Congratulations to Simone Douglas who has been invited to curate the 2016 Auckland Festival of Photography and to Anna Carey and Shoufay Derz whose work has been selected for the festival.
Simone is the first international curator to be invited to curate the Auckland Festival of Photography which runs from 2-24 June 2016.
The curatorial theme for this year’s festival is ‘Home’ – as part of which Simone will be curate a group exhibition at Silo 6 at Wynyard Quarter, in the Auckland CBD, the 2016 Festival exhibitions hub.
The exhibition features a line up which includes Artereal artists Anna Carey and Shoufay Derz alongside: Ian Strange, Shan Turner-Carroll, Sean Lowry, Lin+Lam, Arthur Ou, Eva Marosy-Weide.
Simone Douglas will also give the keynote address for the Auckland Photography Festival on Saturday 4 June, 2016 at 2pm.
“What is home? comes to us in a slow burn of revelation in the hands of the artists in this exhibition. The artists, each connected to the Australasia Pacific Region look at assumptions of home as a given. Questions of where we come from? and, how long have we been here? so pertinent to our region, are palpably raised in the artists’ photographic works.
For some of the artists, they never came from – they were always here. Home as spirit. Home as land. For others their family was forced away from ancestral homelands and set adrift, hoping to find refuge and acceptance in lands new to them. Home as hope. Photographs of home past carried forward into new homes, reveal photography’s paradoxical relationship with time. Home as return. Many of us within our region draw from multiple bloodlines. Home as heritage.
In other artists work, the disquiet of the suburban home where ‘all is well’ slowly dissipates into states of angst, into the DNA of our suburban dream. Houses lit up like cruise ships, houses constructed from memory. Doorsteps from which every one has departed, doorsteps at which no one can arrive.
It is a significant human experience to know home, and these artists powerfully suggest that home is not a fixed experience. Rather home is a shape shifter revealed through time, culture, and politics.”
Simone Douglas
Artist and Curator
Anna Carey, Golden Palms, 2012
Shoufay Derz portrays landscapes through the thematic lens of home, inheritance, and lineage. Not too unlike earlier explorers on the outer edge of known territories, Derz approaches her photography as an outsider seeking to connect with unfamiliar lands. The artist mines the land not as a repository of material or gold but for its imaginative potential. For Derz, ‘home’ is an unfixed idea, made up of shifting layers of the known and familiar coalescing with a
dark substratum of fissures, erosion and voids. Land is imagined as layers of time, and history as the indeterminate embedded in the visible world forming the bedrock of our identity and sense of ‘home’.
From the desert valleys of the Taklamakan dessert in China, the Badlands of the Taiwan, and the Australian bush, Derz mines the landscape for a connection to heritage. The Taklamakan which interestingly translates from Turkic to ‘Depart without return’ was a significant trade passage on the ‘Silk Road’ between the West and East. Contrary to its name the Silk Road was a vast network of interconnecting routes, and as such an appropriate metaphor a multilayered idea of ‘Home’.
Shoufay Derz, Someone digging in the ground (red), 2015