22 November–20 December 2013
Gallery One and Two
ST PAUL St Gallery
School of Art and Design
AUT University City Campus
Level 1 WM Building
40 St Paul Street
Auckland
Aotearoa/New Zealand
WeakForce4 co-operating artists include: Bruce Barber (CAN), Benji Bradley (NZ), Liz Bird (NZ), Anthony Cribb (NZ), Paul Cullen (NZ), Eugene Hansen (NZ), Joe Jowitt (NZ), Laresa Kosloff (AU), Lee Ihnbum (KOR), Ziggy Lever (NZ), Kim Morgan (CAN), Deborah Rundle (NZ), Matthew Sansom (UK), Daniel von Sturmer (NZ/AU), Andy Thomson (UK/NZ), Layne Waerea (NZ), Suh Youngsun (KOR), and invited others.
WeakForce4 is the fourth WeakForce project associated with the collaborative Unified Field Theory (UFT) project, uft-gravity.com. The aim of the umbrella project UFT is to locate and represent the social and relational as the generative dynamic of the co-operative in creative collaborative work.
The WeakForce projects are generated by concepts embedded in the UFT project exploring how artists can work together and why. They examine to what extent an idea is separable from its specific material expression, and what latitude is possible for its material expression and presentation to constitute an authentic expression of idea.
“Through collaboration with others it is hoped to make palpable the exchange between cultures and its representations—where up and down, east and west, before and after, distance, proximity, language, matter, interpretation and perception are all means and measures of negotiating a relationship to gravity’s space-time.”
–”The Contingency of Gravity,” Andy Thomson.
With more than 17 artists participating, WeakForce4 is the largest international collaborative team under UFT to date. WeakForce4 works with ‘artist as interlocutor,’ where the weak force of (social) attraction is explored through the use of media and forms such as sound, food, clothing, sculpture and performance. Dealing in social contracts and discourses of exchange such as barter, voice, critique, laughter, and sound reveals a politic of materialism through a series of timetabled events, kiosks, pavilions, displays and other manifestations of WeakForce, which will take place over the duration of the project. Information on the changing schedule of Weakforce4 events can be found on the UFT website, uft-gravity.com.
Through dialogue and subsequent discourse, the structure and nature of WeakForce collaborative processes (practical, technical, conceptual and generative) will be made public via a publication and a project blog. WeakForce4 will culminate in a hardcopy catalogue devised in relation to the openness of the final installation and encompassing all the WeakForce projects.
In physics, weak force is one of the four fundamental interactions of nature, alongside the strong interaction, electromagnetism, and gravitation. It is weaker than the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force but stronger than gravity.
Previous iterations of WeakForce include: WeakForce1 at Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2011; Weakforce2 at The Lewis Elton Gallery, Surrey University, UK, 2013; and Weakforce3 at Gallery Zero, Sangmyung University, Seoul, 2013. WeakForce is the sixth collaborative project associated with the UFT project and the first under the newly established UFO Bureau (an AUT-funded research project), co-directed by Paul Cullen and Andy Thomson.
About
ST PAUL St Gallery is a non-collecting gallery based within the School of Art + Design at AUT University, Auckland. The gallery is dedicated to the development of contemporary art and design through an international programme of exhibitions, events, symposia and publications. ST PAUL St Gallery embraces one of the primary instructions for universities in the New Zealand Education Act, that they “accept a role as critic and conscience of society.” We also interrogate the longstanding proposition that the arts have a particular capacity to speak critically about social issues.
For more information please contact Charlotte Huddleston, T +64 9 921 9999 x 6820, [email protected].
