Facilitated by Dr Miki Seifert and Dr April K. Henderson
1pm – 2pm, Saturday 19 July
Toi Pōneke Gallery
Free
Dr Miki Seifert and Dr April K. Henderson
In the first of three artist’s talks about Azúcar/Sugar, the latest installation from With Lime, learn how Dr Miki Seifert used the concept of Wunderkammer to explore the connection between sugar, colonisation, global trade and climate change. Arising in mid-sixteenth-century Europe, Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, put the many kinds of art and natural objects wrought by European colonisation and foreign trade on indulgent display.
Dr Seifert will be joined by Dr April Henderson who will talk about the impact of sugar, colonisation and global trade in the Pacific..
Panelist’s Biographies
Dr Miki Seifert
Miki Seifert has a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington and a B.A. in French and Political Science from Moravian College. Since 2007, she has lived in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Her body of work ranges from performances, installations and videos with her collaborator William Franco to solo work of mixed media paintings to writing and artbooks. Her movement training (Butoh, contact improvisation, ballet, circus arts and gymnastics) imbues her work with flow, timing, placement, and a balance between the improvised and the choreographed.
She is best known for “He rawe tona kakahu/She wore a becoming dress”, a Butoh performance about gender and colonisation. Her performative research is published in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance and the Brazilian Journal on Presence Studies.
She studied Butoh with Diego Pinon, Oguri, and Shinichi Momo Koga; contact improvisation with Carmella Herman; and modern dance at the Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey Studios in New York.
Dr April K. Henderson
Dr April K. Henderson is a tauiwi scholar of Pacific Studies based in Te Whanganui a Tara. Raised and educated on the US West Coast and in Hawai‘i, she joined the Pacific Studies programme at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington in 2002 and previously served as the director of Va‘aomanū Pasifika. Her research explores the movements of people and things—from trade commodities to popular culture, art forms and ideas—in and through the Pacific Islands region. She teaches courses on themes of migration, diaspora, identity, artistic practice, activism, globalisation and popular culture. For further information, see: https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/april.henderson.
Azúcar/Sugar
12 July - 8 August
What is the connection between sugar, colonisation, global trade and climate change?
Azúcar/Sugar is an explorative gallery experience that uses sugar sculptures, videos and digital art to trace how European and US conquest terraformed the environment from a living entity that encompassed the living spirits of the land, water, plants, animals and humans into an inert repository of resources to be harvested and harnessed for profit. Azúcar/Sugar is the latest installation from With Lime, the long-standing collaboration between William Franco and Miki Seifert.