Exhibitions
Events
On display
Arts + Climate Innovation Roadshow
Event
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free, but please register
Join us for a timely conversation about how the arts can contribute to our attempts to adapt to climate impacts and shape our carbon neutral future in Aotearoa New Zealand.
An event for artists, curators, producers, directors, art lovers, art funders, along with representatives from national, regional and local art institutions, organisations and trusts.
With expert climate scientists, Professors James Renwick (Victoria University) and Dr Craig Stevens (NIWA), joined by Track Zero Founder, Sarah Meads and local special guests: food and social practice artist, Gaby Montejo, Director of Te Pūtahi- Christchurch centre for architecture + city-making, Dr Jessica Halliday; multidisciplinary artist Della Rees, and poet Teoti Jardine.
Learn about the very latest climate science; work that’s underway in New Zealand to adapt and shift to a low-emissions society, and exciting examples of artists already working in the climate change space. Become part of the conversation. Explore how the arts can help to inspire climate action and ways this can be supported.
We live in an increasingly hot, hungry and less equal world in which climate impacts disproportionately affect those most vulnerable. Scientists tell us we have a critical window – less than a decade – in which to act to prevent climate events that may be beyond civilisation’s capacity to adapt. The urgent need for far reaching social, economic and technological responses is not being matched by action.
The Arts + Climate Innovation Roadshow is travelling to ten locations from Whangarei to Dunedin from July to November 2018.
Co-hosted with Track Zero and WORD Christchurch
More information on the Track Zero website.
This event is FREE but you are required to register.
Related reading: Enviromentalism, Free event
Event
Hawkins by Rata Lovell-Smith
Join guide volunteer guide Susan Bidwell as she discusses Rata Lovell-Smith's Hawkins in From Here on the Ground on the first floor.
Event
Taranaki by Christopher Perkins
Join curator Ken Hall as he discusses Christopher Perkins's Taranaki in From Here on the Ground on the first floor.
Event
Sign Language Tours
Celebrate Sign Language Week and take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our guides and a sign language interpreter.
Event
Oh Baby, It's Art!
A free, guided art tour especially for parents with babies. Buggies welcome.
Event
Art Safari
A chance for pre-schoolers to paint, glue, print, stamp and colour without making a mess at home. Art Safari is designed for our youngest budding artists between 2-4 years old.
Event
Late Night Tour
Take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our friendly, knowledgeable guides.
Commentary
Pauline Rhodes: Blue Mind
Painted blue and patterned with rust, the thin plywood panels and screens lean nonchalantly around the walls of the gallery and form a skyline of sorts. Across the floor sculptures intersect the space, with groupings of tall rods, waist-high enclosures, clusters of plywood shapes and a small kayak frame on salvaged seaweed and driftwood. Islands for the audience to navigate. The forms are roughly human in scale and relative to the body, generating an intensity and making this an immersive installation to wade through.
Commentary
The Edge of the Sea
A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:
Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.
Exhibition
Adele Jackson: Antarctic Sun Lines
To mark the opening of the 2019/20 Antarctic summer season, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū presents the first publicly exhibited Antarctic Sun Lines solargraph. A multi-day exposure image made using a pinhole camera and illuminated with solar energy, it considers Antarctica in relation to the sun and the natural forces that create and sustain life on Earth
Interview
Power Play
In November 2017, Simon Denny’s The Founder’s Paradox opened at Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, the first solo exhibition Denny had made specifically for New Zealand audiences in several years. His starting point for the project was local: the news, broken by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert in early 2017, that the billionaire tech investor and Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel was in fact a New Zealand citizen.
Commentary
Of Braided Rivers and Hydro-Traders
“With 14,000km of coastline, over 180,000km of rivers, and 3,820 lakes, there’s more to the land of the long white cloud than land…” So began an advertisement in a recent Sunday Star Times. It might have been the opening gambit for a campaign devoted to water conservation but was, in fact, a promotion for the latest model jet ski: “And all you need to unlock it is the all-new Yamaha Waverunner FX HO… SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD. Yamaha-motor.co.nz.”
Commentary
The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
Event
Introduction to the Gallery Tour
Take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our friendly, knowledgeable guides.
Collection
Ralph Hotere Dawn/Water Poem
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“There are very few things I can say about my work, that are better than saying nothing.”
—Ralph Hotere, undated