Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, Te Tuhi 2007
(image: North.Gabríela Fridriksdóttir, from the series 'Tetralogia' 2005 DVD, Reykjavík and Spielhaus Morrison, Berlin).
Cao Fei
Gabríela Fridriksdóttir
Peter Gossage
Star Gossage
Veli Granö
David Haines
Shigeyuki Kihara
Joanna Langford
Polixeni Papapetrou
Teresa Peters
Sriwhana Spong
John Walsh
In association with Auckland Festival, AK07. With support from Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa.
'An artist can sometimes restore severed paths to our unconscious.'
Veli Granö
People have always told tall tales. From early folklore to classic
children's fairytales such as the Grimm's brothers, fantastical stories
provide explanation for the strangeness of everyday events. The telling
of such tales lets us break out of our own world to the vast universes
beyond. These stories, folklore and histories provide us with moral and
social guideline, offering insight into our ancestors as well as into
the uncharted territories of the unknown.
Post the increasingly pervasive narratives of colonisation,
globalisation and economic rationalism, have we lost the ability to
access the mystic, the fantastical and the uncanny? Culturally based
histories have become 'mythologies' and relegated, as co-curator Pita
Turei says 'to stories without substance… we lose the original context
of those stories, which have evolved from generations of observation, of
the experiences of the land, its plants and living things'. Fairy tales
have, of course, long been high-jacked by the saccharine regime of
Disney Inc.
But alternative narratives still abound, if one knows where to
look—mostly sideways, or off in dark corners. Artists, with the
potential to subvert, transgress, contradict and resist, can leap
boundaries from the literal to the lateral. Artist André Breton's hope
for the resolution of the two differing states of dream and reality into
'a kind of reality, a surreality' appears both as hopeful and as useful
as it was when he first penned his Manifesto of Surrealism back in
1924, railing against 'the reign of logic'.
The exhibition 'Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?: mythology, fairytales
and the occult' charts some of these alternative paths taken by
contemporary artists, at times using existing narrative structures, or
in other cases creating their own access routes to the other-worldly.
The artists find gaps or passageways through to the uncanny and the
unreal, explore the unconscious realms of our minds, and probe and
challenge our attachment to the rational at the cost of the fantastical.
Like any rupture from the stable to the unstable, there are gaps,
overlaps and at times unruly contradictions.
Emma Bugden
