Calendar
Calendar
The HUM calendar features exhibitions & events by New Zealand arts practitioners working or living abroad.
Te Tangi a te Tūī (The Song of the Tui)
The Cultch, Vancouver, Canada
19 October —
29 October 2023
Te Rēhia Theatre Company and The Dust Palace present the world premiere of Te Tangi a te Tūī (The Song of the Tui), a Māori cirque theatre epic about adaptation and authenticity. The Tūī (Indigenous songbird) soaks up the world around it and responds in song. Though beautiful, his tune is a faint echo from when Aotearoa was blanketed in the ngāhere (forest), flutes of Patupairehe (fairy folk) filled the trees, and Māori alone walked gently upon their mother. The fading of the Tūī’s song parallels the forces of loss and regeneration of te reo Māori. This show combines Kaupapa Māori (a Māori way) and cirque theatre to create an evocative narrative of love and loss between Māori, Patupairehe, and the natural world facing colonial impact.
Written by Amber Curreen and Tainui Tukiwaho, the project includes Geoff Gilson, Eve Gordon, Jane Hakaraia, Andrew Gibson, David Atai, Crescendo, Rachael Dubois, Edward Peni, Ellyce Bisson, Te Rongopai Cureen-Tukiwaho, Joe Dekkers-Reihana, Paku Fernandez, Freddy Matariki Carr, Luis Mierelles and Mia van Oyen.
Te Rēhia Theatre Company and The Dust Palace present the world premiere of Te Tangi a te Tūī (The Song of the Tui), a Māori cirque theatre epic about adaptation and authenticity. The Tūī (Indigenous songbird) soaks up the world around it and responds in song. Though beautiful, his tune is a faint echo from when Aotearoa was blanketed in the ngāhere (forest), flutes of Patupairehe (fairy folk) filled the trees, and Māori alone walked gently upon their mother. The fading of the Tūī’s song parallels the forces of loss and regeneration of te reo Māori. This show combines Kaupapa Māori (a Māori way) and cirque theatre to create an evocative narrative of love and loss between Māori, Patupairehe, and the natural world facing colonial impact.
Written by Amber Curreen and Tainui Tukiwaho, the project includes Geoff Gilson, Eve Gordon, Jane Hakaraia, Andrew Gibson, David Atai, Crescendo, Rachael Dubois, Edward Peni, Ellyce Bisson, Te Rongopai Cureen-Tukiwaho, Joe Dekkers-Reihana, Paku Fernandez, Freddy Matariki Carr, Luis Mierelles and Mia van Oyen.
Areez Katki, Vanishing Act
Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver, Canada
18 June —
08 July 2022
Vanishing Act, the 15th edition of the Queer Arts Festival, is curated by Adwait Singh and takes place at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Featuring nearly 20 artists from around the world, including Aotearoa artist Areez Katki, the exhibition is a survey of queer artistic practices from the Global South – South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas.
Singh’s curation asks viewers to “behold the hulking vessel of modernity, where the only hope for a future is a ghostly one, the only inheritance a poisoned gift"; to face our own Frankensteins, in a manner that queers have long been wont, haunted as we are by spectral toxicities.
Vanishing Act, the 15th edition of the Queer Arts Festival, is curated by Adwait Singh and takes place at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Featuring nearly 20 artists from around the world, including Aotearoa artist Areez Katki, the exhibition is a survey of queer artistic practices from the Global South – South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and their diasporas.
Singh’s curation asks viewers to “behold the hulking vessel of modernity, where the only hope for a future is a ghostly one, the only inheritance a poisoned gift"; to face our own Frankensteins, in a manner that queers have long been wont, haunted as we are by spectral toxicities.
Sriwhana Spong, The Poem is a Temple
Western Front Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
11 September —
27 November 2021
Western Front is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Sriwhana Spong, a multidisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, living in London. The exhibition brings together two works: a sculpture that is part of an ongoing series of instruments based on the Balinese gamelan, and a single-channel film shot in and around the artist’s ancestral home in Bali, Indonesia.
The painter-tailor (2019) constructs a family portrait from 16mm film and HD video footage collected by the artist, her relatives, and the family dog. The hook to which the film repeatedly returns is an untitled painting by Spong’s grandfather, the Sanur artist I Gusti Made Rundu (1918–1993). This painting, the intimate surroundings of the family compound, and her father’s memories weave a net in which fragments relating to the effects of colonization, invasion, and tourism on image-making in Bali gather. Presented alongside the film is Instrument H (Monster Chicken) (2021), a sculpture made from approximately 50 bronze casts of chicken bones and twigs collected on Spong’s daily walk between her house and studio in London during lockdown, which passes two 24-hour fried chicken shops. The work, with its bones sucked clean and discarded by humans and foxes, charts a strange intimacy between city dwellers, while reflecting on human-animal interactions and their ecological impact and evoking the ancient cultural practice of osteomancy, a form of divination performed by throwing bones. Each day at 2:30 p.m., the sculpture will be activated as an instrument, and moved through the space and surrounding neighbourhood before being placed in a new arrangement for possible future-telling.
Western Front is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Sriwhana Spong, a multidisciplinary artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, living in London. The exhibition brings together two works: a sculpture that is part of an ongoing series of instruments based on the Balinese gamelan, and a single-channel film shot in and around the artist’s ancestral home in Bali, Indonesia.
The painter-tailor (2019) constructs a family portrait from 16mm film and HD video footage collected by the artist, her relatives, and the family dog. The hook to which the film repeatedly returns is an untitled painting by Spong’s grandfather, the Sanur artist I Gusti Made Rundu (1918–1993). This painting, the intimate surroundings of the family compound, and her father’s memories weave a net in which fragments relating to the effects of colonization, invasion, and tourism on image-making in Bali gather. Presented alongside the film is Instrument H (Monster Chicken) (2021), a sculpture made from approximately 50 bronze casts of chicken bones and twigs collected on Spong’s daily walk between her house and studio in London during lockdown, which passes two 24-hour fried chicken shops. The work, with its bones sucked clean and discarded by humans and foxes, charts a strange intimacy between city dwellers, while reflecting on human-animal interactions and their ecological impact and evoking the ancient cultural practice of osteomancy, a form of divination performed by throwing bones. Each day at 2:30 p.m., the sculpture will be activated as an instrument, and moved through the space and surrounding neighbourhood before being placed in a new arrangement for possible future-telling.
Maddie Leach: Lowering Simon Fraser
Off-site at New Westminster Quay and Queensborough Bridge billboard, Vancouver, Canada
29 September —
04 October 2019
Lowering Simon Fraser culminates Maddie Leach’s Burrard Marina Field House residency and research project focusing on the Simon Fraser Monument currently sited on the riverside boardwalk of the Quay in New Westminster, British Columbia. The monument commemorates the controversial early nineteenth century fur trader and explorer credited with charting much of what is now understood as British Columbia. In 1808, with the aid of many Indigenous communities, he explored the river that now bears his name, long a transportation and exchange route and source of food for Coast Salish Nations near the mouth of the Fraser; the Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan, Secwepemc, St’át’imc and Tsilhqot’in in the central Fraser; and the Dakelh, Sekani and Wet’suwet’en in the regions around its northernmost origins.
Lowering Simon Fraser culminates Maddie Leach’s Burrard Marina Field House residency and research project focusing on the Simon Fraser Monument currently sited on the riverside boardwalk of the Quay in New Westminster, British Columbia. The monument commemorates the controversial early nineteenth century fur trader and explorer credited with charting much of what is now understood as British Columbia. In 1808, with the aid of many Indigenous communities, he explored the river that now bears his name, long a transportation and exchange route and source of food for Coast Salish Nations near the mouth of the Fraser; the Nlaka’pamux, Okanagan, Secwepemc, St’át’imc and Tsilhqot’in in the central Fraser; and the Dakelh, Sekani and Wet’suwet’en in the regions around its northernmost origins.
Transits and Returns at Vancouver Art Gallery
Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada
28 September 2019 —
23 February 2020
Transits and Returns presents the work of 21 Indigenous artists whose practices are both rooted in the specificities of their cultures and routed via their travels. These forces of situatedness and mobility work in synergy and in tension with one another, shaping the multiple ways of understanding and being Indigenous today. Within the exhibition, these dual realities are explored through themes of movement, territory, kinship and representation, with many artworks inhabiting multiple categories. It is curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, with Sarah Biscara Dilley, Freja Carmichael, Léuli Eshraghi and Lana Lopesi.
Featuring artists from local First Nations, as well as those from communities located throughout the Pacific region (ranging from Alutiiq territory in the north to Māori lands in the south, with many mainland and island Nations in between), Transits and Returns traces wide-ranging experiences that are inclusive of both ancestral knowledges and global connections. Participating artists include Edith Amituanai, BC Collective with Louisa Afoa, Carol McGregor, Ahilapalapa Rands amongst many others.
Transits and Returns presents the work of 21 Indigenous artists whose practices are both rooted in the specificities of their cultures and routed via their travels. These forces of situatedness and mobility work in synergy and in tension with one another, shaping the multiple ways of understanding and being Indigenous today. Within the exhibition, these dual realities are explored through themes of movement, territory, kinship and representation, with many artworks inhabiting multiple categories. It is curated by Tarah Hogue, Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, with Sarah Biscara Dilley, Freja Carmichael, Léuli Eshraghi and Lana Lopesi.
Featuring artists from local First Nations, as well as those from communities located throughout the Pacific region (ranging from Alutiiq territory in the north to Māori lands in the south, with many mainland and island Nations in between), Transits and Returns traces wide-ranging experiences that are inclusive of both ancestral knowledges and global connections. Participating artists include Edith Amituanai, BC Collective with Louisa Afoa, Carol McGregor, Ahilapalapa Rands amongst many others.
Ruth Buchanan: Dead Marble
Artspeak, Vancouver, Canada.
09 June —
28 July 2018
In 1958, weaver Ilse von Randow was commissioned to produce a major work of woven curtains for the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in New Zealand. Her ‘Auckland Art Gallery Curtains’ became the largest piece of hand weaving created in New Zealand. In her first presentation of work in North America, Ruth Buchanan’s exhibition ‘Dead Marble’ revisits von Randow’s curtain, and the newly designed Auckland Art Gallery sculpture court (1953) in which they were hung, as a departure point to reconfigure the complex relationships between gendered representations, institutional hierarchies and the burden of inherited legacies.
‘Dead Marble’ is an installation that stages a series of performative provocations drawing attention to the ways in which both people and architecture determine the experience of the institution. Through an audio guide, several characters—all of whom have a distinct relationship to the sculpture court—will “inhabit” the space. Each week for the duration of the exhibition, the tone of the installation will shift through the scripted audio presence of one of the seven characters: the Visitor; the Weaver; the Plinth; the Cleaner; the Director; the Piano; and the Architect. ‘Dead Marble’ takes shape through the subjectivities of these characters, who essentially become custodians of the space of Artspeak as they set up the embodied conditions through which we experience and encounter the works within the installation.
In 1958, weaver Ilse von Randow was commissioned to produce a major work of woven curtains for the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki in New Zealand. Her ‘Auckland Art Gallery Curtains’ became the largest piece of hand weaving created in New Zealand. In her first presentation of work in North America, Ruth Buchanan’s exhibition ‘Dead Marble’ revisits von Randow’s curtain, and the newly designed Auckland Art Gallery sculpture court (1953) in which they were hung, as a departure point to reconfigure the complex relationships between gendered representations, institutional hierarchies and the burden of inherited legacies.
‘Dead Marble’ is an installation that stages a series of performative provocations drawing attention to the ways in which both people and architecture determine the experience of the institution. Through an audio guide, several characters—all of whom have a distinct relationship to the sculpture court—will “inhabit” the space. Each week for the duration of the exhibition, the tone of the installation will shift through the scripted audio presence of one of the seven characters: the Visitor; the Weaver; the Plinth; the Cleaner; the Director; the Piano; and the Architect. ‘Dead Marble’ takes shape through the subjectivities of these characters, who essentially become custodians of the space of Artspeak as they set up the embodied conditions through which we experience and encounter the works within the installation.
Bridget Reweti and Shannon Te Ao at Or Gallery
Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada.
12 May —
02 June 2018
Being in Place brings together four artists from territories an ocean apart who tell stories about place. Installations by Māori artists Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tuwharetoa) and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) unravel colonial histories and express guardianship using performance and experimental moving image. The works of these artists from across the Pacific, from Aotearoa New Zealand, will be seen through and alongside the local voices, images and narratives of xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) artist Debra Sparrow and Vancouver-born Métis/Cree/German filmmaker, Kamala Todd. What is generated by bringing together the work of artists from two distinct places and putting them in dialogue? How do we relate to land and place as both a host and a guest? Stories contain – and storytelling expresses – Indigenous knowledge. These stories are not simply representative of, but constitutive of relationships between peoples and places. As such, they express Indigenous ways of being and offer powerful commentary for considering a variety of relationships to our environment. The exhibition is curated by New Zealand curator Paula Booker.
Being in Place brings together four artists from territories an ocean apart who tell stories about place. Installations by Māori artists Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tuwharetoa) and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) unravel colonial histories and express guardianship using performance and experimental moving image. The works of these artists from across the Pacific, from Aotearoa New Zealand, will be seen through and alongside the local voices, images and narratives of xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) artist Debra Sparrow and Vancouver-born Métis/Cree/German filmmaker, Kamala Todd. What is generated by bringing together the work of artists from two distinct places and putting them in dialogue? How do we relate to land and place as both a host and a guest? Stories contain – and storytelling expresses – Indigenous knowledge. These stories are not simply representative of, but constitutive of relationships between peoples and places. As such, they express Indigenous ways of being and offer powerful commentary for considering a variety of relationships to our environment. The exhibition is curated by New Zealand curator Paula Booker.