Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Celebrate Matariki at the Gallery
Tatai Whetū Tatai Tangata.
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.
E tuwhera ana te wharetoi i kā rā e 7 o te wiki, 10am - 5pm
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
Artist Unknown Statue of a Man
Identifying the subject of a statue that is missing its head and arms is more than a little tricky. However, the relaxed pose and flowing drapery of this Roman statue suggest that it may depict Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
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- )