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 co-opts 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.
Hikalu Clarke (b. 1991, Chigasaki, Japan) lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design. His work has been shown throughout New Zealand, including Auckland Art Fair; Te Tuhi Art Centre, Gus Fisher Gallery; Adam Art Gallery; and Artspace Aotearoa. Clarke recently completed artist residency programs at Youkobo Artspace (2019, Asia New Zealand) and Gasworks, London (2018, organised by the Jan Warburton Trust and Richwhite family).