Adam Art Gallery presents The Otolith Group

London-based art collective and 2010 Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group are showing their work for the first time in New Zealand at the Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington. Their trilogy of film works and book project A Long Time Between Suns sympathetically re-orientates our perception of history by treating the past as an archival resource to re-envisage the future. Theirs is no utopian imagining, but a sceptical image of a ‘global’ future built from a disjuncture of sounds and images that tap into ideas of futurity and trans-national histories.

Their work is being staged alongside Object Lessons: A Musical Fiction, an exhibition curated by Laura Preston and Mark Williams that also investigates the past in the interests of engaging the future. Five artists/collectives, who all operate between the spheres of music and the visual arts—Fitts & Holderness, DJ $1 Record aka Bryce Galloway, Caroline Johnston, Torben Tilly & Robin Watkins, and Ronnie van Hout—have been invited to produce new works that take as their starting point the idea of “the record”.

The record is a dissemination device and a visual object, a record of the event in time and a commodification of a moment in history—Bruce Russell

Object Lessons has been conceived in the wake of the digital download. The project investigates the visual forms of music as a way to address issues of documentation and distribution. It is curious about how histories accrue around this object as a material artefact and as a commodity. Intriguingly the music record provides access to the past and yet it implies an inevitable distance from the contexts and circumstances of its production. Therefore the lesson of this object is that while the past may be ultimately unobtainable, stories, memories, values, and beliefs assemble around it.

The exhibition explicitly focuses on independent music production as a site where the social, economic and political effects of recording are re-negotiated by artists eager to work outside “the system” and usually “off the record”. Here questions of commodification are critically addressed and social and cultural codes are inventively reworked.

The works presented by the artists forecast the future by reconnecting with the past, to resist and reorient the “impending tsunami” of the digital download and the modalities of communication within which music now circulates.

Object Lessons is the second project to be curated for the Adam Art Gallery’s Sound Check research initiative that explores the intersections between music and the visual arts. It is accompanied by a public programme of talks, workshops and performances: http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz/current-exhibition/

This exhibition project is accompanied by an illustrated publication with an essay by theorist and musician Bruce Russell and a CD interview with Campbell Kneale and Anthony Milton.

The exhibitions are supported by LUX London, VideoPro, and Coopers Creek.

If you require further information please contact: Laura Preston
Email: laura.preston@vuw.ac.nz Tel: +64 4 463 5229

The Adam Art Gallery is the university art gallery of Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. It is a forum for critical thinking about art and its histories as well as the professional structure within which the Victoria University Art Collection is managed. The gallery has built a considerable reputation for its programmes that explore the full range of media available to artists and which aim to test and expand art form and disciplinary boundaries. The gallery is a remarkable architectural statement designed by Ian Athfield, one of New Zealand’s foremost architects.

Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
Gate 3, Kelburn Parade
PO Box 600, Wellington 6140
Aotearoa /New Zealand
Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm
FREE ENTRY
+ 64 4 463 5229
adamartgallery@vuw.ac.nz

http://www.adamartgallery.org.nz