Back to Homepage

Time_Art_Impact Dialogue #7

RECOLLECTION • REPRESENTATION • REFLECTION

Fiona Pardington in dialogue with Zhang Hui

23rd NOVEMBER 2014

At Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai

Live-streamed with Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai

MOMENTUM Berlin and Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai are proud to present the collaborative project: Time_Art_Impact, a year-long education program of dialogues between media artists from the MOMENTUM Collection and key figures from the Shanghai art scene. Time_Art_Impact is the inaugural program of the new Media Library at Minsheng Art Museum, which will use the MOMENTUM Collection of international video art as a basis for a series of monthly cross-cultural dialogues via live-stream between Berlin, Shanghai and the rest of the world.

Fiona Pardington was born in 1961 in Devonport, New Zealand, of āi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Scottish descent. She lives and works in New Zealand. She is recognized as the leading woman artist working with photography in New Zealand. Her work examines the history of photography and representations of the body, taking in investigations of subject-photographer relations, medicine, memory, collecting practices and still life. Fiona has been working in a still-life format within museums, recording taonga (Māori ancestral treasures) and other historic objects such as hei tiki (greenstone pendants) and the now extinct huia bird. In these works, she brings to a contemporary audience an awareness of traditional and forgotten objects. Re-examining the history of portraiture in more recent work, she addresses the New Zealander traditional idea of the photograph as a stand-in for an actual person – a way of looking at portraits that western minds associate with traditions of Maori animism that imbue photographs of loved ones who have passed away with their actual presence and characteristics. Applying this tradition to a still-life format, Pardington portrays ancestral Maori carvings alongside objects redolent of the colonial history of an island nation at the outer edges of empire.

Zhang Hui, PHD from University of California, Los Angeles, who is currently a lecturer in the Institute of Anthropological studies, School of Social Development at East China Normal University. Zhang’s research mainly focuses on cultural theory, intangible heritage protection, museum studies, anthropology of media and anthropology of education. Here’s a link of Zhang Hui at East China Normal University: http://faculty.ecnu.edu.cn/s/2770/t/29709/main.jspy

WATCH THE TALK: