CIRCUIT and Auckland Council are inviting proposals for six new artist moving image commissions that will form Wild, Wild Life, an installation of video art across sites in Auckland to coincide with the 2024 Auckland Arts Festival.

The successful proposals will each receive $20,000 towards the production of a new single channel video work, which will enter the Auckland Council Public Art Collection, and be displayed on the Auckland Council Public Art and CIRCUIT websites.

What kind of works are sought?

CIRCUIT are seeking responses that consider the following themes:

How is Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland city described outside of official city maps? What other kinds of wayfinding exist beyond prescribed routes, paths and junctures? How are these activated by people, fauna and flora? What discrete spaces exist in the plain sight of everyday work, life and commerce? Beyond visual recognition, how might we know them, sensorially? How does revitalisation occur in the transitional spaces of the urban landscape? What economies are supported in the grey zone between the formal and informal? Can abundance exist in a void? What speculative systems and forms might reshape the future city?

Wild, Wild Life: project context

The City Rail Link is the largest transport infrastructure project ever to be undertaken in New Zealand. Scheduled for delivery in 2025, this transformative project will expand and connect existing Auckland rail services by excavating two new subway tunnels, removing dirt and rocks to the surface and installing infrastructure. On completion the City Rail Link will deliver a train every 10 minutes to four new stations, carrying a daily load of 54,000 passengers.

As this massive urban project continues towards its determined purpose, Wild, Wild Life will present artists’ moving image works to form an alternate map of Auckland. Sometimes subversive or unexpected, these works utilise the city’s discrete, informal and overlooked spaces as vital nodes, networks and sites of community. Installed as a series of dispersed video screens in street-facing city premises, the video works are likewise presented during the Auckland Arts Festival as discrete city wayfinders.

Wild, Wild Life is curated by CIRCUIT Director Mark Williams.

“As life must adapt to site-specific solutions, the real life of cities often takes place in the corners where no one is watching.” — Steffen Lehmann, The Unplanned City: Public space and the spatial character of urban informality (2020).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring a map of the installation sites, a conversation about informal systems in urban spaces, and a public programme which includes a conversation between the curator and the artists. An essay response to the artworks will be commissioned and published on the Auckland Council Public Art and CIRCUIT websites.

Applications

• details of the proposed artwork

• a statement about the relationship of the work to public space and the particular context of Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland

• a broad outline of the production process and key collaborators (even if unconfirmed)

• a biography (no longer than one page) describing your practice and highlights from your exhibition history

• links to video/images of previous work, and if available, your website