury University, Lincoln University, Fletcher Trust Collection, Wallace Arts Trust and the State Library Of Queensland. www.markbraunias.com

THURS 26 SEP, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Leoni Schmidt
Venice 2019: May you live in interesting times

This seminar shares the presenter's recent experiences of the Venice Biennale 2019. Violent Rages, Tragedies of Loss, Wry Humour, and Apocalyptic Cacophonies are some of the registers of contemporary practice exhibited this year by more than 90 countries and thousands of artists 116 years after the advent of this international showcase for the visual arts. 

Dr. Leoni Schmidt is the Director: Research & Postgraduate Studies at Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin and Auckland, New Zealand. She is a full professor in the Dunedin School of Art at the same institution. 

THURS 17 OCT, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Rachel Allan and Alex Lovell-Smith
Code & silver 

As graduates of Dunedin School of Art, Alex Lovell-Smith and Rachel Hope Allan find themselves working between multiple digital media and analogue processes. In this seminar they will discuss the intersections and overlaps in their photographic practices. Both share a passion for the darkroom and the alchemical and arcane process of film and silver salts and mix these techniques with contemporary technology, digital media and the changing photographic landscape. 

Lovell-Smith and Allan are Lecturers in Photography and Electronic Arts at the Dunedin School of Art. Both are independent practitioners, researching and experimenting in a range of photographic and  (unhol) mixture of image making systems.

THURS 24 OCT, 12.00 – 1.00 PM, P152, DUNEDIN SCHOOL OF ART, RIEGO ST, DUNEDIN

Kalisolaite ‘Uhila
Dunedin Public Art Gallery Visiting Artist 

Kalisolaite achieved his Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology, Auckland in 2010.  Just one year after graduating, he earned the Visual Arts Award for his work Pigs In The Yard at The Auckland Fringe 2011 Awards.  In 2013 Kalisolaite received the Iris Fisher Scholarship from Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Pakuranga while studying for his Postgraduate Diploma in Dance from the University of Auckland; awarded annually to assist postgraduate art students with promising and visionary (http://www.tautai.org/artist/kalisolaite-uhila/)

DPAG NZ visiting artist Kalisolaite Uhila will present a number of performances while in Dunedin, including a durational drumming performance that will extend across 80 days, based in the BNZ gallery on the ground floor of DPAG.  Paying reference to various histories and ancestories Kalisolaite ‘Uhila’s performance work is also receptive to the every day and the multiplicities of being.