Bright Paradise is the inaugural Auckland Art Gallery triennial. The working thesis of Bright Paradise is that New Zealand is peculiarly well suited as a place from which to speculate on the disturbing beauty of artificial paradises and the fateful allure of utopian desire.
The historical imagination in New Zealand is illuminated by dreams of long white clouds and natural bounty, by memories of Pacific plenty, South Seas utopias and burst South Sea bubbles. Located geographically in the South Pacific, but imaginatively split between visions of local and global culture, New Zealand has distinctive perspectives on the rich mix of beauty and anxiety that characterise contemporary speculations about paradise and history.
Such speculations uncover metaphors of our contemporary world caught between an exhilarating desire for experience, information and discovery on the one hand, and a powerful sense of our having corrupted history and destroyed any oceanic sublime or garden paradise, on the other.
Allan Smith, Curator, Contemporary Art.
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"Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilisation has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories."
Claude Levi-Strauss, quoted in Peter Brunt
"Afterword" in Nicholas Thomas, Diane Losche (eds.), Double Vision: art histories and colonial
histories in the Pacific, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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