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.
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.
Writing
A Place You Didn’t Know That You Didn’t Know About
By Chloe Lane
06.12.2022
Chloe Lane speaks to Aotearoa artist Imogen Taylor on finishing their six-month residency at The International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City, discussing Taylor's newest body of work, what it's like to be a contemporary artist from Aotearoa in New York City, and what living with a ball python can teach you about fear.
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".
Maddie Leach, The fountain: An art-technological-social drama
01 January 2021 — 01 January 2025
Lund Technical University, Lund, Sweden
Writing
A Time of Uncertainties – Remodelling Reality
By Zsófia Danka
31.10.2022
Considering our altered experience of time in a moment marked by crisis, curator and art critic Zsófia Danka looks to Extended Present – Transitional Realities, a group exhibition at Budapest's Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art featuring Aotearoa New Zealand artist Dane Mitchell that explores notions of transience, the failure of modernity, and the possibility of change.
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.
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.
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.
Project
Forever Fresh Talanoa Series 2
Partnership
Following on from our 2021 talanoa series, this is a new round of edited online talanoa (conversations) between several tagata Moana (Māori and Pasifika people) across the globe, once again produced in collaboration with In*ter*is*land Collective.
Each talanoa in this series focuses on different topics central to life in the diaspora and is individually responded to in writing by Ioana Gordon-Smith, a Sāmoan/Pākehā arts writer and curator living in Aotearoa.
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 Mataaho 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.
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.
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
Clinic of Phantasms
By Jennifer Bornstein
12.07.2022
The writings of Aotearoa artist, writer and gallerist Giovanni Intra have been collected together for the first time in Clinic of Phantasms: Writings 1994–2002, spanning his career from K Road in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland through to Los Angeles. Artist Jennifer Bornstein reflects on Giovanni Intra’s life and work on the occasion of this new publication.
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, Contemporary 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.
An interview with the curators of 'Paradise Camp'
By Contemporary HUM, Ioana Gordon-Smith, Natalie King
24.05.2022
In the opening week of the 2022 Biennale di Venezia, Contemporary HUM sat down with the Aotearoa New Zealand pavilion’s Curator, Natalie King, and Assistant Pasifika Curator Ioana-Gordon Smith, to talk about bringing Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp to Venice.
In the opening week of the 2022 Biennale di Venezia, Contemporary HUM sat down with the Aotearoa New Zealand pavilion’s Curator, Natalie King, and Assistant Pasifika Curator Ioana-Gordon Smith, to talk about bringing Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp to Venice.
Writing
The Mind’s Eye
By Susanne Prinz
11.05.2022
On the occasion of Gill Gatfield’s first solo exhibition in Berlin, Susanne Prinz, Director of Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz in Berlin, Germany, reflects on the practice of the Aotearoa artist—from her use of ancient, salvaged materials to her work creating an audience-activated virtual reality experience, and the complex resonances of memory, reality and consciousness in her work.
Writing
HUM live from the 2022 Venice Biennale
By Contemporary HUM
24.04.2022
From 20—24 April 2022, Contemporary HUM brings you live coverage, exclusive images and videos from the opening week of The Milk of Dreams, The 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, including Yuki Kihara's Paradise Camp for the New Zealand Pavilion.
Writing
Betty Collings and 'To Begin, Again: A Prehistory of the Wex, 1968–89'
By Dan Munn
07.04.2022
Aotearoa artist and curator Betty Collings acted as Director of the Ohio State University’s Gallery of Fine Art from 1974 to 1980, amassing during that time a significant collection of then-contemporary artworks. With many of these works showcased at the recent exhibition To Begin, Again: A Prehistory of the Wex, 1968-89, Dan Munn looks back to Collings’ influence as a Director and her own, long-running artistic career.