Yukari Kaihori

Yukari 海堀Kaihori is a Japanese-born artist working and living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, currently a doctoral candidate at Elam School of Fine Arts. Her work develops an interest in the More-than-Human-World and draws on practices located in Japanese folk animism to consider the life-force in materials and things by building on a material practice of respect and awareness of the immediate environment.

·       Yukari spoke about growing up in Brazil as a Japanese immigrant. The relationship between Japan and Brazil is complex, with diplomatic, political, and cultural ties dating

back to Portuguese colonisation of the two countries in the 16th century.

·       She grew up learning the art of calligraphy, the meditative aspect of this practice becoming important to her work.

·       She was a painter, but during the first year of her MFA she moved from ten years of painting to installation.

·       Her practice looks into the relationship between objects and a ‘more than human’ world through mixed-media sculptures in site-specific or site-situated installations.

·       Site-situated as defined by artist Pierre Huyghe – contingency, relational aesthetics

·       Referenced Timothy Morton’s idea of genius. Morton is a member of the object-oriented philosophy movement. His work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies.

Two Sides of the Moon, 2023, exhibition view, at Te Tuhi.

·       She has to study the site in order to give power back to the site

·       Uses careful observation to guide her installation

·       Throughout the duration of her installation at Te Tuhi plants started to grow up through and around her work in the courtyard. She loved that this happened.

·       Interested in the Japanese folk idea of luck, unluck, and chance

·       “Yeon” – chance encounters in past lives – like fate (see “Past Lives”, Korean film)

·       Yukari had a chance meeting that lead her to use black sand from the west coast, that gets exported to Japan

·       Sand has memories and stories (also scientifically true)

·       Yukari’s installation at Gus Fisher as part of the group exhibition eight thousand layers of moments, started life as the two sides of the moon installation at Te Tuhi

·       More-than-Human-World (MTHW), David Abrams (1996) – she prefers this term to animism

·       Kami (deities) – everything is kami

·       “The Handbook of Contemporary Animism” (2013) – ed. Graham Harvey

·       She thinks of new-animism as our everyday – not magical thinking

·       Miwan Kwon (One Place After Another)]

·       Ma Umi residency – on Ishigaki Island, a tropical island in south Japan (close to Taiwan) that wasn’t a part of Japan till about 200 years ago. Yukari studied the location and spoke to the local people. Spent time gathering along the coast and created her installation from found objects.

Ma Umi Residency exhibition, December 2023, Ishigaki Island, Japan.

The thing that most interested me about Yukari's practice was her use of space. As my work gets larger it seems to have a stronger relationship with the space itself, and I’ve been thinking about intervening in the space in a more site-specific way. That is, spending more time with the space prior to installation to see how I can use my work to activate it in a more disruptive way.

There’s also something to imbuing my objects with more character. Not to the extent of animism, but enough that a viewer can potentially make a make a more meaningful connection.

Victoria Wynne-Jones

Victoria Wynne-Jones is a curator, art historian, and art writer.

Her talk titled “Am I overly suggestible?”: encounter and the relational in contemporary performance art (Invisible Forces: Subtle Bodies In and Around Works of Art), was presented to us in two parts.

The first part centred around Elbow-room in the universe, which was a performance-based project curated by Victoria for Enjoy Gallery in Wellington, that included work by artists Sholto Buck, Amy Howden-Chapman, Sonya Lacey, val smith and Fiona Williams.

All the work involved atmosphere, encounters, orientation, proximity and hospitality, and created environments that had room for and welcomed irresponsibility and freedom. Slender openings in time-space were created so that visitors to Enjoy might have the possibility of finding themselves in the midst of short and engaging interpersonal encounters.

For this talk Victoria focused on the work of val smith and Sonya Lacey.

·       She spoke about the way that subtle bodies can be enacted using the example of val smith’s “Sexes on site – with light and air”, a 7 hour performance where smith, dressed in full PPE gear which made her ambiguous and devoid of gender, explored and tried to sense the built environment but was fully prevented from doing so by the PPE gear.

val smith, Sexes on site - with light and air, 2020.

Performer, beholder, space, light, sounds, and objects were intermingled. Her engagement with the site was contagious in that her experience was felt by the viewer.

·       “New light wedge fiction”, with Sonya Lacey was a one on one performance where a participant listened to Sonya reading aloud while watching a ceiling fan working on the floor - both delicately activating the invisible with shared breath and movement of air.

·       Victoria said she thinks about the small delicate things when facilitating performances and her curated relational performances relate to climate change, ecologies, and events.

Sonya Lacey, New light wedge fiction, 2020.

The second part of Victoria’s talk was titled On binding: Nuanced differentiation of vision and touch in the painting of Anoushka Akel.

Anoushka Akel, Wet Physics, 2021

Anoushka Akel, Examiner 2, 2020

Anoushka Akel, Clock, 2023

Anoushka Akel, Being Marthe, 2021

·       Using the examples of four of Akel’s paintings, “Wet Physics”, “Examiner 2, “Clock” and “Being Marthe”, Victoria spoke about ideas of membranism and the transfer event of object to body, acts of wet contact, and binding as the overarching methodological approach. She spoke about the way that vision can be tactile and how opening up visuality acknowledges vision’s location in the body. She referenced author Lisa Samuel’s relational theory of the concurrence of the visual, haptic and bodily and the unity of sensing and the sensed.

·       Victoria says that the core of these two talks is fighting against the idea of separation and the different ways that art can connect. The openness and porousness of us and art – art is us and we are art.