Writing

“Sorry … Ummm”: Mystery, Mark Fisher, and Laughter

By Jasmine Gallagher

06.03.2023

Artist Campbell Patterson discusses his recent residencies, delayed by over two years due to the pandemic, at Headlands, Sausalito, and Gasworks, London, with friend and poet Jasmine Gallagher. They share their reflections on institutions of art and medicine, and on carving out their own spaces for the process of creation. 

Writing

Reading Artists’ Books with Interjections from a Daphne on Pete’s Front Step

By Hamish Petersen

21.02.2023

HUM’s Senior Editor considers the unique capacities of artist books by exploring three Aotearoa artists’ international projects from recent years. They learn how the intimate encounter between page and reader relies on finely tuned elements to realise some kind of sovereignty over the artist’s story or recognition in their reader. 

Writing

To Move Across a Window

By Francisco González Castro

31.01.2023

Texas-based artist and writer Francisco González Castro was first introduced to the many-armed project Beberemos El Vino Nuevo, Juntos! / Let Us Drink the New Wine, Together!, co-created by artist and educator alys longley and featuring no less than 19 Aotearoa contributors, just as the pandemic was escalating internationally. Here, he considers the lessons it presented to audiences in Santiago in the summer of 2022, just as the distance that defined the collaborators’ interactions was once again traversable.

Writing

Forever Fresh Talanoa Series 2.2

By Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Grace Iwashita-Taylor, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Lana Lopesi

12.12.2022

Our second episode in this four-part talanoa series, produced in collaboration with In*ter*is*land Collective, sees Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Grace Iwashita-Taylor and Lana Lopesi discuss their recent writing initiatives, each focused on fostering the conditions that allow Indigenous writing to flourish. Written response by Aotearoa writer and curator Ioana Gordon-Smith.

Calendar

Brian Fuata, 'of a house besieged (preposition tweaked)'

27 January 2023 —
27 January 2025

The Kitchen Video Viewing Room, Online

Writing

Stories of Becoming

By Harvey Bruce Milligan

15.11.2022

Sitting at a bar assembled from upcycled materials in Taipei, Harvey Bruce Milligan reports from Aotearoa-based artist Xin Cheng’s contribution to IsLand Bar, an annual event in which artists are invited to construct a bar as a platform for performance. Addressing Cheng's use of re-purposed materials as a basis for creativity and connection, he explores the artist's consideration of a broad material ecology and her pursuit of connecting people to the lives of things in a wider project of "regenerative re-making". 

Calendar

Maddie Leach, The fountain: An art-technological-social drama

01 January 2021 —
01 January 2025

Lund Technical University, Lund, Sweden

Calendar

Richard Lewer, Lisa Reihana and Francis Upritchard, Sydney Modern Project

02 December 2022 —
02 December 2024

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Writing

Still Alive

By Stuart Munro

18.10.2022

For this year's Aichi Triennale, writer Stuart Munro takes a trip to some of its more isolated venues to see works by Aotearoa artists Nikau Hindin and Yuki Kihara. Visiting buildings of historical significance where the various parts of the exhibition are installed, Munro unravels the far-reaching connections of Hindin and Kihara's contributions to family, survival and place. 

Writing

Aotearoa Reviews its Official Participation in the Venice Biennale

By Anna Brown, Bruce Barber, Heather Galbraith, Hutch Wilco, James Goggin, Jennifer Flay, Jhana Millers, Julia Holderness, Laura Preston, Michael Stevenson, Ron Hanson, Sophie Thorn, Tessa Giblin, Tessa Laird

26.09.2022

In light of the current review of Aotearoa New Zealand’s ‘official’ presence at the Venice Biennale, HUM invited responses from New Zealanders on- and off-shore who have visited or been involved in ‘New Zealand at Venice’ projects, as artists, pavilion attendants, exhibition installers or designers, to enable insights into how involvement in (or experience of) our previous national pavilions have influenced people’s own careers, and the profile of contemporary art from Aotearoa.

Writing

Forever Fresh Talanoa Series 2.1

By Ioana Gordon-Smith, Rosanna Raymond, Tanu Gago

10.10.2022

Our first episode in this four-part talanoa series, produced in collaboration with In*ter*is*land Collective, has Rosanna Raymond and Tanu Gago reflecting on recent international projects and the difficulties of being Moana artists working in countries with cultural amnesia over their colonial pasts. Written response by Aotearoa writer and curator Ioana Gordon-Smith.

Writing

FAFSWAG at documenta fifteen

By Will Fredo

20.09.2022

Berlin-based artist and writer Will Fredo discusses the decolonial gestures at play in Aotearoa-based art collective FAFSWAG’s contributions to documenta fifteen, encompassing works that champion unapologetic self-expression, queer joy and the power of futurity in rejecting colonial inheritances.

Writing

Meandering Gestures, Infiltrating Language

By Imaad Majeed

08.09.2022

Artist, curator and writer Imaad Majeed talks with Aotearoa artist Areez Katki about his participation in Language is Migrant, the latest edition of the international arts festival Colomboscope, in Sri Lanka, and about using embroidery and textiles to explore ideas of displacement, trajectories of violence, and the colonial legacy of his own Parsi heritage.

Writing

On Wet Ontologies, Fluid Hierarchies and Hope-Soaked Propositions at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney

By Emma O'Neill

26.08.2022

This year’s Biennale of Sydney, titled rīvus, included the work of Aotearoa-based artists Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi and Mata Aho Collective. Emma O’Neill, a writer working on Gadigal Land, responds to the exhibition and some of the work presented by the 89 participants invited to interact with different forms and bodies of water.

Writing

documenta fifteen or lumbung one?

By Bruce E. Phillips

12.08.2022

For documenta fifteen, the arts collective FAFSWAG were invited to participate as members of the lumbung process established by this year’s curatorial collective ruangrupa. In the absence of the trophy artist phenomenon so entrenched within mega-exhibitions, Bruce E. Phillips responds to the work of different participating collectives exhibiting in Kassel and discusses how introducing a non-European exhibition-making concept into the heart of arguably Europe’s most revered art event was bound to confound those unwilling to consider a differing perspective.

Writing

Chance and Impermanence

By Daria de Beauvais, Kate Newby

27.07.2022

Texas-based Aotearoa artist Kate Newby talks to Palais de Tokyo curator Daria de Beauvais about Reclaim the Earth, traversing the ecological questions at the heart of the exhibition, Newby's collaborative process of art making, and her new works commissioned for the exhibition. 

Writing

The Way Through Doors

By Andrew Berardini

22.06.2022

Andrew Berardini visits Fiona Connor’s solo exhibition at Château Shatto in LA, where the artist’s carefully rendered replicas of the doors of closed down clubs conjure up memories of forgotten youth. 

Writing

Purple Rain

By Clémentine Deliss

07.06.2022

Writer and curator Clémentine Deliss reviews Aotearoa artist Ruth Buchanan’s solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, an artwork as exhibition that reconfigures collecting history, curatorial practices and institutional norms.

Writing

An interview with Yuki Kihara

By Contemporary HUM

24.05.2022

In the opening week of the 2022 Biennale di Venezia, HUM sat down with the artist representing Aotearoa, Yuki Kihara, to discuss her exhibition Paradise Camp, and what it means to bring a Pasifika, Fa'afafine voice to the international audience of this major event.