Long before reality tv, Bennifer and the scourge known far and wide as Paris Hilton reared their strangely compelling, utterly homogenised and invariably well coifed heads, Shakespeare rather famously observed in his play As You Like It, that 'All the World's a Stage': that we all to some extent conduct our lives as public performances. Some, like Andy Warhol fudged the concept of public and private life in such a way that we could never go back even if we wanted to.

What you do in your own home - therapist's office or beauty salon - has, contrary to popular belief never been your 'own business' but technology and its accessibility means it can literally become your own business or art practice. Though the vast number of self portraits through art history suggests that the concept of 'self' as art is as old as art itself and has always been rather lucrative provided of course you're terribly famous and as Warhol would have probably pointed out, there in lies the rub.

We are all merely players at this strange act of faith called life. We have our entrances and our exits, our public and private personas and although as New Zealanders we hold dear the concept of lives quietly lived - unobserved - there is a point at which what we consider to be private is actually public. Those moments when you look up and realise that a camera is emotionlessly watching you at a service station, supermarket or on the street. Nobody cares, but you're caught all the same. Go on smile, call your agent. This is Public/Private Surveillance at its most banal, but consummately intrusive. You didn't want to give yourself away, but you did anyway. So what happens when you do hand over a bit of yourself, often without context or explanation, to complete strangers? In life, in art. We all do it. In the end. Welcome to my public private life.

This is the colour of my skin, my name, maybe even my face, my very Identity, the result perhaps of cross cultural Hybridity. Where do I belong? In the place that you put me or where I locate myself?
These are my sexual proclivities, the way I feel when we are in my bed. This is the street, this is the building, where I find, procure, make and recreate an act that may be Love by any other name. This is the costume I wear that makes me feel true to myself. Do you like it? All this I give. These are my not so Private Desires.
This is a mattress on which a thousand tears have been spilled and one hundred and three score different dreams have been dreamt, some born of Love, others made of Despair. This is my skin, the way it bleeds, the way it scabs, the way it heals. This is the place they'll take me when I die, strip me bare and wash me. The white linen they wrap me in. Shroud or swaddling cloth? The Social Structures and daily rituals that move me relentlessly forward. Birth. Survival. Death.
This is me at my most alone when I am in a crowd.
And in the end you have to decide whether I have told the truth. Or not. The artist, the writer, all just story tellers. The things to keep. The things to take to show and tell. The Divided Self. Public/Private. Fiction and fact.

All these questions and more are asked, addressed, probed, poked, reconnoitered and exploded by 39 leading and emerging artists (projects) from eleven different countries, touching on a wide range of cultural and social contexts using a staggering range of media. All have a history of art practises and processes grounded in the six possible threads that curators Ngahiraka Mason and Ewen McDonald have located in the concept of Public and Private, though as Mason says, 'the boundaries are always shifting,' and certainly most of the works in the 2nd Auckland Triennial - Public/Private:Tumatanui/Tumataiti would find a resting place in any of the themes - The Divided Self, Social Structures, Identity and Hybridity, Love, Joy and Despair, Private Desires and Public and Private Surveillance - that the curators have found in their exploration of concepts of Public/Private.

So the stage is set for the 2nd Auckland Triennial - Public/Private:Tumatanui/Tumataiti, the - surveillance - cameras are rolling. This is Public. This is Private. This is Personal.