Share / Cheat / Unite

Share / Cheat / Unite

Gemma Banks, Yu Cheng-Chou, ChimPom, Sasha Huber, Anibal Lopez (A-153167), Pilvi Takala, & Johnson Witehira

An exhibition developed in conversation between The Physics Room and Te Tuhi

Exhibition Preview: Friday 1 September at 5.30pm
Exhibition Runs: Saturday 2 September – Sunday 8 October 2017

Saturday 2 September, 1pm

Share / Cheat / Unite Exhibition Talk with Bruce E. Phillips, Curator-at-Large, Te Tuhi, and Jamie Hanton, Director, The Physics Room

Image: Gemma Banks, Lola in Orb IP/SP (video still), 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.

Share / Cheat / Unite is a collaborative exhibition between Te Tuhi and The Physics Room Contemporary Art Space. Featuring international and New Zealand-based artists, the exhibition delves into the human psyche to consider how altruism, cheating, and group formation play a key role in shaping society, but not necessarily in the ways we might assume.

First shown at Te Tuhi in Auckland last August, this version of Share / Cheat / Unite brings a new selection of artists together to create new inter-work connections and develop aspects of the original exhibition. Three artists remain from Te Tuhi: Anibal Lopez (A-1 53167), Yu Cheng-Chou, and Sasha Huber, and four have been introduced: Gemma Banks, ChimPom, Pilvi Takala, and Johnson Witehira.

This iteration of Share / Cheat / Unite focuses on communication strategies and the use of language in the service of persuasion, coercion, and reconciliation. A new commission by Christchurch-based artist Gemma Banks situates these ideas in The Physics Room’s immediate environment of the post-quake ‘Innovation Precinct’; a model of neo-liberal urban development designed to legitimize and maximize productivity through a language of creativity.

It is the system’s Foucauldian reliance on language to uphold its values that the artists of Share / Cheat / Unite address directly. Yu Cheng-Chou, Anibal Lopez (A-1 53167), and Pilvi Takala focus on the human consequences of a market that privileges and valorizes certain forms of labour, while Johnson Witehira, Sasha Huber, and ChimPom challenge the ongoing, and traumatic, effects of language within histories of inequitable power relations.

Each artist in Share / Cheat / Unite capitalizes on the system’s paradoxical relationship to creativity – the artist at once precarious and unusually mobile – to operate with one foot in the sphere of creative practice, and one foot out, employing guerrilla tactics to actively share, cheat, and unite.

ENDS

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