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Places in which we live and dream:

The 5th Auckland Triennial

Jane Button
Eyeline 80
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Today mobility is both a condition, and indeed necessity, of the global and cosmopolitan world in which we live. Departing, commuting, veering and living between places—countries, metropolises and homelands—also constitutes a continual (re)negotiation and consciousness of the meaning and embodiment of place and ‘home’.

According to curator and critic Hou Hanru, where we find ourselves, the hereness of wherever we may be, is ‘an ever-moving and evolving concept’. Insofar as ‘to “live here” does not simply mean to dwell here, but to play a role in the reinvention of an ever changing “here”’.1 In this sense, the creation of ‘here’ is subject to fluidity, is partial and is form(ed) in motion. By premising both his curatorial conception and the title of ‘The 5th Auckland Triennial’ on the question ‘If you were to live here …’ Hou has, from the outset, sought to stimulate and provoke speculation, to open a discussion and discourse of just this: If you were to live here …

The 5th iteration of the Auckland Triennial, as manifested in its tangible and exhibition-based form, suggests that it is in the interstices of the everyday that the potential of creative energies and modes of participatory engagement become mobilised. At the same time, the recognition of the tensions, the flux, and volatility of these spaces—their lived realities and daily struggles—their imaginative and utopic tendencies becomes palpable. Giving prominence to processes of urbanisation and social adaptation, as critical and thematic issues of our present time, curator Hou Hanru questions the status quo and urges viewers to consider the possibility of something ‘other’; where the imagination and creative processes foster awareness of, and a desire for, a ‘better equilibrium of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Amie Siegel, Winter, 2013. Still. Super 16mm transferred to HD video, colour, sound, performance. The Auckland Triennial Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2013.

Amie Siegel, Winter, 2013. Still. Super 16mm transferred to HD video, colour, sound, performance. The Auckland Triennial Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2013.

Do-Ho Suh, A Perfect Home: The Bridge Project, 2010. Still. Synchronised four monitor animated digital slide presentation. Courtesy the artist and Auckland Art Gallery;

Do-Ho Suh, A Perfect Home: The Bridge Project, 2010. Still. Synchronised four monitor animated digital slide presentation. Courtesy the artist and Auckland Art Gallery;