Short Bio
Dr Chris Braddock, artist and writer, is professor of visual arts at AUT University, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland. He is director of doctoral studies and co-leads the Art & Performance Research Group. His work explores themes such as animism, dialogue, material trace, ritual, silence, spirituality, Sufism, participation and performance. His most recent book Resetting the Coordinates: An Anthology of Performance Art in Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024)—which he co-authored and edited with Ioana Gordon-Smith, Layne Waerea and Victoria Wynne-Jones—is the first anthology of performance art of Aotearoa. He is editor of Animism in Art and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and author of Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). His performance and installation works have been included in Public Relations at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, curated by Simon Gennard (2022), How To Live Together at AUT ST PAUL St Gallery, curated by Balamohan Shingade (2019), and Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art curated by Amelia Jones in Montréal (2013). In 2011 he represented New Zealand in Prague’s Veletržní Palace (Museum of Modern Art) for the PQ11 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.
Statement
I aim to explore sculpture and recorded/repeated bodies as ‘objects’ or ‘debris’ of performance. Bodies are traced in material substances, cast in appendages, or relayed through live and recorded performance. I’m interested in objects and images of encounter in difference to objects of recognition. In a deconstructive approach, material processes and performance take precedence. I seek out ambiguous, partial visual imagery and sounds that escape immediate comprehension. Tactical ‘trace structures’ provoke ideas of erasure where disappearance occurs in its appearance—a temporization and spacing that misconstrue dominant discourses about time, identities and place.
Longer Bio
Braddock’s 2013 book Performing Contagious Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art explores the problematic of the ‘objects’ of live/ performance art: either those activated within performances and then acting as traces, and/ or those produced to activate viewer relations in a performative way. Through a history of Western perceptions of magic ritual the book focuses on key concepts of contagion, animism and ritual participation. Braddock’s essay “Contagious Animism in the artwork of Felix Gonzales Torres and Dane Mitchell” is selected as the feature essay for Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture in Black,Issue 13, 2012. In 2011 Braddock represented New Zealand with a performance and video work in Prague’s Veletržní Palace (Museum of Modern Art) for the PQ11 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Also in 2011 Performance Research Journal Vol. 16:4 published Braddock’s essay “Contagious Participation: Magic’s Power to Affect” on the work of Ann Hamilton. In 2010 he published “Alicia Frankovich and the Force of Failure” for Sydney Artspace’s Column 6. In 2009 he curated Random Entrant for PSi#15 (Performance Studies International) in Zagreb which included Australasian artists David Cross and Alicia Frankovich. In association with this project he published “Random Entrant and the Force of Failure,” Frakcija Performing Arts Journal, 50 (Spring), 26-33. In 2008 Braddock exhibited his video and sound installation The Artist Will Be Present atSt Paul St Gallery, AUT University, Auckland. In 2007 he was an International Artist-in-Residence at Melbourne’s RMIT University. In 2004 he was recipient of the Arts Council of New Zealand toi Aotearoa Visual Arts Residency in New York City at the International Studio & Curatorial Program.
Qualifications
PhD, Auckland University of Technology; Master of Arts, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London; Diplôme Supérieur d’Art Plastique, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Bachelor of Fine Arts (Double Major in Sculpture and Art History), University of Canterbury, New Zealand.