Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Raymond McIntyre: A Modernist View
Dynamic and progressive paintings and woodcuts from one of Aotearoa’s New Zealand foremost modernist artists.
Living Archives
Archives that tell stories about artists and history in Aotearoa
Whāia te Taniwha
Māori artists consider the enduring relevance of taniwha in Aotearoa.
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Collection
Ruth Buchanan Brain Building Body
Brain Building Body brings together ideas of language, architecture and the body through a systems diagram, that describes the building as a body. It progresses on Ruth Buchanan’s earlier work The weather, a building that followed the story of a Berlin library as though it were a character, looking at ideas of embodied knowledge and poetic ways of understanding space. This work uses Ruth’s distinctive visual language of wavy pink and white stripes, taking up physical space through hanging across the room and requiring the viewer to walk around and between to read the work and think about their own position within it.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Sriwhana Spong The painter-tailor
Filmed in Sanur, Bali, The painter-tailor is a family portrait. Drawing together multiple perspectives through the use of 16mm film and HD video that were made by the artist with her relatives and a family dog, the story revolves around the last painting created by Sriwhana Spong’s grandfather, the artist and tailor I Gusti Made Rundu (1918–1993). It is the only work that the family still owns and evokes memories of his life and role as an artist.
Setting the work in the surrounds of the family home and alongside photographic albums, the film reveals the social, economic and political contexts that influence art-making. Sriwhana prompts us to think not only about the ways that we make art and images, but also their distribution and the act of looking. Through this lens we can see the effects of colonisation in Indonesia and the subsequent impact on traditions of art and image-making.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022 – 21 July 2024 )
Collection
Miranda Parkes etc (exploded book: French Painting)
For her series of ‘exploded books’, Ōtautahi artist Miranda Parkes used old books about painting as palimpsests for wild and colourful collages. This literal ‘painting over’ of Western art texts and images challenges and rewrites the contents, revealing the subjective nature of art history and suggesting it is more unruly and diverse than we think. Elisa Bonaparte peeks out from vibrant pink, yellow and golden layers; an eye stares back at us from the centre of a swirling silver record adorned with chocolate covered fruit and a pair of lips; and an arm reaches into what was once a Manet but is now a psychedelic party of paint. This playful, almost surreal, treatment of the book as canvas is a joyful critique of the patriarchal, heteronormative, monocultural art histories that are written and taught in academia. Instead, Miranda imagines and celebrates the other artists and artworks that we might consider important today.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Miranda Parkes The Third-class Compartment (exploded book: French Painting)
For her series of ‘exploded books’, Ōtautahi artist Miranda Parkes used old books about painting as palimpsests for wild and colourful collages. This literal ‘painting over’ of Western art texts and images challenges and rewrites the contents, revealing the subjective nature of art history and suggesting it is more unruly and diverse than we think. Elisa Bonaparte peeks out from vibrant pink, yellow and golden layers; an eye stares back at us from the centre of a swirling silver record adorned with chocolate covered fruit and a pair of lips; and an arm reaches into what was once a Manet but is now a psychedelic party of paint. This playful, almost surreal, treatment of the book as canvas is a joyful critique of the patriarchal, heteronormative, monocultural art histories that are written and taught in academia. Instead, Miranda imagines and celebrates the other artists and artworks that we might consider important today.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Areta Wilkinson Whakapapa II
Areta Wilkinson’s work expresses concepts of Ngāi Tahu whakapapa, genealogy and relationships, and mahinga kai, customary sites of natural resources and cultural production. Like her ancestors before her, Wilkinson utilises available resources in her making, from local river stones, clays, pigments and gold to contemporary resources like 3D prints of archaic artefacts. Layering past and present, she acknowledges Ngāi Tahu visual culture and histories through a contemporary art conversation. Wilkinson made Whakapapa II remembering Maerewhenua and Takiroa – limestone rock shelters that feature drawings made with charcoal and kōkōwai red ochre and created from the thirteenth century onwards. Wilkinson’s work is made from a range of precious materials and recalls how these drawings sit alongside each other through the placement of the individual objects, the positive and the negative elements carrying cultural – as well as aesthetic – ideas and narratives.
(Die Cuts and Derivations, 11 March – 2 July 2023)
Collection
Miranda Parkes Eliza (exploded book: French Painting)
For her series of ‘exploded books’, Ōtautahi artist Miranda Parkes used old books about painting as palimpsests for wild and colourful collages. This literal ‘painting over’ of Western art texts and images challenges and rewrites the contents, revealing the subjective nature of art history and suggesting it is more unruly and diverse than we think. Elisa Bonaparte peeks out from vibrant pink, yellow and golden layers; an eye stares back at us from the centre of a swirling silver record adorned with chocolate covered fruit and a pair of lips; and an arm reaches into what was once a Manet but is now a psychedelic party of paint. This playful, almost surreal, treatment of the book as canvas is a joyful critique of the patriarchal, heteronormative, monocultural art histories that are written and taught in academia. Instead, Miranda imagines and celebrates the other artists and artworks that we might consider important today.
(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )
Collection
Bill Hammond Bone Yard Open Home, Cave Painting 4, Convocation of Eagles
Ōhinehou Lyttelton artist Bill Hammond sailed south from Aotearoa New Zealand to the subantarctic Maungahuka Auckland Islands in 1989. The islands are rich with an abundance of birds and diverse flora, and the experience left a lasting impression. Hammond began to imagine how Aotearoa may have looked before humans arrived, painting evocative, ghostly landscapes dominated by bird-people. This painting has connections to Ōhinehou, Matuku-takotako Sumner, Te Raekura Redcliffs and Horomaka Banks Peninsula. A large tree stump alludes to the destruction of forests across Aotearoa, reinforcing Hammond’s ongoing concern with the fragility of our natural environment and species loss. In the 800 years that humans have occupied Aotearoa, seventy percent of our indigenous landcover has been lost and more than 100 species of plants and animals have become extinct. Most extinctions have been birds, with Aotearoa losing almost half of its known species. Currently seventy-five percent of indigenous reptile, bird, bat and freshwater fish species are at risk of extinction.
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)