William Hsu for Alterations
A tour in the Wellington Harbour
18.12.11
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For William Hsu’s project, viewers were invited to assemble at Wellington’s Queens Wharf at 4.30 pm on the 18th of December 2011. Once there, they were asked to board a chartered East by West Ferry which departed on an unrevealed route. It was blowing a strong southerly and once out in the harbour the ferry rose and fell with the swell.
The non-destination ferry trip in the Wellington Harbour included passing along the Petone forshore, near the former sites of the historic Gear Meat Company and Petone Swimming Baths.
Once the ferry neared Petone a member of the crew presented an audio commentary over the intercom composed of fragmented accounts of the history of the area. The commentary tracked the entwined relationships of agricultural production and refrigerator shipping to the harbour and Petone township.
He spoke of how the blood and offal discharged into the Harbour by the Gear Meat Company had turned the sea red attracting sharks and rendering it unfit and unsafe for swimming. The commenatary ended with a description of Edwin Jackson’s development of the Petone Swimming Baths in 1887 as a strategy to respond to the transformation of the Petone Harbour.
Some of the passengers noted a parallel in the story to the markedly red earth that stains the sea at the edge of Petone.
The ferry completed its loop, by travelling past the mouth (where the harbour joins with Cook Strait and then the Pacific Ocean), returning to Queens Wharf around 5:30pm after approximately an hour at sea.
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Michael Stevenson for Alterations
(Special edition) available
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Lauren Winstone and Nick Spratt for Alterations
Responses to New Zealand Potter Magazine
31.7.11 - 31.12.12
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Lauren Winstone and Nick Spratt have collaboratively developed Responses to New Zealand Potter magazine, an online research project which can be found here.
The project invites a new generation of practitioners and theorists to revisit the ideas and critical dialogue on ceramic art and culture that appeared in the founding issues of the magazine.
Each invited guest will give an interview discussing selected articles taken from the first two volumes of the magazine. The transcripts of these interviews will be published on the website.
Re-reading is a key strategy used in this project to contextualize the historical material within its current situation. The project aims to review and build the history of ceramic discourse in New Zealand amongst art and design disciplines.
Similar to the original periodical, the interviews will be published every six months. The project will grow over the course of two years, extending Alterations’ life-span and come to a resolution in 2012.
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Alex Martinis Roe interviews Wendy Webster for Alterations
Online broadcast
29.6.11
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On 29 June 2011 at 20:00 NZST / 10:00 CEST Alterations aired on this blog a video interview between artist Alex Martinis Roe and historian Wendy Webster.
The video was presented in black and white and in split screen format showing both women engaged in a conversation via Skype.
Wendy the proposed subject of this interview began by conversely asking Alex the first set of questions. The role of the interviewer and interviewee kept changing between them.
As the interview progressed both women probed the ethics of involving participants in the creation of a work – be it a book, film or research project – which claimed single authorship. The image of the video disappeared when the speakers began to question the authority given to image over speech in documentary production.
The video document escapes to settle on any specific form and instead oscillates between research, critique, art and performance. The interview presents the artist and the historian at work.
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A Reader for Alterations
Sophie Calle, Marjolijn Dikman, Liam Gillick, Idris Khan, Abbas Kiarostami, Alec Soth, Susan Sontag, Wolfgang Tillmans, Roman Ondak, Bik van der Pol, Tris Vonna-Michell
11.4 - 15.4.11
26.4 - 10.5.11
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An exhibition in book form - A Reader is a compilation of texts by numerous authors who have a reflexive interest in the production of the reproduction. Often they use the tool of photography to make this known. Their work operates as both a commentary and reflection on the mechanism of the copy that publishing necessitates.
A Reader is a candid exhibition of secondary and previously disseminated material - some of which is now out of print/hard to find and some forgotten. In drawing attention to the copy, the compilation authenticates the primary source and brings it closer to the reader.
This one off publication is currently in circulation. To date it has been available for viewing at public libraries in New Zealand. The public library is a site to encounter art mediated through physical and online journals and books. The public library also used to loan reproductions of art to readers in the past. Alterations taps this history and distributes research findings under this framework.
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Kelvin Soh for Alterations
Everything Must Go
31.3.11 - 2.4.11
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Kelvin Soh’s exhibition for the taking took on the structure of a three-day clearance and was held at the end of the financial year.
A variety of products were presented on wooden delivery crates offering a line up of goods, stacked and piled, which included unlabeled bottled water, screen-printed tee shirts and printed matter.
Themed around water as a resource, the printed matter included a wallpaper decorated with marine iconography, posters depicting a section of water sourced from Google Earth and reproductions of the text ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ by Garrett Hardin.
A banner image with block colours and a photographic image of the unbounded sea was suspended in one corner of the space and functioned as an accompanying ‘text’ for the show.
Kelvin’s exhibition, as proposition for a gift economy, seemed to contest the commercialization of water and suggested the impossibility of trying to objectify such an expansive and timeless form.
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