The Killing Organisation / Collective / Group

INFO

Name	The Killing
Established	2021
City	Tāmaki Makaurau
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	2020s
Names of Artists	Daniella Bay, Minsoh Choi, p. A, Meleseini Faleafa, Tristan Bloemstein, Venus Blacklaws

ABOUT

The Killing is a visual arts collective based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Self-described as a “6-celled body” made up of Daniella Bay, Minsoh Choi, p. A, Meleseini Faleafa, Tristan Bloemstein and Venus Blacklaws, the collective met and formed in 2021 while studying at Elam School of Fine Arts, bonding over a shared sense of marginalisation. They consider themselves a family and attribute their aesthetic to that connection, stating: “I feel like our friendship is the style. Before we are a collective, we are a bunch of friends who love each other. You can see that in the work.”

As Samuel Te Kani stated in response to their first solo show Nuisance (2021) at RM Gallery and Project space:

The Killing not only speculates on formlessness and the freedoms that come with it thematically, but formally—in as much as it’s a group exhibit that refuses individual presentation. Rather, the input and impetus of each practitioner is smeared across the space indiscriminately, itself a gestalt entity swirling over the gallery’s otherwise monochrome walls like melted ice cream.

The work that the collective creates uses bold colours, maximalism, big shapes and cartoonish figures that build playful and immersive visual experiences. Their second solo exhibition, Cirque Du Killing Presents: Appetiser (2023) at Papakura Art Gallery encapsulated this entrancing approach to exhibition-making, with the collective covering the gallery’s walls in floor-to-ceiling clown-like portraits. All the figures were distinct — using different colours, scale, compositions, characters, aesthetics, and materials — with one commonality: each picture depicted a big smile. On the floor space was a custom-built red and white carousel, equipped with different rocking-horse animals, such as a blue papier mache elephant and a plushy white bird with an elongated neck and long orange beak. The carousel spun around in the centre of the room. As they describe, “APPETISER is a body of works that play and expand upon the pluralities of the body: & chooses to actively celebrate & uplift the othered, the monstrous, the invalid, the non-human body”

The collective also gives each member of the group a sense of community that they have described as hard to find within the visual arts industry in Aotearoa. They find that as artists from minority backgrounds, they do not need to define themselves using their marginalised status; instead their work is under the banner of the collective, which overrides the feeling of having the burden of representing a whole community.

The group advocates for creative collectivism, as Faleafa describes: “Collective work needs to be more common because it’s so underrated. There is so much juice in it.” The collective explains:

Because arts are consistently being defunded, organising, collectivising and relationships are maybe the only way we can actually succeed. When we collectivise, we share power. Because we work together under The Killing, we are kind of protected by the collective. We share resources and skills. We have enough brains to not get scammed or underpaid — to think critically about what we are saying when we make work.