Exhibitions
Events
On display
Curators' Tour of Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
Angela Tiatia Lick 2015. Single-channel high definition video 16:9, colour, sound. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2018
Friends
Past event
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Free / Register by Thursday 4 June
REGISTRATION NOW CLOSED
Doors open 8.45am, tour starts 9am
Members are warmly invited to join curators Felicity Milburn, Peter Vangioni, Nathan Pohio and Ken Hall for a private tour of the Gallery's immersive new exhibition Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania, which celebrates Ōtautahi Christchurch’s connections with the Pacific.
Taking up the entire south side of the first-floor galleries, this exhibition features our city’s public art collection alongside key loans of taonga from significant collections around Aotearoa New Zealand.
This is a Friends-only event.
Please register by Thursday 4 June by emailing friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz to ensure we meet the criteria for events under Alert Level 2.
Registration may close earlier than this date due to limited spaces available.
Visit https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/support/friends to find out more about how you can become a supporter of the Gallery and get access to special Friends events and offers.
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania runs from 30 May 2020 – 23 May 2022.
Related reading: Friends
Exhibition
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
30 May 2020 – 3 July 2022
Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.
film
Kelcy Taratoa: Te Tāhū o ngā Maunga Tūmatakahuki
This timelapse video shows the installation of a vast new painting by Kelcy Taratoa about how we are bound together.
Echoing the overlapping forms of the Māori art of tukutuku, this vividly coloured wall painting by Kelcy Taratoa weaves together a story of exploration and connection. Spanning 36 metres across Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū’s outer east wall, best viewed from Gloucester Street, it's about everything that binds us together, from the ocean to the stars. This painting, and another related wall painting inside, were commissioned to accompany the major exhibition Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania. Taratoa worked with the support of mana whenua to ground the work in local narratives that relate to discovery and whakapapa. Within the painting’s abstract composition are islands, a maunga (mountain) and kāhui whetū (cluster of stars). They relate to early voyages of discovery across the Pacific and how whakapapa (genealogy) can unite people in a common kaupapa, or purpose.
Notes
Massive wall painting marks opening of Te Wheke at Christchurch Art Gallery
A 36-metre painting by artist Kelcy Taratoa is part of a new exhibition opening at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū on Saturday.
Notes
Director’s Update
With a welcome shift back to Level 2 in our collective fight against COVID-19, we are delighted to reopen our doors to visitors.
Notes
Te Wheke celebrates Ōtautahi Christchurch’s place in the Pacific
An immersive exhibition that explores art through our connections with the Pacific will be unveiled at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū on 30 May.
Notes
Puta Noa I Te Ao / In the World
Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand are often well-travelled. Feeling the distance of Aotearoa from the world’s centres of art, they have often been drawn overseas to study and work, contributing to the art history of their adopted countries as well as this one.
Notes
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
Welcome – nau mai haere mai. Kei Te Ararau o Tangaroa / Pathways Across Oceania is an attempt to understand the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean. Full of stories of migration, connection and belonging, this huge new exhibition reflects the connections and tensions that shape our past, present and future.
Notes
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Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.
Collection
Julia Morison Dulia
In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”
The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.
