Essays
Writing
Living Things
16.03.2024
In this short piece, originally put together as a HUMcard mailout for Contemporary HUM's Publishers Circle, Aotearoa-based artist Yukari Kaihori reflects on her two-week residency at Ma Umi Residencies on Ishigaki Island, Japan. The impacts of climate change and marine debris on the subtropical island offer the context for a meditation on the ecological entanglements between objects, animals, and places.
Writing
We Work Well Together
By Julia Craig
11.02.2024
Presented at Phillida Reid, Claudia Kogachi’s Labour of Love and Nova Paul’s Hawaiki offer frames through which to view the role of collaborative practice in building worlds of love, care, and self-determination.
Writing
Collective
By Emily Jan
20.11.2023
Upon visiting Treaty 8 territory for the exhibition Collective, by collaborative duo Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux, Alberta, Canada-based artist and writer Emily Jan considers how these photographic works function as a body which, like the trees they depict, carries stories; of human desires, needs, and actions of destruction or care.
Writing
What is held between bodies
By Clémentine Dubost
31.10.2023
After two years of development with his immediate family and numerous international residencies, Amit Noy premiered A Big Big Room Full of Everybody’s Hope in Paris this September, onstage alongside his mother, father, sister and grandmother. Clémentine Dubost spoke with Noy to explore the complexities of this work and his wider practice.
Writing
The Polyphonic Sea
By Emma O'Neill
10.10.2023
Presented at Bundanon Art Museum, deep in the territory of the Dharawal and Dhurga language groups, The Polyphonic Sea features new commissions and recontextualised work by Antonia Barnett McIntosh, Andrew Beck, Ruth Buchanan, The Estate of L. Budd, Sione Faletau, Samuel Holloway and et al., Sarah Hudson, Sonya Lacey, Nova Paul, Sriwhana Spong and Shannon Te Ao.
Writing
A River Runs Through It: Creative Currents Through Aotearoa and Japan with Grace Mirams
By Jennifer Pastore
22.09.2023
This summer Grace Mirams spent six weeks visiting studios and sharing her exhibition I’m at the river, I’ll meet you by the sea at Gallery Crossing in Minokamo, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. After speaking with Mirams in Tokyo and visiting the exhibition, writer Jennifer Pastore considers how Mirams’ practice and interests resonate with a region of Japan steeped in craft and exchange.
Writing
Dear Ella
By daniel ward
05.09.2023
In a letter to Aotearoa New Zealand artist Ella Sutherland, Berlin-based poet daniel ward reflects on the sensual role of printing technologies and the passage of queer narratives in Sutherland’s practice during her twelve-month residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.
Writing
Feeling, pressed
By Ash Kilmartin
18.08.2023
Zooming-in to personal memory and bodily encounter, Rotterdam-based artist Ash Kilmartin writes on the work of Alexis Hunter (1948–2014) in An Emergency Exit Sealed Shut at Kunstverein, Amsterdam.
Writing
Ngā Huarere o Te Moana Nui a Kiwa: Pacific Weathers
By Melody Nixon
01.08.2023
US- and Aotearoa-based writer Melody Nixon responds to digital artworks in Te Moana Nui a Kiwa; a weather station in the World Weather Network project featuring works by over twenty artists from Aotearoa and Oceania. One of twenty-eight stations in the project, the station featured online artworks by Kalisolaite ‘Uhila, Denise Batchelor and Maureen Lander, The Breath of Weather Collective, and a collaboration between Janine Randerson, Ron Bull, Rachel Shearer, Stefan Marks and glaciologist Heather Purdie. Nixon discusses how a selection of these works may reorient our approaches to the climate crisis.
Writing
Semantics of a City
By María Inés Plaza Lazo
26.06.2023
In May, publisher María Inés Plaza Lazo visited Ruth Buchanan’s A garden with bridges (spine, stomach, throat, ear), a walk-in sculpture and the result of a multi-part collaboration with the New Patrons that brings the synapses between all elements of Mönchengladbach, Germany, to new impulses.
Writing
On Measuring Distance: THE FIELD
By Helen Hughes
12.07.2023
Art historian Helen Hughes examines how THE FIELD—featuring work by Ming Ranginui, Shannon Te Ao and Shiraz Sadikeen, and curated by Tamsen Hopkinson at Gertrude Contemporary in Naarm Melbourne—inhabits the spaces between categories and haunts institutional memories through a unique curatorial approach.
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.