Exhibitions
Events
On display
Lisa Reihana's Wog Features and A Māori Dragon Story
Film
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
Bringing you two early animated films from this pioneering Māori artist for Waitangi Day and the weekend following—newly remastered: Wog Features (1990) and A Māori Dragon Story (1995).
Always fresh, funky and representing, Reihana’s work as a multimedia artist and wahine toa is fabulous—no wonder she has been named a key artist of the decade. (23 minutes)
Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū) has work in this year’s Toronto Biennial, and represented Aotearoa New Zealand in 2017 at the Venice Biennale. In Pursuit of Venus [infected] (2015) was nominated for the 2016 Walters Prize, and her work has featured in important group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Reihana was awarded an Arts Laureate Award by the Arts Foundation of New Zealand in 2014; the Te Tohu Toi Ke Te Waka Toi Maori Arts Innovation Award from Creative New Zealand in 2015; and was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2018.
Wog Features is in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and A Māori Dragon Story is in the collection of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth. These screenings are supported by Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage's Commemorating Waitangi Day Fund.
Related reading: Film, Māori
Exhibition
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive
23 August 2019 – 26 January 2020
This dynamic exhibition explores the history of Māori artists who have used animation, film and video as a medium.
Notes
Celebrate summer at Christchurch Art Gallery
Summer is here and it’s the perfect time to visit Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Experience incredible art, express your creativity through art courses and workshops, attend an artist talk, event or activity and explore your world in a new way through art.
Notes
Māori video artists on display in Christchurch
Works by more than twenty Māori moving image artists will be on display at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū in August.
Commentary
Curating Oceania
The idea for an exhibition of Oceanic art originated from the Royal Academy itself, proposed in 2012 by its then artistic director Kathleen Soriano, an Australian. The exhibition was imagined to fit within the Academy’s occasional programme of ‘civilisation’ or ‘world art’ exhibitions, inaugurated in 1996 with the ground-breaking Africa: Art of a Continent, and followed by exhibitions such as Aztecs (2002), China (2005), Byzantium (2009) and others. These exhibitions sat among the gallery’s more usual fare of historical European, modern and contemporary art.
Commentary
Te Āhua o te Hau ki te Papaioea
The ‘Operation 8’ anti-terror raids in October of 2007 were the culmination of a police investigation that led to the raiding of homes across New Zealand. The raids were conducted after an extended period of surveillance, which was enabled through use of the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act. In 2013 the Independent Police Conduct Authority found that police had “unnecessarily frightened and intimidated” people during the raids.
Interview
Looking at Forty Years of Māori Moving Image Practice
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive is co-curated by Bridget Reweti and Melanie Oliver. The following text is a conversation between the two curators around co-curating, archives and Māori moving image practice.
Commentary
Bringing the Soul
As an eleven-year-old boy from Whāngarei, sent to live in Yaldhurst with my aunt in the late seventies, Christchurch was a culture shock. Arriving in New Zealand’s quintessential ‘English city’, I remember well the wide landscapes and manicured colonial built environment. It was very pretty but also very monocultural, with no physical evidence of current or former Māori occupation or cultural presence, or at least none that I could appreciate at that time.
