CS
The Arts Council of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa is proud to present Dane Mitchell as New Zealand’s artist for the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
“The Arts Council of New Zealand sees an official presence at La Biennale di Venezia as an incomparable opportunity for New Zealand artists to showcase their work on the international stage. As the world’s leading contemporary art forum, it provides career development at the highest level for New Zealand artists and practitioners.”
Michael Moynahan - ARTS COUNCIL CHAIRMAN
“Dane Mitchell’s Post hoc is a distinctive project that will bring something truly unique to the Biennale Arte 2019. Dane is known widely for his innovative and challenging work, we are very excited to have such an original project at this highly influential event.”
Dame Jenny Gibbs - COMMISSIONER
Dead words. Extinct species. Ghost towns. Former nations. Destroyed art works...What do these things have in common? They are just a few of the countless phenomena to have existed but are now no more. These myriad disappearances are at the heart of Dane Mitchell’s presentation Post hoc for the New Zealand pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
A vast inventory of bygone things will be broadcast from the Palazzina Canonica on the Riva dei Sette Martiri to different locations throughout the city. This prodigious quantity of lost and extinct entities will be announced and transmitted via industrially produced tree cell towers. These barely camouflaged, ersatz trees are nodes in a communication network that will signal to listeners the entities that have gone before — almost like the trees that the cell towers have come to replace.
“From our current perspective, the history of progress looks more like a history of obsolescence, in which case a retrospective gaze gains a particular importance. Responding to this, Post hoc seeks to symbolically re-materialise unseen, vanished and defunct phenomena in the present,” say the project’s curators Dr Zara Stanhope and Chris Sharp.
A Latin phrase, ‘Post hoc’ translates as ‘after this’. It describes the assumption that an occurrence has a logical relationship with the event it follows. In Mitchell’s presentation, Post hoc evokes the question of the connections between events and vanished ‘past things’, without necessarily calling up judgement.
