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New Zealand’s Most Successful Contemporary Artist Returns to His Roots

We catch up with Simon Denny as he makes the trip from Berlin to Auckland.
Simon Denny. Photography by Frances Morton

From our vantage point in 2016, it seems a little bizarre that Simon Denny never made it into Artspace’s annual new artist show when he was kicking off his career in Auckland. Now based in Berlin, Denny has become New Zealand’s most successful contemporary artist.

If you had to sum it up, you could say his work interrogates the role technology has in shaping our world today. And if you want to know what that means, just look at his work currently—or about to be—on show: the exhibition at Petzel in New York that explains a database of Bitcoin transactions; the Serpentine show on management systems for hacker communities that he’s prepping to tour to Las Vegas; the new work he’s making in Shenzhen, China on incubator tech companies; and Secret Power at Te Papa in Wellington, a restaging of his Venice Biennale show on surveillance and New Zealand’s involvement in the Five Eyes network.

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When Artspace director Misal Adnan Yildiz invited Denny to collaborate on the annual new artists show, Denny happily saw it as a chance to re-connect with what is going on in New Zealand art. The Creators Project sat down with Denny to talk about looking for hope in New Perspectives.

The Creators Project: Was it a disappointment that you were never in Artspace’s new artists show?

Simon Denny: Of course. It was a big thing on the calendar. Every year it rolled around and I really wanted to be involved. I know how much of a big deal it is for artists here. That’s a nice thing to remember, and a nice thing to re-engage with. Adnan said he wanted me to be involved with the process of meeting with the artists and process of selection. He also wanted it to be an open process rather than a selection process.

So he changed it to an open call?

Yeah. And I thought that was a really smart idea.

The call asked artists to respond to three questions about artist perspective, global societies and hope. How did you come up with them?

That was Adnan. One of the great things about a director position like Adnan’s at Artspace is it brings a perspective from outside. I think bringing me in was a step to reinforce that, but a kind of middle ground at the same time.

The New Perspectives show. Images courtesy of Artspace Auckland

It’s kind of outside in and inside out.

Exactly. I’m always really happy when they award the directorship of Artspace to somebody from somewhere else because I think it’s a very good window on the world for people here.

Is that why you asked a question about how art operates in a global perspective? That question was about thinking macro. Thinking big things. Both Adnan and I feel that artists should be engaging with what’s urgent to them but also what’s urgent to the world. Is that what you saw in the responses? Absolutely. The responses were kind of amazing. I’m not really that in touch with the current young artist community here. I didn’t know so many practices. The open call aspect of it meant I learnt about a lot. We had 117 applications. When you’re looking at applications are you aware of where they’re coming from? It was kind of blind. They sometimes put CVs in, sometimes not. It was up to them what they wanted to present. I think an important thing about being in a show like this is you’re making the world for yourself and you’re determining the terms in which you want to work. That’s a big thing for an artist. When did you develop that sense for yourself? It’s ongoing. It started in art school, or maybe even high school. It’s constantly been a process of remaking and reassessing whether I feel good about what I’m doing and where I’m going. I’m also an artist who embraces change and does different things over time. Ten years ago I was making art that is quite different to what I’m doing now. What themes have come through in this show—is there a strong technology aspect? Not that much actually, which I think is quite good. What people think about as my core interests as an artist are not really central to what the show is about. I am interested in technology and the culture around technology and Silicon Valley and state enterprise and all those kind of things. As an art consumer I’m quite broad in my tastes and interests. I don’t necessarily want to see or hear about things that I am directly involved in researching and making art about. If this show had become about similar themes or even a similar approach to what my work was about, that would be a boring outcome.

Did you intend to have 21 artists? Not necessarily. That’s quite a lot for a show like this, especially in a space like Artspace. The Artspace team and Adnan and I were like, “We want more of these voices. And that’s a strength. Why did you pose the question, “What brings hope to our world”? That’s another thing that both Adnan and I feel quite strongly about. There are lots of difficult things happening in the world all the time. We’re both quite invested in the news cycle and what things are happening in different parts of the world but I think art can have a unique opportunity to bring optimism and a proposal that has hope in it is something that we both wanted to foreground in a difficult time. So the work all had to be hopeful? I don’t think it was prescriptive in that sense. But I think work that takes things seriously, not flippantly, but also proposes some sort of angle to a hopeful direction, rather than a condemnation, is something that inspires me. A lot of people look to art for inspiration and a degree of optimism in a response can help that. Are all the artists in their 20s? Is it a millennial show? 20s to 30s. Is this a hopeful generation or a cynical generation? I wouldn’t say it’s a cynical generation. The artists we looked at for this show are a group of people who draw on very different traditions. But they are all taking something rich from what they’re looking at, where they’re from or what’s important to them and applying it to a very contemporary moment. That’s what is moving to me about all these people’s presentations. New Perspectives finishes this week. You can find out more about Simon Denny here and follow him on Instagram.

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