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    The transnational performative archive : documenting, archiving and curating performance art : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2025-09-05) Liu, Tingyu
    The ephemeral nature of live performance art poses significant challenges to its documentation, archiving, and curation, leaving critical gaps in its representation within art history and institutional collections. These challenges are further complicated as performance art circulates across transnational contexts, raising essential questions about how performance archives can capture the essence of live works while fostering meaningful audience engagement. This thesis explores how performance art archives can transition from static repositories to dynamic, participatory spaces, enabling intercultural dialogue. This interdisciplinary and transnational study draws on gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) studies, visual arts, as well as theatre and performance studies, to explore innovative archival and curatorial practices to address the inherent ephemerality of performance art. The inquiry employs autoethnography, participatory action research, and practice-based research methodologies to document contemporary performance artwork presented at the 11th UPON International Live Art Festival in Chengdu, China. The creative component of the research inquiry involved presenting a selection of these works to audiences in New Zealand as part of the exhibition Flow: Chinese Performance Art Documentation and Exhibition. The thesis argues that audience participatory curatorial strategies and collaborative documentation practices can transform traditional archives into performative, living entities that engage audiences as active participants. By integrating audience experiences, these archives generate new, embodied knowledge, fostering intercultural exchange and expanding the scope of traditional documentation. The concept of the transnational performative archive is advanced as a curatorial strategy that shifts conventional approaches to archiving by emphasising the significant role of audience engagement in the construction of cross-border collaborative performance art archives. Unlike traditional archives which are often seen as static repositories of the past, the transnational performative archive is a dynamic process that evolves through intercultural interactions, reinterpretation, and audience engagement. This study contributes to the field by advancing the framework of the transnational performative archive, promoting how interdisciplinary and audience participatory strategies can enhance the representation and understanding of performance art across cultures.
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    to trace a path through the dark : on forming bodies to see through, and be seen by : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa
    (Massey University, 2024) Whitta, Belinda
    to trace a path through the dark is a photographic performance incorporating two analogue slide projectors side by side, which I control manually standing between them. The left hand projector casts abstract, cameraless images produced through a ritual of burying photographic film in a hole in the ground at night. These earthly portraits are projected alongside haptic photographs which communicate my experiences of the ritual and my subsequent evolving relationship with land farmed by my settler-colonial ancestors. The performance occurs in a room darkened by mud applied onto the windows. I operate both the slide projectors with remotes attached to the projectors via cords, sequentially revealing the photographs, forming a conversation between the earthly portraits and haptic photographs. The performance is accompanied by a soundtrack composed of layered recordings made during the journey to the site where I bury film. Alongside the soundtrack is a periodic spoken word element inspired by experiences making the photographic work in the dark. My voice is amplified from behind the audience, who are facing towards the screens and the speakers that play the soundtrack forming another conversation that the audience are positioned within. to trace a path through the dark is a carefully collected set of experiences which, through performance, draw the audience into the rituals of my making.
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    (un)settling : performing landscape, woman, Aotearoa : an exegesis submitted to Massey University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
    (Massey University, 2024-08-08) Ora , Rebecca Anne
    This practice-led doctoral research explores my relationship to landscape, land and whenua as a Pākehā woman in Aotearoa New Zealand, through video mediated performance works. Recorded and edited as temporal markers of live events, these works actively reflect on my uneasy relationship with ‘settling’, as they tease my Pākehā self as a beneficiary of colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand. Positing landscape as a western constructed narrative of dominion over the natural world enmeshed with colonial grasping of land, I focus on unsettling the landscape habits I have in an exploration sensitive to decolonial possibilities. This creative research engages with decolonial discourse, which seeks to re-imagine the world on alternative epistemic foundations (Gallien 33) with the aim to dismantle colonial systems of domination (Bell et al. 605), while centering Indigenous voices (Smith Decolonising Methodologies). By utilizing the guidance inherent in a decolonial and feminist approach, these works consist of a series of creative acts which challenge the “common sense” of settler-colonial logic (Rifkin 322) and western landscape conceptions. As a whole these creative works add up to a” 'decolonial gesture”, an act or series of actions that intentionally refer to and challenge colonial norms and systems (Mignolo 14). The moving locus of these works is The Chrysalis, a 1973 home-built horse float repurposed into an off-grid base and home. Living out of a paddock in Tangimoana was a return to my birthplace and a metaphorical access point to the landscape dreams of my farm labourer forebears. Following the feminist/decolonial strategy to think out of place, this creative body of work is sited in Manawatū, the rohe (home territory) of Rangitāne o Manawatū, Ngāti Raukawa and Ngāti Kauwhata, where my family has lived for five generations. Framing my relationship to land in terms of Barclay’s Fourth Cinema, as a “view from the ship,” I draw upon the writings of Eduardo Glissant, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti and Maria Lugones, and an awareness of feminist positioning, all of which lend wisdom to subjectivity, relationality, decolonisation and the processual nature of these creative thought/acts. I unpack aspects of the work through the avant garde cinematography of Maya Deren and the performative practices of artists Julieanna Preston, Sally J Morgan, Holly Walker and Marja Helander. With these feminist and decolonial thinkers by my side, this research unfolds over time to become a moving constellation of reflections where works sit in relation to each other. This research contributes to a burgeoning decolonial discourse, including its expression and communication via a performative and lens-based practice. The research offers visual and physical evidence of a person of settler descent grappling with these historical and current cultural and geographical tensions in a series of doings.
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    From dough to wheat : a posthuman performance practice with companion species : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, College of Creative Arts, Toi Rauwharangi, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2022) Trigg, Madaleine
    This creative-practice-led doctoral research follows a question: What is it to practice Posthumanism? (Or, “what can Posthumanism do?”) The research joins a recent wave of enthusiasm, curiosity and speculation on Posthumanism, which finds contemporary scholarship traversing feminist studies, social and political sciences, and the humanities both informing and being informed by the arts. As such I follow, and am beholden to, figures such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Astrida Neimanis, Stephanie Springgay and Tarsh Bates. Building upon my experience and training across performance, theatre, costume, movement studies and photography, I use an iterative and process-oriented mode of inquiry centred on learning in the making and critical reflection upon one experimental work to shape and score the next one. A series of performances framed as contact improvisations has assisted my realisation of the expansive agency of yeast as it exerts itself in alternative methods of mixing, kneading, rising and baking processes. These range from cultivating seeds, wearing and cooking dough, and preparing bread for consumption. In this context, the physical, social and chemical boundaries of all bodies, including technological bodies, blur, converge and multiply; they are guided and activated by literal and conceptual gestures of touch. One of the central tenets in this transdisciplinary field of concern is exploring humankind’s relation to the environment, unhinging the root causes of human hubris, habits of waste, control and dominance at the expense of other bodies and, hopefully, to stall or prevent the destruction of the earth and inequities resulting from the misuse of power. I am one of many artists exploring what happens when binaries are abandoned—when humans let go of their self-importance—to reignite a co-living model with other species. Resting on the prospect of making contact with, building a relationship with, communicating with another material body, a non-human body, the research wonders what a new relationship between humans and “other-than-humans” might be.
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    Inside Arcadia : an immersive, virtual phantasmagoria : an exegesis written in partial completion of a PhD degree in Creative Practice at Massey University, College of Creative Arts
    (Massey University, 2022) Doidge, Malcolm
    This research explores Mātiu/Somes Island’s colonial past in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition project, Inside Arcadia, is a hybrid of sculptural installation, performance design and an immersive virtual reality; the latter a 360˚ digital scenography of Mātiu/Somes Island’s historic quarantine and defence sites. These features are experienced interconnectedly while wearing a stereoscopic Head Mounted Display (HMD). The research underpinning Inside Arcadia’s three exhibitions focuses on technological spectralities – the phantom experience of virtual disembodiment wearing the HMD. This discussion relates to defining how these VR digital scenographies comprise a ‘quarantine gothic’. The work of noted academics specialising in video game studies ontology is considered, including Espin Aarseth’s notion of virtual space as an allegory of space and Grant Tavinor’s discussion of IVR as a novel medium. European cultural contexts identify allegory as simply describing one thing by pointing to another, related thing, e.g., Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s deployment of allegory referencing Walter Benjamin’s notions of history and ruin. Inside Arcadia recontextualises this in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a gothic mode – a site-specific, digitally layered 360˚ mediation of historic animal and human quarantine and defence sites. Inside Arcadia also references a quarantine gothic, acknowledging the historic exclusion of Taranaki Whānui from cultural and ecological relations with Mātiu/Somes Island. Terry Castle’s interpretation of allegory as phantasmagoria or exhibiting ghosts in public is identified as having a key role conceptually and technologically in linking this past with the COVID-19 pandemic. This context is critical to understanding the role of Inside Arcadia’s HMD technology mediating a ghostly digital avatar whilst leaving a material trace of footprints on the chalk-floor installation. My argument above is demonstrated through Inside Arcadia’s three exhibitions. To help contextualise the field, this research references the works of Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi - Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tu-Te Auru), Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), Sven Mehzoud and Stuart Foster regarding the historical European colonising gaze toward Aotearoa/New Zealand. The installation of my work at separate local sites contributes to understanding spatial porosity and spatial layering wearing the HMD, an action performing a ghostly avatar. These distinctions are demonstrated through extended analysis in the final section to this exegesis. As sustained throughout my creative research, wearing the HMD mediates Inside Arcadia’s layers of virtual space within its physical installation. When considered part of this site-specific palimpsest, Inside Arcadia emerges as an allegory of Mātiu/Somes Island’s colonial past, the haunting echo of a quarantine gothic returned amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.
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    Fluid/s : come, piss, spit; rivers, lakes, sea : exploring queer, brown, male identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand through abject, queer, feminist, and decolonisation theory : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Irvine, Elton
    I am spent. My puku distended, the bloat of my gut stretches the skin, my innards pushing out, the soft fat pushed to hard. There is a comfort in this tension; my clothes hold me; the fabric stretches to the shape of my body. My belly filled to bursting with the essence of the gods and deities of my people. I am full to bursting, but (do) I want some more(?) From our most intimate of spaces: of memories best not remembered come words spoken, that are, perhaps, best not be spoken. Aligning memory with a physical here and now, fluid(s) acts to the abject of bodily fluids, to the concrete materiality of natural bodies of, and to the state of being fluid, slipping eel slide slick, between one, and the other.
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    Pākehā (body in between) identity : an offering to decolonial discourse, through embodied performance in the landscape : an exegesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirement of the post graduate degree of Master of Fine Arts, Massey University, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Walker, Holly
    My thesis project moves through discussions of my Pākehā identity and relationship to whiteness and the whenua in the context of Aotearoa. Both my thesis writing and performance are presented as an autobiographical practice. This work is a personal exploration of being Pākehā with a critical acknowledgement of the relationship and separation from Māori and mātauranga. My mahi explores revisiting my lived experiences as a way to self-reflect and better situate my body in the political, cultural, and social context of being Pākehā. This embodied method in my interrelated performance, video, and literary practices has allowed me to better understand multiplicities and nuances of identity. This project is of my body and therapeutic for my body, therefore I have used a storytelling literary style, as this reflects the personal context of my work. My performance work shares my identity as a white body, Pākehā body, Tangata Tiriti, and a woman, in contrast and in conversation with the landscape, exploring narratives of ‘location’ ‘disconnection’ ‘unsettling’ ‘fitting in’ and ‘belonging’. I use the subjectivity of my body in both my performance and literary practice, as a way to lay a foundation to host investigation into the seemingly invisible systemic network that is whiteness. This exegesis feels to me to be a living performative document of its own, learning as I am doing and moving through research. This year the work I have made, and the kōrero I have had with my whānau, has been the most important in relation to situating my Pākehā identity, to then help other Pākehā understand their own through my disseminated work. I remember the beginning of this process; I was so uptight and worried about appropriating from Māori in my initial experiments involving ecofeminism and paganism that I didn’t acknowledge indigeneity in the landscape. This work kept leading to my unavoidable relationship to te ao Māori in the context of Aotearoa and the whenua on which I was making my performance work. In the process of my journey to locate myself in the land, the understanding of being Pākehā became more than a small acknowledgement but central to having a performative practice that works in the landscape of Aotearoa and politics of New Zealand. Researching my Pākehā identity isn't just a place I will visit, but a place where I can belong. I believe sharing these stories, performance works and learnings of my life before now ‘from my well’ are intrinsic to how I have navigated a Pākehā experience, and to understanding how I can contribute to undoing systems older and more powerful than the blind ignorance of a large part of Pākehā culture. Alongside this, actively listening to the experiences of Māori has been fundamental for enriching my understanding of the realities of Aotearoa, my reality included. As Alison Jones articulates: “If Pākehā people exist in terms of our relationship with Māori, then we have to be able to think with a Māori-informed point of view.” (Jones.190) I have the honour of sharing with my friends their kōrero about their own journeys of decolonisation. This is why an autobiographical way of writing is important as it continues the language of storytelling, listening and sharing of stories with my whānau. In my experience, stories can travel further and become more accessible in the way they expose concepts like white supremacy or privilege. Storytelling through lived experience intertwines the theory with an embodied reality. I am not claiming that my lived reality is the only reality or a right or wrong one, but I hope that it can be a starting point for more dialogue, critique, and broader shared realities. Storytelling is an indigenous way of sharing knowledge through generations and the way that knowledge has survived and resisted colonial erasure. Kōrero pūrākau and indigenous auto-ethnography connects people to history and places them in reality. Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that: For many indigenous writers stories are ways of passing down the beliefs and values of a culture in the hope that the new generations will treasure them and pass the story down further. The story and the storyteller both serve to connect the past with the future, one generation with the other, the land with the people and the people with the story. (Smith,144-145) As a Pākehā, I have seen my connection between past and future, generational knowledge, and stories to be dishonest, harmful, or intentionally absent from Pākehā culture. Alison Jones explains that “Pākehā insistence on ‘forgetting the past’ becomes possible only if we believe the past is lost behind us, out of sight and gone.” (Jones.170) This sense of absence has shaped a large part of my journey through my art practice, research, and identity. Thankfully in our whare Jayden and Tūī keep reminding me of the whakatauki ‘ka mua ka muri’, ‘walking backwards into the future’. This humbles me enough to see that I am not as alone as I may feel, there is history and stories waiting to be made visible as I move forward with my art practice and understanding my identity, it will just take time. I have started this journey, both looking back from my past, and into the present to where I am now, in my body.
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    Transposing auralities : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Walker, Fraser
    This exegesis seeks to investigate music’s capacity to and complicity in performing acts of acoustic violence, listening to the repercussions as they reverberate from the architectural, seep through the pores of the social, and emanate into the very fabric of the cultural. Through gestures of deconstruction and defamiliarisation, the works discussed serve as templates in considering how music’s hierarchical structures might be rearranged, recomposed, and reinterpreted to produce alternative listening experiences. Informed by a “non-cochlear” sonic sensibility, I endeavour to hear through modernity’s ear the continuum of sound as it oscillates across thresholds of disenchantment and re-enchantment, the scientific and the mythic, facilitating a discussion towards what a sonic agency might sound like.
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    The ship of fools : puppetry in the age of materialism : an exegesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Farrow, Leda
    This Thesis looks at what a puppet is, how it has evolved and expanded to include a multitude of art practices and how the language of puppetry might be a powerful force for engaging us with current contemporary issues. The concept of human-machine entanglement will be analysed in relation to models of human-machine simulacra, especially in contemporary practice; relevant dynamics of the avant garde; and aspects of contemporary materialism. I have taken my fascination with puppetry into a specific direction. The concept of human-machine entanglement is explored through two major works that I have created: an installation using automata entitled The Ship of Fools and The Last Ship, a shadow art performance using overhead projectors. Both works use Plato's Ship of Fools allegory as a vessel for articulating a political and allegorical perspective on some of the pressing issues of our time. Puppetry can be used as an agent for exploring issues around human-machine entanglement through metaphysical and philosophical concepts and the impact of technology on the body and material world. I will discuss where this creative journey has taken me, what I have learnt about the power of performing objects and how I hope to use my findings in future creative endeavours.
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    Entanglement : an investigation into the effective union of contemporary art and science communication : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2019) Hughes, Claire I.
    Virtual reality (VR) technology is increasingly providing opportunities for new contemporary art experiences. This creative practice research has been developed to provide one such contribution. It offers innovative employment of the immersive capabilities of VR to engage with and convey complex scientific theories, and to stimulate changes in mental processes to unlock these concepts. The research highlights empirical similarities between art and science to propose that creative aspects of art can be considered proximate to the creative qualities required to understand quantum theories. In order to reveal this, the body of research engaged specifically with quantum entanglement, because of its well documented existence¹ combined with the more challenging considerations of how ‘communication’ can occur at a quantum level. By providing metaphoric immersive experiences of quantum entanglement, a contribution of ‘scientific communication’ is made as defined by the evocation of awareness, enjoyment, and interest, questioning of opinions and providing new perspectives of understanding.² This research posits that there is a fertile, effective terrain to explore in the union of the fields of contemporary art and science communication. Considerations of constructivist theories of knowledge and the concept of paradigm shifts³ are used whereby new insights into knowledge processes can be experienced through VR art. Here, simulacra, cognitive dissonance and the technological sublime afford a framework to create experiences of conflicting realities. It is due to the immersive strengths of VR which are exploited and subverted through my designs that these experiences can be facilitated for the viewer. The culmination of this research is Entangled, a VR art installation which provides interplays between virtual and physical spaces while also offering entry-points to contemplate and understand quantum theories. Critical analysis of this project is supported by focus group and questionnaire responses. These findings prove how viewers perceived the project as an aesthetic art work and that by recognising scientific underpinnings, an effective engagement and participation in elements of scientific communication occurred at varying levels. The work provided new perspectives on the properties of quantum entanglement. This facilitated cognitive and experiential awareness providing opportunities for viewers to encounter conflicting knowledge systems. The challenge in this creative practice research was to create aesthetic experiences that contravene common sense reasoning and provide insights into the type of thought processes and experiential perception that is required to deepen and expand our understanding of our physical reality. In the present era of an evolution of super- technologies, now past its nascent stage, Entangled offers exposure to the types of interfaces that this thesis asserts will increasingly be encountered when comprehending our reality in the 21st century and beyond.⁴ ¹ References to the proven existence of quantum entanglement are provided in section 1.6. ² This definition of scientific communication is expanded in section 1.1. ³ Paradigm shifts are times when the familiar framework has to be profoundly changed. This is discussed in detail in section 1.3. ⁴ Quantum entanglement is only one possible area that will cause our experience of reality to change radically. For example biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and human/AI interfaces to name some.