Essays

Writing

Off Season by Richard Frater

By Henry Babbage

29.05.2023

Off Season by Richard Frater at the Kunstverein München sparked reflections, for writer Henry Babbage, on our asymmetrical relations with the avian life that shares our cities. 

Writing

The Octopus Against a Sharp White Background

By Amit Noy

14.05.2023

Writer and choreographer Amit Noy reviews Atamira Dance Company’s performance of Te Wheke in the Lenape territory of New York City, and finds a work enlivened by indelible performances and critical Indigenous inquiry.

Writing

Thinking Historically in the Present

By Megan Tamati-Quennell

17.04.2023

Having attended the opening week of Sharjah Biennial 15, Megan Tamati-Quennell writes about the work of Aotearoa artists Robyn Kahukiwa and Kahurangiariki Smith, included in this large-scale exhibition in the United Arab Emirates, and how Hoor Al Qasimi has carried the curatorial mantle from Okwui Enwezor to create an exhibition that both celebrates the late curator’s legacy and the diversity, solidarity and strength of non-Western art.

Writing

Rocks on Wheels and Flying Shoes

By Rosemary Forde

28.03.2023

Curator Rosemary Forde explores the art-historical and civic context in which artist Mike Hewson’s recent public playground in Naarm Melbourne, Rocks on Wheels, has landed. 

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

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". 

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Writing

Reimagined Futures

By Johanna Bear

23.03.2022

Featuring work from Aotearoa artists Edith Amituanai, Brian Fuata, Christina Pataialii, Shannon Novak and Shannon Te Ao as well as collaborators from Aotearoa in the project Kā Paroro o Haumumu: Coastal Flows / Coastal Incursions, this piece from writer and curator Johanna Bear considers the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial’s celebration of Indigenous futures, collaborative and community-based practices, and new ways of understanding the world around us. 

Writing

Naahdohbii: To Draw Water & What It Means To Come Together

By Franchesca Hebert-Spence

10.03.2022

Featuring Aotearoa artists Israel Birch, Nikau Hindin, Jeremy Leatinu’u, Nova Paul, Rachel Rakena and Keri Whaitiri, the inaugural Indigenous Triennial at the Winnipeg Art Gallery/Qaumajuq (WAG/Q) in Winnipeg, Naadohbii: To Draw Water, presents a collaborative curatorial approach to Indigenous artists’ work—Franchesca Hebert-Spence visits the exhibition and talks to the curators about the curatorial process, the opportunities offered through cross-cultural exchange, and the adherence to the specificities of place and history fostered through the exhibition.

Writing

Settling troubled waters with Emma McIntyre

By Megan Macnaughton

23.02.2022

A new series of works by LA-based Aotearoa painter Emma McIntyre form the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe, Up bubbles her amorous breath—a feminised reimagining of mythological landscapes and our relationship to them. Writer Megan Macnaughton visits the exhibition and talks with McIntyre about her developing process of painting, using her whole body, to create vividly imagined abstract works. 

Writing

A painter’s painter

By Clare Gemima

07.02.2022

Aotearoa artist Christina Pataialii features in the fifth New Museum Triennial, one of the world’s leading exhibitions for emerging artists. New York-based writer Clare Gemima visits the exhibition and reflects on Pataialii’s rule-breaking approach to painting technique, and the artist’s search for a language for her family history, identity and the cultural “in-between”.

Writing

“Don’t Learn Anything More!”

By Connie Brown

26.10.2021

Writer Connie Brown pays a visit to Virginia Leonard’s studio, encountering the artist’s “fugly” ceramics and talking with her about recent and upcoming international exhibitions, her process into ceramic-making and the resistance her work offers to traditional notions of wellness, pain and the body. 

Writing

Vivian Lynn / Liliane Lijn

By Laura Castagnini

07.10.2021

Following her death in 2018, pioneering feminist artist Vivian Lynn is receiving unprecedented international attention, after a lifetime of exhibiting widely in Aotearoa, but never outside of New Zealand. Following her recent inclusion in the 13th Gwangju Biennale and a solo exhibition at Southard Reid, London, Laura Castagnini reflects on the long-overdue revival of feminist art practices from the 1980s, and considers the striking parallels between Lynn’s work and her London-based counterpart, Liliane Lijn. 

Writing

They Call Me The Believer

By Habib William Kherbek

21.09.2021

Michael Stevenson’s retrospective at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, traces a 35 year practice exploring the intricacies of storytelling and truth in popular culture, media and technology. In this piece, Habib William Kherbek explores how Stevenson’s practice calls into question the infrastructures of knowledge formation in a sprawling, fragmented exhibition from inside the belly of a whale. 

Writing

Talk, Protest, Revolt

By Frances Loeffler

06.08.2021

In the 2021 documentary Revolt She Said, filmmaker Louise Lever traces the histories and critical concerns of feminist movements in Aotearoa. Frances Loeffler reflects on the complex questions raised by the film and the impact of recent feminist movements in the art world. 

Writing

Plant Data

By Alice Bonnot

22.07.2021

Porto-based New Zealand artist Yota Ayaan investigates the possibilities of human-plant communication in Plant Data, an exhibition at the Galeria da Biodiversidade, Centro Ciência Viva, in Porto’s Botanical garden. After visiting the show, writer and curator Alice Bonnot discusses here the urgent lessons that can be gleaned from it in the current climate crisis.

Writing

Some Kind of Travelogue

By Esther Lu

18.06.2021

Aotearoa-based artist Sorawit Songsataya’s practice explores the many tangents that connect and redefine our understandings of subjectivity and ecology. Songsataya was invited to participate in the group show, The Turn of the Fifth Age, at Selasar Sunaryo Art Space in Bandung, Indonesia, earlier this year, where they exhibited their work Jupiter. Here, co-curator Esther Lu responds to that work.

Writing

A protest and a mourning ritual

By Michelangelo Corsaro

11.05.2021

In their work for the 13th Gwangju Biennale, the Bad Fiji Gyals call attention to the legacy of Girmitiya women, indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent recruited by British colonial authorities to work on Fiji’s sugarcane plantations. Associate Curator Michelangelo Corsaro writes about the collaborative work of Aotearoa-based artist Quishile Charan and US-based artist Esha Pillay.

Writing

Ann Shelton’s Strange Flowers Set the Stage

By Katie White

14.04.2021

Inspired by ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, Ann Shelton's photographs subtly recall both ancient and contemporary female archetypes and the subversive histories of natural medicine - a sharp reminder of our forgotten affinities with nature in the current moment of climate crisis and the ongoing politicisation of female bodies.

Writing

An interview with Joel Kirkham

By Catherine Dale

22.10.2020

Based in Japan for the past ten years, Joel Kirkham founded Goya Curtain in Tokyo with fellow artist Bjorn Houtman in 2016, and has since been running the gallery. Together with Catherine Dale, he discusses the project space, the exhibitions it has hosted since opening, including Anoushka Akel's recent show (RED LEGS) HOT HEAD, and the future direction for Goya Curtain.

Writing

Time and Water

By Maya Wilson-Sanchez

03.09.2020

Presented earlier this year at Oakville Galleries in Canada, Shannon Te Ao's two-channel video and sound installation Ka mua, ka muri recently opened at Remai Modern, Saskatoon. In this part essay, part dialogue, writer Maya Wilson-Sanchez examines Te Ao's new project, and meditates on the relationships between indigenous populations in colonised nations.