Cardboard city to rise at Auckland Art Gallery

Cardboard city to rise at Auckland Art Gallery
– Project Another Country opens next weekend

IMAGE: Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, In-Habit: Project Another Country, 2012, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney. Courtesy of the artists.

A collaborative art installation opening at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki on Saturday 21 April will see a city emerge from cardboard as artists and husband-and-wife team Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan present From Pillars to Posts: Project Another Country, 2018.

From Pillars to Posts: Project Another Country is a participatory artwork commissioned for the Gallery’s Todd Foundation Creative Learning Centre. It explores community, family, relocation and homemaking, and is part of an ongoing series of site-specific projects that use art-making to prompt conversations about what makes a home.

Using recycled cardboard boxes to create a model city, the artists invite collaboration by providing work space and materials for Gallery visitors to produce their own small cardboard houses which will be amassed into the installation.

Auckland Art Gallery Director Rhana Devenport says, ‘The themes the Aquilizans explore and the discussions that their work evokes – surrounding migration, displacement and settlement – are so vitally relevant for Aucklanders today and for the city’s future. With 39 per cent of people living in the Auckland region having been born overseas, these are conversations that truly matter in today’s world.’

‘The Aquilizans have dedicated a large part of their careers to travelling and exploring the concept of “home” and “belonging” around the world. The Gallery is honoured to be the site of this newly commissioned project for Auckland,’ says Devenport.

The very first cardboard houses to contribute to the installation will be made by Gallery visitors in a series of drop-in workshops being held in the upcoming school holidays. From Saturday 14 April, the Gallery invites the public to participate in daily art-making workshops. Participants will imagine their perfect home and create it using recycled cardboard.

Public programme:
Project Another Country Art-making Workshop
Saturday 14 April to Sunday 29 April, 10.30am – 3.30pm daily
Gallery visitors are invited to take part in a community-based project led by the internationally acclaimed artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan. Participants are invited to drop in to art-making workshops where they will create their own home from recycled boxes, cardboard, tape and glue. These cardboard homes will then form part of the installation, From Pillars to Posts: Project Another Country, in the Gallery’s Creative Learning Centre and, later, Pillars: Project Another Country, 2018, a large-scale, suspended artwork to be installed in the Gallery’s North Atrium.


In Conversation: Artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan with Gallery Director Rhana Devenport
Sunday 22 April, 3pm

On Sunday 22 April, visitors to the Gallery will have the opportunity to hear artist couple Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan in conversation with Auckland Art Gallery Director Rhana Devenport, who has worked with the artists since 2009, as they discuss the collaborative artwork, Project Another Country.

© Scoop Media