Exhibitions
Events
On display
Waitangi Day Celebrations 2016
Te Ahikaaroa Kapa Haka
Dudley Benson
Event
Past event
Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
Free
Commemorate Waitangi Day at the Gallery with performances, art and family-friendly activities that celebrate Aotearoa New Zealand and tangata whenua.
The day will include including a children's weaving activity, and a kapa haka demonstration at 1pm by the incredible Te Ahikaaroa Kapa Haka. This will be followed by a performance of Dudley Benson's incredible 'A Wedding' at 3pm – a bold and visceral declaration of our relationship with the land, expressed through engaging pop music. More information about this performance can be found here.
Related reading: New Zealand, special event, Free event, Māori
Event
Hawkins by Rata Lovell-Smith
Join guide volunteer guide Susan Bidwell as she discusses Rata Lovell-Smith's Hawkins in From Here on the Ground on the first floor.
Event
Taranaki by Christopher Perkins
Join curator Ken Hall as he discusses Christopher Perkins's Taranaki in From Here on the Ground on the first floor.
Event
Sign Language Tours
Celebrate Sign Language Week and take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our guides and a sign language interpreter.
Event
Oh Baby, It's Art!
A free, guided art tour especially for parents with babies. Buggies welcome.
Event
Art Safari
A chance for pre-schoolers to paint, glue, print, stamp and colour without making a mess at home. Art Safari is designed for our youngest budding artists between 2-4 years old.
Event
Late Night Tour
Take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our friendly, knowledgeable guides.
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
Notes
Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation's Fifth Annual Gala Dinner
London's hottest chefs are coming to town – and you're invited to dinner!
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
Aberhart Starts Here
Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart
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
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
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
Max Hailstone: Te Ara Takahaka Tapuae / Points of Reference
An exhibition of Max Hailstone's most controversial and important series, using the signatures of the rangatira (Māori chiefs) who signed New Zealand's Treaty of Waitangi in 1840
Event
Introduction to the Gallery Tour
Take a free guided tour of our exhibition highlights with one of our friendly, knowledgeable guides.
Exhibition
Te Rua o te Moko
Each of the eighteen rūnanga within Ngāi Tahu are represented here by a work of art depicting a significant land site.
Exhibition
Kā Honoka
Cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific shows whaling as central to the local story.