Whakaaturaka
Exhibitions
Taiopeka
Events
E Whakaaturia ana Ināianei
On display
Mark Adams Artist Talk
Mark Adams 25.05.1988. Rapanui.Shag Rock.Ōpāwaho-Ōtākaro hapua.Heathecote-Avon Rivers mouth. Ōtautahi Christchurch. Te Waipounamu South Island 1988. Silver bromide print. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2011
Talk
Meet in the exhibition
Free
Join Mark Adams and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki curator Sarah Farrar for a floortalk in Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua.
This exhibition offers the first comprehensive survey of New Zealand photographer Mark Adams' work, showcasing more than 65 works spanning his 50-year career. Bringing together black-and-white and colour photographs made decades apart, it examines his compelling and distinctive approach to image-making in Aotearoa. Come along and enjoy this rare opportunity to hear Mark discuss his work.
Related reading: Artist Talk, Photography, Free event
Exhibition
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua
7 March – 26 July 2026
A comprehensive survey spanning the artist's career.
Collection
Mark Adams 25.05.1988. Rapanui. Shag Rock. Ōpāwaho-Ōtākaro hapua. Heathcote-Avon Rivers mouth. Ōtautahi Christchurch. Te Waipounamu South Island
Rapanui, which in te reo Māori means ‘the great sternpost’, stood for thousands of years near Matuku-takotako Sumner, where the Ōpāwaho Heathcote and the Ōtākaro Avon rivers drain out to sea. Māori used the rock as a marker for passage into the estuary, an important mahika kai (food and resource gathering area) where Ngāi Tahu gathered shellfish, eels and harakeke. A naturally occurring seastack, known to many locals as Shag Rock, Rapanui was eight metres tall before the destructive earthquake of February 2011 reduced it to a heap half that high. Mark Adams’ photograph, taken twenty-three years earlier and reprinted following the earthquake, highlights that shocking transformation. It also calls attention to the many overlaid histories – human and natural – of this place.
(Absence, May 2023)
Notes
Largest ever Fiona Pardington exhibition opens in Christchurch
Death, sex, flesh and the female gaze are among the many themes explored in the Gallery’s newest exhibition, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation.
Artist Profile
Larence Shustak
Welcome to the world of Larence Shustak—a rule-breaker and image-maker who came of age in the creative cauldron that was New York City in the 1950s. He used a camera as a paintbrush, documenting as well as creatively interpreting his subjects: street people and nudes. Old folks and children. Jazz legends.
Commentary
Representing Women: Ann Shelton’s Dark Matter
What is ‘dark matter’? For theoretical physicists it is matter that cannot be directly observed but whose existence is nevertheless scientifically calculable – productively present yet simultaneously invisible. In a similar vein, the everyday phrase ‘dark matter’ describes objects, conditions and situations that harbour unease or trauma. Trauma that is often concealed, repressed, or buried. Both definitions are active in Ann Shelton’s mid-career review exhibition Dark Matter, and they provide a rich point of entry into this compelling collection of her photographic work. These are photographs that bristle with intensity and refuse to let their subjects die a quiet archival death.
Commentary
Laurence Aberhart
New Zealand artist Laurence Aberhart is internationally regarded for his photographs of unpeopled landscapes and interiors. He photographs places redolent with the weight of time, which he captures with his century-old large-format camera and careful framing. But he’s always taken more spontaneous photographs of people too, particularly in the years he lived in Christchurch and Lyttelton (1975–83) when he photographed his young family, his friends and occasionally groups of strangers. ‘If I lived in a city again,’ he says, ‘I would photograph people. One of the issues is that I even find it difficult to ask people whether I can photograph a building, so to ask to photograph them – I’m very reticent. I also know that after a number of minutes of waiting for me to set cameras up and take exposure readings and so on, people can get rather annoyed. So it’s not a conscious thing, it’s more just an accident of the way I photograph.’
Artist Profile
The Devil’s Blind Spot
Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery has a long-standing tradition of curating exhibitions of emerging and early-career artists. We do this in order to contribute to the ecology of the local art world, as well as because – quite straightforwardly – we’re interested in the practices of artists at all stages of their careers, and would like to bring the work of outstanding younger artists to wider public attention. The Devil’s Blind Spot is the latest in this ongoing series, but unlike earlier exhibitions, it’s concerned with a single medium – photography.
Commentary
The Camera as a Place of Potential
To Māori, the colour black represents Te Korekore – the realm of potential being, energy, the void, and nothingness. The notion of potential and the presence of women are what I see when I peek at Fiona Pardington’s 1997 work Moko. And I say peek deliberately, because I am quite mindful of this work – it is downright spooky. Moko is a photographic rendering of a seeping water stain upon the blackboard in Pardington’s studio, taken while she was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin in 1997.
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.
My Favourite
Selwyn Toogood, Levin
I spent much of my adolescence in hospital, confined to bed due to a chronic illness. With a 14" TV beside me, I’d travel to imaginary places via the controller of my Nintendo games console. At the time, I couldn’t imagine walking to the letterbox, let alone experiencing the more exotic places of the world.
Article
Taryn Simon's known unknowns
In 2003, the American photographer Taryn Simon embarked upon a four-year heart-of-darkness journey. In response to paranoid rumours of WMDs and secret sites in Iraq, she turned her gaze to places and things hidden within her own country.
