Meri Kirihimete!
Meri Kirihimete! Warmest holiday wishes from the Gallery team. We’re closing at 5pm on Christmas Eve and will be taking Christmas Day off but we’ll see you on Boxing Day from 10am.
Kā Kaupapa o te Wā
What’s On
Raymond McIntyre: A Modernist View
New exhibition now open.
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.
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
Yuki Kihara Roman Catholic Church, Apia (2013)
Yuki Kihara has developed a persona called Salome who often appears in her work – named for the biblical figure who, Kihara notes, influenced politics through dance. In these photographs, Salome, dressed in constricting Victorian clothes, gazes out to sea and on the ruined interior of the Roman Catholic Church in Apia following the devastation of Cyclone Evan in 2012. The viewer’s gaze is directed by Salome: through her quiet strength and indelible presence, we are invited to consider the effects of colonialism on Sāmoan culture.Kihara describes herself as Fa’afafine – a person within indigenous Sāmoan society who ‘does in the manner of a woman’; loosely translated as being ‘transgender’ in the Western context. Kihara’s Salome exists in the vā – which can be understood as a realm that transcends space and time, a place in which relationships between people and things are established. As the poet Albert Wendt writes, the vā is ‘not a space that separates but relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.’
(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)
Collection
Yuki Kihara After Tsunami Galu Afi, Lalomanu (2013)
Yuki Kihara took her alter ego Salome from an 1886 photograph titled Samoan half caste by New Zealand colonial photographer Thomas Andrew. Clad in Victorian ourning black, Salome’s unforgettable spectral presence is informed by Kihara’s own xperiences as a Sāmoan-Japanese person who is also Fa‘afafine, a term used in Indigenous āmoan society to describe someone who lives ‘in the manner of a woman’. Free from binary narratives, Salome occupies the Vā, a realm separated from time and space, in order to critique and reframe the impacts of colonisation. Roman Catholic Church, Apia and After Tsunami Galu Afi, Lalomanu were made in Sāmoa following the devastation of Cyclone Evan. With her back to us, Salome pulls our gaze to the ruined church and out to the open sea. Bearing witness to this recent tragedy, and Sāmoa’s history of loss through colonisation, she looks to the future. In Conveyance of Time (on the wall to your left), Salome is not one, but many. In flowing black crinoline, she moves through history and place like a queen on a chess board. In her arms are objects gathered from across time – an ava bowl, bible, navigational chart, the moon and Jupiter – carried as guides for the days to come.
(Dummies & Doppelgängers, 2 November 2024 – 23 March 2025)
