AUCKLAND.- Eighty-four fish flew by plane over the Tasman Sea on 21 March, each travelling in a glass bowl on their own seat. The work was commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery curator Natasha Conland for the New Zealand-wide One Day Sculpture series of temporary public art works. Following a three hour flight, the plane touched down at Auckland International Airport to be greeted by a waiting audience.

In order to meet the series’ 24-hour deadline, a video of the journey was then edited for projection onto the side of a building in Auckland’s Freyberg Place later the same night. A 16mm film also recorded in-flight will screen at Le Grand Café in St Nazaire, France in June.

Pivi gained prominence at the 2003 Venice Biennale for Untitled (donkey), an image of a donkey floating in a small boat. Recent works include One more cup of cappuccino then I go, a leopard walking across 3,000 cappuccino cups and It’s a cocktail party, in which hundreds of litres of common household liquids were poured from 5m-high machines.

Conland says: “There is an imaginative generosity to the work which belies the extravagance of the gesture. It was an eerily liberating project and perhaps one befitting its location staged on an island nation.”

New Zealand artist Dylan Horrocks has been commissioned by Pivi to create a response to the work in comic strip form. He also produced a cartoon for promotional use in advance of the performance.