The Wellington season of the DOCNZ 2009 Documentary Film Festival is on sooon! This year the films are screening at Hoyts Regent on Manners.

Festival includes world premiere of ‘Architect of Dreams‘ about Ian Athfield.

New Zealand 2008 / 52min, Director Geoffrey Cawthorn. Producer Richard Riddiford.

CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE : A KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY JANE RENDELL

THURSDAY 26 MARCH 2009, 6PM

SOUNDINGS THEATRE, TE PAPA, WELLINGTON

Keynote lecture costs $15 waged / $10 unwaged

Coordinators of the One Day Sculpture Project, hosted by Massey University as a Litmus Research Initiative, are please to invite the Wellington architectural community to participate in the symposium and/or keynote lecture by Jane Rendell (Director of Architectural Research, The Bartlett, Faculty of The Built Environment, University College London and author of Art and Architecture: A Place Between (I. B. Tauris, 2006))

Her talk will examine the concept of ‘critical spatial practice’ (Rendell, Art and Architecture, 2006) with respect to site-specific art practice, curating and criticism. It will look at definitions of key terms such as site, space and place, as well as dialectical relations of site and non-site/ site and off-site.

“The ONE DAY SCULPTURE symposium brings together leading international curators, cultural theorists and historians, participating artists, writers and curators to address the principal ideas and contexts that have informed the development of the series. The symposium will consider the issues underpinning the commissioning and production of temporary place-responsive artworks in the public domain.”

Where: The New Dowse, Lower Hutt

When: till May 10

Tim Larkin won the 2008 Deane Award for Decorative Arts with a proposal based on the long-redundant, yet highly efficient food safe. Larkin, writer Luke Feast and photographer Pete McColl, have created a body of work that explores the food safe and its unique architectural position between the indoors and outdoors.

‘Letting Dwell’ is drawn from Martin Heidegger’s important text (for architecture) ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. The work shifts scales, from models to full works, but also imaginatively, from the scale of furniture to that of architecture.

VENUE: Theatrette 10A02: Old Dominion Museum Building, Wellington

DATE & TIME: Monday 30th March at 5:30pm

Site-Writing: Subjectivity and Positionality in Criticism.

A rare opportunity to hear a guest lecture by Professor Jane Rendell (Bartlett, London)

She will speak on current research and design work in relation to interdisciplinary meeting points – feminist theory and architectural history, conceptual art practice and architectural design, art criticism and autobiographical writing.

Rendell’s paper will discuss two of her site-writing works, ‘Les Mots et Les Choses’ and ‘An Embellishment: Purdah’, in the context of relational aesthetics and dialogic practice citing the work of psychoanalytic practitioners/theorists Jessica Benjamin and Jean Laplanche.