Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Made in the Pacific: A Collection of Tāoga
A selection of Pacific tāoga from the Canterbury Museum in conversation with contemporary artworks that highlight the continued strength in culture and traditional art forms.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua
A comprehensive survey spanning the artist's career.
Ana Iti: Ngahere Behind a Pile of Metal
An immersive installation considering the legacies of deforestation and significance of kauri trees.
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Ka tuwhera ki te 9pm i kā pō Wenerei
Open 7 days, 10am - 5pm
Late night Wednesday until 9pm
Uruka utukore, ahokore utukore
Free entry, free wifi
Collection
Edith Amituanai Tup$ hits the human flag
Made in Edith Amituanai’s home suburb of Rānui in West Auckland, this photograph is from the ongoing series ETA (Edith’s Talent Agency). Began in 2015, the series blends street and documentary photography. Edith is active in her community and collaborates with the people in her photographs, forming trusting and long-lasting relationships before taking her camera out. Here Tup$ pulls a classic parkour move, known as the human flag, against the backdrop of the local dairy. His horizontal body is an impressive physical feat – playful and streetwise, like the stylised S on the end of his name. The artist’s photograph records Tup$’s agility and asserts his agency as he moves and pulls stunts through the neighbourhood.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)
Collection
Kura Te Waru Rewiri A Construction of a Past
Infused with a sense of circuit board energy, Kura Te Waru Rewiri’s A Construction of a Past feels purposeful and definite while also filled with cryptic, hidden clues; like a modernist-inspired personal mapping of whakapapa, connections, memory and experience.
After graduating from Ilam School of Fine Arts in 1973 and completing teacher training, Kura spent the next decade raising a family and teaching. On returning to painting in 1985, she took encouragement in a whakataukī from a friend: ‘He kokonga whare e kitea, he kokonga ngakau e kore e kitea’ (‘the corner of a house can be seen but not a corner of the heart’).
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)
Art Bite
Ngā Here o Te Ao by Cath Brown, Diggeress Te Kanawa, Kahutoi Te Kanawa, Te Aue Davis, Reihana Parata, Te Muri Turner, Clowdy Ngatai, Katerina Waiari and Ranui Ngarimu
Collection
Grant Lingard Drought
Classical Italian male sculptures are often missing a crucial part of their anatomy – not because of prudery, but because they were souvenired by admiring tourists. Here, a pile of plaster phalluses sits above a tap; a suitably dry commentary on the unending challenge of quenching sexual desires. Made in Sydney in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis, these totems of liberated sexual expression were also associated with danger. In that context, a pile-up of body parts takes on a much darker symbolism.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- 21 July 2024)
Collection
Grant Lingard If the Shoe Fits
These two works are from a series that considered the challenges of fitting within the narrowly defined (largely heterosexual) margins of accepted male behaviour. Always alert to the possibilities of language, Grant Lingard combined pre-made ink stamps with familiar phrases he described as “having suitable political connotations for the gay debate”.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor combines the singsong rollcall of suitable male careers with the image of a black rose. For Grant, roses symbolised growth, passion and beauty, but in black they also represented an outsider or underdog, the family’s ‘black sheep’. He customised each frame, choosing colours that represented different roses. If the Shoe Fits is an image of tightly-laced conformity. Grant said he wanted to show that “sexuality is only one small part of a person’s makeup, and gay men are equally as varied and individual as non-gay. I just want to plant a seed in people’s head hoping it will grow and perhaps affect the way they think and behave.”
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )