What’s On
Maureen Lander: Aho Marama Strings of Light
A magical UV light installation bringing together different art forms and histories.
Out of Time
Experience the storytelling power of art.
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection
Come in and explore our exciting collection exhibition.
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Free entry, free wifi
Commentary
Spring Time is Heart-break
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū’s new exhibition Spring Time is Heart-break: Contemporary Art in Aotearoa takes its title from one of six poems written as memorials by Ursula Bethell after the death of her partner Effie Pollen. The couple’s relationship mirrored the seasonal changes in the garden they tended together during the decade that Bethell was writing poetry on Ngā Kohatu Whakarakaraka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua, the Port Hills overlooking Ōtautahi Christchurch. For the poet, signs of spring became a bittersweet reminder of her lost love. Reading Bethell’s work today, her evocation of intense feelings and embeddedness with the land not only reflects the ethos of our present time, but also resonates with many of the works in the exhibition. Bethell claims that we are kin with the environment, foreshadowing ideas of human/non-human interconnectedness and echoing tangata whenua understandings of whakapapa to the whenua. Artist Aliyah Winter brought Bethell to our attention while she was conducting research for a new work; our choice of title was made to encompass seasons, temporality and emotion, as might be applied to contemporary practice in Aotearoa.
Commentary
Silver Screen
Writing on the virtues of filmic possibility, Susan Sontag identifies that “the distinctive cinematic unit is not the image, but the principle of connection between the images: the relation of a ‘shot’ to the one that preceded and the one that comes after.” It is this ability to manipulate the structure of film that makes the medium special; editing, Sontag proposes, is the reason for film to exist at all. The continuation or dissolution of one scene into the next constitutes the materiality of the moving image; it is defined by the seams where it also might be undone. As such, an artist’s choice to work with moving image comes from an appreciation of its distinct characteristics.
Commentary
Crosstalk
“Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. With so much to look forward to he looked back.”
I drive north through darkening skies. Dim headlights diffuse a blue pallor over the sinking plains and pooling wetlands that glow in dusk. The car bends the coast before turning inland to ascend the thicket of pine that cuts across the dark island. Forest hedging the summit accedes to widening de- pressions in the land. Its recesses withhold rubbled secrets of a past that appear and recede without warning. I am driving into October.
Commentary
If Objects Could Walk, Where Would They Go?
In early 2023, I was fortunate enough to travel to Seoul and Gwangju, Korea. This was my first time visiting this eastern part of Asia – a continent I thought I knew quite well through shared cross-cultural histories, migrations, tourism, friends and relatives, literature and pop culture. The trip reminded me, however, that many countries in Asia are still almost completely closed-off, inaccessible or strictly controlled by their governing bodies. This intensified the unease I felt every time I boarded a plane to visit another country, returning to my birthplace in Thailand, or crossing the motu. It’s the mobility privilege; everywhere I go, I remember those who cannot leave.
Commentary
Capturing the Airs
In the archive there is a stillness, an air of silence animated by the low hum of electronics: servers buzzing, computer screens flickering, wires, old analogue equipment. I load an audio file into a software program with a few clicks of the mouse. Its waveform unfurls on my screen, a horizontal axis of blue lines accentuated by vertical peaks and troughs, rendering the singing breath and its energetic highs and lows. I press play and ambient sounds flood the speakers. The magnetic tape hisses, jumps and crackles as it winds along, the swell of laughter, singing voices, traffic passing by – inflections of a bygone era. I’m transported to the memory of learning mā'ulu'ulu, a Tongan group dance, as a young girl. After church on Sundays, in the middle of winter, we would pack into the cold hall for rehearsal, kept warm by the movement of bodies swaying together.
Commentary
Watch Your Tongue
I te tīmatanga ko te hiahia Mai i te hiahia ko te mahara
Mai i te mahara ko te whakaaro Ka puta ko te kupu e.
In the beginning was the desire From the desire came the remembrance
From the remembrance came the conscious thought From the conscious thought came the word.
Rangimotuhia Kātene
Commentary
Te Rā at Christchurch Art Gallery
On 8 July 2023, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū opened Te Rā: The Māori Sail to the public. The opening was a celebratory event to which manuhiri travelled from around Aotearoa, excited by the opportunity to view the only known customary Māori sail in existence. The development of the exhibition required the knowledge and skills of numerous experts from the Gallery team and elsewhere in Aotearoa, Australia and England. This photo-essay documents the work that went into the installation, and some of the people that made it happen.
Interview
Supporting a Pacific Presence
In 2022, the Gallery received an extraordinary gift: fifty-seven works by thirty-two artists from the private collection of writer, researcher and lecturer Karen Stevenson. Of Tahitian heritage, Stevenson was raised in Los Angeles and moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1995 to take up the position of lecturer in art history at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. She told Felicity Milburn just what the gift means to her.
Artist Profile
Spring Time is Heart-break
In anticipation of our major summer exhibition, curatorial assistant Jane Wallace talked to five of the artists involved in the show. Working across a range of media, the twenty-five contemporary artists in Spring Time is Heart-break have a shared interest in storytelling. They consider ideas around communication, distance, memory, the body and materiality, generating works that gently reveal contemporary forms of image-making and circulation. How can we communicate through time, or in a different tongue? What do materials reveal to us as they are transformed from one state to another? From rimurapa harvesting to cavorting queer tableaux and fish ‘n’ chips, Heidi Brickell (Te Hika o Papauma, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tara, Rangitāne, Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Apakura), Priscilla Rose Howe, Lucy Meyle, and Steven Junil Park and John Harris share their energetic practices – a small glimpse of what will be on display this November.
Artist Profile
Flitting, Gliding, Strutting, Cavorting
Ranking highly among the privately-owned works of art that have fallen across this curator’s path is an exquisite late-Georgian era album of Indian bird watercolours. This significant, previously unpublished folio contains twenty-five delicate watercolours and three small lithographs. Most paintings were produced collaboratively in 1826 by an interesting couple, Elizabeth (Eliza) Jane D’Oyly and her husband Charles Walter D’Oyly, the latter recognised in India as “perhaps the most famous of the amateur British artists who depicted the Indian scene.” A treasured gift from Elizabeth to her sister Isabella Gilbert in 1866, the album has stayed in the same family since then. It also carries sombre themes alongside its splendours.