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WeakForce4

Opened at St Paul Street Gallery on 22nd of November 2013

WeakForce4 Collaborating Artists: Bruce Barber (Canada), Benji Bradley (NZ), Liz Bird (NZ), Anthony Cribb (NZ), Paul Cullen (NZ), Eugene Hansen (NZ), Laresa Kosloff (AU), Lee Ihnbum (South Korea), Kim Morgan (Canada), Matthew Sansom (UK), Daniel von Sturmer (NZ/AU), Andy Thomson (UK/NZ), Layne Waerea (NZ), Suh Youngsun (South Korea), Deborah Rundle (NZ), Joseph Jowitt (NZ), Ziggy Lever (NZ) and others, including Darcell Apelu (NZ) and Cora-Allan Wickcliffe (NZ).

WeakForce4 intends to act as an organisational infrastructure with a ‘pooling’ impetus. Selected individuals, students, and research projects that work with [other international and national] academic individuals, institutions and research organisations gathered together under the auspices of the UFT PROJECT to collectively build the agency and application of co-operative visual art research outcomes.

Art practices in and of themselves, are able to transgress discipline divides and can give form and expression to critical perspectives not readily generated, or accepted, within a specific subject discipline. This capacity of art to reframe problems, envision new perspectives and propose alternative models to the [rationalist and capitalist] status quo, is deployed by WF as a means to build critical understanding and self-knowledge across and within various disciplines – including those of particle physics, business, the environment, education and the arts.

Transdisciplinarity (rather than multi - or inter-disciplinary approaches) is co-opted WF as the fundamental premise and common object of its inquiry. Artist researchers will work with their respective individual creative practices and disciplines to examine co-operatively, the language, systems, structures and stereotypes that often determine types and qualities of power/energetic relations between individuals, groups, objects, and sites and spaces. Artists will variously deploy spatial and sculptural (e.g. objects, sound, video, installation, landscape/architecture) practices, and/or use more socially oriented art practices (e.g. institutional critique, political, participatory modes of art making) to achieve shared, or integrated goals and creative outcomes with potential positive application beyond individual discipline fields or territories.

"The justification of the modern work of art as future-orientated and prophetic, which unavoidably triggers a high tone in the corresponding kind of critical writing, certainly means an overvaluation of the work of art - but at the same time also a possible undervaluation, should it emerge that the future looks different from what the work of art ostensibly promised." (Boris Groys on Heidegger)

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.