Fiona Pardington The Charlotte Jane 2009. C-type photograph. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2009
This exhibition is now closed
A small but poetic exhibition looking at early European and Māori representations of seafaring vessels, with the Charlotte Jane as a focal point.
The technique of call and response resonates across many art forms and cultures, where it generally expresses something of a working conversation. A visual call and response is found in the nautical flag signals used by sailors to establish identity and other communications at sea. Ship Songs proposes a similar process in art. It does not seek to tell a tale of journeys or arrivals, although this and other ideas are evoked. Rather, it asks the viewer to simply consider the idea of the representation of the waka/ship, and to feel something familiar and human running through the works when presented together
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Date:
3 September 2016 – 6 February 2017 -
Curator:
Nathan Pōhio -
Exhibition number:
1017 -
Historical Collection Art Partner
Related reading: Ryman Healthcare, Māori
Exhibition
Reading the Swell
3 September 2016 – 6 February 2017
Drawing its inspiration from the sea, this exhibition highlights the Gallery's collection of maritime paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and ceramics, alongside scrimshaw from Canterbury Museum's collection.
Exhibition
Kōwhaiwhai
3 September 2016 – 6 February 2017
Five significant works of art that look to traditional Māori architecture to inform modernist and contemporary Māori art practice.
Notes
Christchurch Art Gallery hosts Artzheimers to make art accessible
When the Artzheimers group visits Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetū the members are are stimulated, not just by the paintings on the wall, but also by the caring presentations they hear from curators and guides.
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.
