Exhibitions
Events
On display
Māori Rock Art
Gordon Walters Untitled 1956, Gouache on paper. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, purchased with the assistance of the W.A. Sutton Trust, 2010. Reproduced courtesy of the Gordon Walters Estate
Talk
Past event
Philip Carter Family Auditorium
Free
How old is it? Who made it? What does it mean?
Gerard O'Regan (Ngāi Tahu) will provide an outline of what we currently know, and don't know, about Māori rock art. He will also explore contemporary re-use of rock art imagery and how that relates to the places originally marked.
Related reading: Talk, Māori
Exhibition
Gordon Walters: New Vision
24 November 2018 – 17 March 2019
Remembered especially for his Koru or Pītau series, Gordon Walters’s explorations into modernist abstract painting are invested with a distinctly South Pacific energy.
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.
