RNZ: Saturday Morning

Listener feedback for 5 May 2018.

Shane Hansen is an artist, and a furniture and fashion designer of Maori (Tainui, Ngati Mahanga, Ngati Hine), Chinese, Danish and Scottish descent. He draws on his cultural background and the environment to create his work. In 2016 he was commissioned by the NZOC to design the team uniforms and village sculpture for the NZ Rio Summer Olympic Team; in 2014 he was commissioned by Sheppard Cycles to create an original bike to be presented to HRH Prince George during the New Zealand Royal Tour; and in 2010 he was one of five Maori artists selected to create Maori designs for Rugby World Cup 2011; his designs were subsequently licensed for the international market. Hansen is the host of the new TVNZ show, Design Junkies, which began screening this week, in which contestants are challenged to make beautiful creations out of rubbish.

Madeleine O'Dea has been a journalist, foreign correspondent and author for 30 years. She's written extensively on international arts and culture, as well as on Chinese politics, society, and culture, for a range publications including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Guardian, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. Her book The Phoenix Years: Art, Resistance and The Making of Modern China charts the country's ascent from economic ruin to global giant through its art. O'Dea will be speaking at this year's Auckland Writers Festival.

Kurdish journalist, poet, filmmaker and refugee Behrouz Boochani has been imprisoned on Manus Island for almost five years. He has created a film entirely on his mobile phone from inside Australia's notorious Lombrum detention centre by uploading short video segments for Dutch-Iranian filmmaker Arash Kamali Sarvestani to edit into a feature-length documentary. The result is Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time, named after the Chauka bird, which is native to Manus, and also the wing in the detention centre where Boochani and others were sent for solitary confinement. Chauka will screen at the Documentary Edge Film Festival.

New York-based soul singer, songwriter, and Broadway performer Morgan James is coming to Aotearoa this month to perform with the NZSO in its Bernstein at 100 concerts. As well as performing with orchestras, James has a big online presence with her jazz and soul interpretations of popular songs, including several with US viral video ensemble Postmodern Jukebox. Bernstein at 100 marks the centenary of legendary American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, best known for the musical West Side Story.

David Klein is a science communicator based in Wellington. Last summer he cycled around the country presenting Tour de Science - a show that explained how all the big things in the universe are made of lots of little things. It was performed in more than 50 towns and cities to rave reviews. More recently Klein has been thinking about what it would like to be a plant - making food from sunlight, dealing with all those bugs, the strong connection to the ground, and time passing really slowly. Plants, he says, aren't brainy but they are clever and successful. Klein combines his love of science with his love of storytelling in his new children's show, Plant Man, which he is performing at the Hutt Stemm Festival - celebrating the multi-million dollar science and innovation industries in Lower Hutt - on May 6.

New York-based Katy Tur is a correspondent for NBC News and an anchor for MSNBC. Tur visited 40 states with then-candidate Donald Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, making more than 3,800 live television reports. Her extensive coverage caused her to be singled out by Trump for often hostile treatment, in some cases causing security scares when she was called out by him during campaign rallies. Tur has written a book about her experiences on the Trump campaign trail, called Unbelievable: My Front-row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History.

Dr Simon Chaplin is director of culture and society at London's Wellcome Trust, the world's second largest non-governmental funder of medical research, and co-founder of the Human Genome Project. Prior to joining Wellcome, Chaplin was Director of Museums and Special Collections at the Royal College of Surgeons. His academic research interests include the history of anatomy and medical museums. He is about to come to Auckland as a keynote speaker at a colloquium that will debate a proposed Medical Museum for Auckland. The colloquium will also coincide with the Body Worlds exhibition currently on in Auckland, which has been criticised for objectifying the dead and exploiting the human taste for the macabre under the guise of education.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

Sian Davey is a photographer with a background in fine art and social policy. She has also run a private psychotherapy practice for the past 15 years. Her work has been included in the National Portrait Gallery's Taylor Wessing Portrait Award for the last three years. Her book Looking for Alice, which documents the childhood of her daughter with Down Syndrome, was shortlisted for the Aperture Best Book Award at Paris Photo 2016. Her latest work, Martha, sees her turn the camera on her adolescent stepdaughter as a response to the girl's question: 'why don't you photograph me anymore?'

This week, local artist Luke Willis Thompson has been named as only the second-ever New Zealander to make the shortlist for the UK's Turner Prize, one of the world's most prestigious awards. The 30-year-old Aucklander, whose father is Fijian-born, has recently been interviewed on Saturday Morning for his 35mm film autoportrait, a silent portrait of Diamond Reynolds, the partner of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer after a traffic-stop in Minnesota in 2016. Thompson won the prestigious Walters Prize in 2014, and his works have been exhibited around the world. The Turner Prize recipient will be announced on December 4, and the four artists shortlisted will have their work exhibited at Tate Britain from September 25. Kim talks to Head of Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, Peter Shand, who has closely followed Thompson's practice for almost a decade and will explain further the significance of the nomination.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a New York Times bestselling author. He heads the Center for Science and Law, a national non-profit institute, is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Science and Law, and serves as an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the author of the companion book, The Brain: The Story of You and several others, including his latest, The Runaway Species, and Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, which explores the neuroscience "under the hood" of the conscious mind. Eagleman will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival in May.

Thelonious Monk was a musical genius set back by mental health problems he could perhaps have been treated for today, says composer John Beasley. The big band MONK'estra will get experimental with Monk's off-beat tunes at this year's Wellington Jazz Festival.

David Goddard QC is the grants and scholarships committee chair of the Michael and Suzanne Borrin Foundation - established earlier this year through a $38 million bequest by the late Judge Ian Borrin in honour of his parents. Judge Borrin was a Family Court Judge and later head of the Police Complaints Authority (now the Independent Police Conduct Authority). The foundation focuses on funding legal research, education and scholarship and recently awarded its first five grants, including research awards on property law and the over-representation of Maori in prison - areas, says Goddard, where the law is not serving New Zealanders well. Goddard is one of New Zealand's leading barristers. He specialises in appellate advocacy, appearing frequently before the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court.

Feminist author and academic Camille Paglia joins Kim to talk about her latest book - a collection of her essays on modern feminism called Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism. Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is the author of Glittering Images; Break, Blow, Burn; The Birds; Vamps & Tramps; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Sexual Personae.