Hikalu Clarke

Lives and works in Auckland CBD, Auckland, New Zealand

Artist statement

Hikalu Clarke’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses installation, sound, performance, painting, and new media. Negotiating the aesthetics and mechanisms of built and virtual environments within advanced capitalist societies, his work engages with notions of power and control. Considering those systems and structures which inform ones lived experience within the modern city: most notably the post-9/11 shift toward adopting ‘unfriendly’ paranoiac spatial design philosophies; as well the all-important semantic change, seeing the term ‘citizen’ replaced by the ‘consumer’. Clarke’s work often coopts such hostile aesthetic and spatial strategies, to activate audiences’ own sense of agency within an art experience. More broadly, his work is one that interrogates our understanding of time, place, and the self within contemporary culture.

Artwork