Published 2013 by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
188 pages
176 x 127mm, softcover, with colour illustrations
Edited by Christina Barton, Natasha Conland and Wystan Curnow
With contributions by Jim Allen, Michelle Antoinette, Christina Barton, Mladen Bizumic, Peter Brunt, Ruth Buchanan, Jon Bywater, Lee Weng Choy, Joselina Cruz, Phil Dadson, Charlotte Huddleston, Tom Irwin, Sophie McIntyre, Viviana Mejía, Anna Parlane, J.G.A. Pocock, Eric Riddler, Joyce Toh, Nina Tonga, and André Vida.
Designed by Inhouse
Printed by GEON
ISSN: 1177-2549

This issue of Reading Room provides a forum for rethinking New Zealand art's relation to the world around  a concept of 'elective proximity' in which contributors are invited to consider various historical and contemporary models of interaction that conceive and realise alternatives to the prevailing discourses of centre and margin, local and global, isolation and assimilation.

Topics that engage a history of trans-Tasman, regional, artist-led, or unofficial initiatives are one line of enquiry this issue will address. Another will explore how individual practitioners negotiate the larger field of practice, whether this is self-consciously 'on the edge', within the 'centre' or by peripatetic moves between.

By choosing how to operate in the world, 'elective proximity' offers cogent means to negotiate a position that navigates difference and similarity, closeness and distance. Reading Room 6 presents this as a situated response to the imperial claims of globalism.