Exhibitions
Events
On display
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania Guided Tour
Guided Tour
Past event
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Be amongst the first to celebrate the opening of this stunning new exhibition!
Join Gallery staff member, co-director of Paludal art space, and writer Simon Palenski as he takes you on a fascinating journey through Aotearoa's art history, looking from the Pacific outwards.
Related reading: Video art, Watercolour, Sculpture, Māori
Exhibition
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
3 July 2022
Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.
Product
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
Ken Hall, Nathan Pohio, Felicity Milburn, Lara Strongman and Peter Vangioni, with Stephanie Oberg
$19.99
Exhibition
Sione Tuívailala Monū and Edith Amituanai: Toloa Tales
New video works trace migratory threads across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa as the artists return to their ancestral homeland.
Exhibition
Bridget Reweti: Ziarah
Ziarah is an Arabic word that refers to an ancestral or spiritual pilgrimage to a gravesite. Developed while artist Bridget Reweti was on residency in the Indonesian city of Jogjakarta, this work traces her attempt to find the unmarked graves of navigator Tupaia and his nephew and apprentice Taiata on nearby Damar Besar Island.
Exhibition
Meg Porteous and Rea Burton: Nancy Treadler
In this moving-image work, artists Meg Porteous and Rea Burton take inspiration from preening pigeons outside their studio to create an exaggerated mimicry of the art world.
Commentary
Memory Pictures
… it suits me to take pictures on celluloid that were formerly pictures of the mind, memory pictures, pictures of the imagination …
Exhibition
Max Fleury and Anna Brimer: Glory
A playful video of impromptu water fountains made from everyday objects.
Exhibition
Aydriannah Tuiali: Kōwhai
In Te Ao Māori, waiata (songs) are often used to retain memories, knowledge and whakapapa. The meditative chant that artist Aydriannah Tuiali’i performs here urges us to reflect on our ancestors, to look for sustenance and future wellbeing through our connections to the past.
Notes
A Quick Q&A with James Oram
Over lockdown, Ōtautahi artist James Oram made a new work for our online exhibition Spheres: An Online Video Project. I asked him a few questions about the making of the work, which is up on our website until the end of October.
Exhibition
Spheres: An Online Video Project
An online series of moving image works exploring social distance and personal environments including works from Xin Cheng, John Chrisstoffels, Conor Clarke, Ronnie van Hout, Sonya Lacey, Janet Lilo, Sione Monu, James Oram, Nova Paul, Bridget Reweti, Sriwhana Spong and Matavai Taulangau.
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.
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
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.
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.
Exhibition
Māori Moving Image: An Open Archive
This dynamic exhibition explores the history of Māori artists who have used animation, film and video as a medium.
Exhibition
Maureen Lander: Flat-pack Whakapapa
An installation of hand-woven harakeke speaks of the contemporary Māori experience
Exhibition
Rachael Rakena: Rerehiko
An immersive video installation by Kāi Tahu artist Rachael Rakena.
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.
Exhibition
The Devil's Blind Spot: Recent Strategies in New Zealand Photography
Recent photography by an emerging generation of New Zealand artists.
Exhibition
Olivia Spencer Bower: Views from the Mainland
A selection of watercolours by one of Canterbury’s most treasured artists.
Exhibition
Francis Upritchard: Jealous Saboteurs
Exquisitely imagined, startlingly strange works by an internationally acclaimed New Zealand artist.
Interview
Not Quite Human
Lara Strongman: The title of your new work for the Gallery is Quasi. Why did you call it that?
Ronnie van Hout: Initially it was a working title. Because the work would be outside the Gallery, on the roof, I was thinking of Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. I was coming out of a show and research around the idea of the freak, the outsider and things that are rejected—thinking about how even things that are rejected have a relationship to whatever they’ve been rejected by. And I called it Quasi, because it’s a human form that’s not quite human as well. The idea of something that resembles a human but is not quite human.
Exhibition
Ship Songs
A small but poetic exhibition looking at early European and Māori representations of seafaring vessels, with the Charlotte Jane as a focal point.
Exhibition
Kōwhaiwhai
Five significant works of art that look to traditional Māori architecture to inform modernist and contemporary Māori art practice.
Exhibition
He Rau Maharataka Whenua: A Memory of Land
Canterbury modernist landscape painting from the collections of Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, poignantly revised from within a Kāi Tahu perspective
Notes
Face Five
Christchurch-born and internationally renowned artist Ronnie van Hout has had a huge hand in our latest outdoor installation. Quasi, a five-metre-tall sculpture of the artist's hand and facial features, was unveiled this morning on the Gallery's rooftop, next to Gloucester Street.
Artist Profile
Doris Lusk: An Inventive Eye
In the strange, stunned afterlife that ticked slowly by in the first few years following Christchurch’s February 2011 earthquake, a curious note of recognition sounded through the shock and loss. As a massive programme of demolitions relentlessly hollowed out the city, many buildings were incompletely removed and lingered on for months as melancholy remains – stumps abandoned in a forlorn urban forest. Hideous, sculptural, beautiful; they bore compelling resemblance to a body of paintings created in the city more than three decades earlier.
Exhibition
Untitled (Bathers)
Séraphine Pick's lush watercolour offers a utopian vision in the car park elevator.
Article
Exquisite Treasure Revealed
Canterbury Museum holds two albums compiled by Diamond Harbour artist Margaret Stoddart. The older of the two, containing images featured in this Bulletin, and itself currently exhibited in the Gallery, covers the period 1886–96. The album is handsomely bound in maroon, and stamped M.O.S. in gold. It contains a sort of travelogue by way of black and white photographs set amongst decorative painting, mostly of native flora, with some locality and date information.
Exhibition
W.A. Sutton: Watercolours of Italy
An exhibition featuring a selection of works from Bill Sutton's 1973–4 Italian sojourn, highlighting his exquisite skill as a draughtsman and watercolourist.
Notes
The Watercolour Collection
The Gallery's Watercolour Collection had modest beginnings, but over the past 70 years it has grown steadily by gift and purchase and, of all the Collections, still maintains a largely traditional emphasis. When the Gallery opened in June 1932, just 28 of the 128 paintings on display were watercolours and, of these, 11 were by British artists and 17 by New Zealanders. Among the mostly nineteenth century British watercolours were those by Helen Allingham, Edgar Bundy, Matthew Hale, Laura Knight, William Lee Hankey and Ernest Waterlow. In contrast, the New Zealand watercolours were by mostly contemporary or early twentieth century artists and included works by James Cook, Olivia Spencer Bower, Margaret Stoddart, Maude Sherwood, Eleanor Hughes and Alfred Walsh. The foundation Watercolour Collection included two paintings of larger than usual dimensions. William Lee Hankey's We've been in the Meadows all day (1184 x 878mm) and Charles N. Worsley's Mount Sefton (996 x 1105mm) are still greater in scale than any other work in the Watercolour Collection.