For the final exhibition of the New Zealand Film Archive’s 2012 Curator-at-Large series seven artists have restaged existing works housed in the archive’s collection. The artists all apply a contemporary cultural lens by variously using humour, homage, and critique to reinterpret and recontextualise pre-existing materials.
Curators Jenny Gillam and Eugene Hansen have asked each artist to choose a title from the Film Archive’s collection and create their own new versions.

Remakes produced for this project include a selection of Shortland Street scenes reenacted from memory and a 1960s Brylcreem advertisement reimagined with the dialogue translated into Samoan, among others.

The artists approach these New Zealand media source materials from a range of perspectives. The remakes refocus the original texts through differing ideological lenses, exploring issues around race politics, national identity, and gender norms.

The contributing artists are Iain Frengley & Shannon Te Ao, Sarah Jane Parton, Gemma Syme, Ray Tat Tan, Andy Thomson and Faamanu Vaofusi.

Frengley and Te Ao are a collaborative team, who have recently won a 2012 Waikato Museum National Contemporary Art Award.

Parton has exhibited her multimedia art widely around New Zealand. She also makes music videos and curates the visual art for festival, Camp A Low Hum.

Syme has shown her video and performance art nationally, as well as performing for Wellington musical acts Trimasterbate and Feline Groovy. She currently lives in London and made the work for this exhibition during a recent visit home.

Tat Tan is a video and performance artist from Malaysia, who is now based in Wellington.

Thomson, who is an Associate Professor in Visual Arts at AUT, hails from Scotland. He works across various mediums and has exhibited his artworks around the world.

Vaofusi is a Samoan performance and video artist, based in Lower Hutt, who has recently completed a BFA at Massey University.


The exhibition will run from 22 November 2012 until 9 February 2013