Essays
Writing
Preparing the Ground
By Chloe Barker
22.04.2017
Arts Programme Coordinator at Tyneside Cinema Chloe Barker reflects on New Zealand artist Cat Auburn's new moving image work Preparing the Ground (2017) and first solo exhibition in the UK, at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Writing
Singing with the Bees
By Pauline Autet
08.12.2016
HUM's Editor Pauline Autet reviews Anne Noble's exhibition Abeille, presented at the Abbaye de Noirlac in France from June to November 2016.
Writing
We See the Same Stars
By Gabriela Salgado, Sabine Casparie
16.11.2021
In this interview with Gabriela Salgado, former Artistic Director of Te Tuhi, Sabine Casparie sits down with the curator to discuss her new London-based project, Southern Stars, a platform connecting artists from the southern hemisphere. Casparie and Salgado discuss how the European art world is responding to new, Indigenous voices, and Southern Stars’ first exhibition, Golden Daughters of the Sun, featuring Aotearoa artist Salome Tanuvasa.
Writing
Charting the Constellations of the Oceans, Rivers, and Islands
By Julie Nagam
09.07.2021
As the inaugural Artistic Director for Nuit Blanche Toronto (2020 and 2022), Dr Julie Nagam is interested in forging new relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, in Turtle Island (North America) and internationally, and in the use of digital and new media to express shared experiences of colonialism. Here, Nagam introduces several recent projects undertaken in collaboration with artists and curators from Aotearoa and the new global partnership The Space Between Us, emerging from these cross-cultural exchanges.
Writing
Movements of Outsiders
By Alexa Wilson
10.02.2021
Together with three of her contemporaries, interdisciplinary artist Alexa Wilson considers dance and performance art in the time of Covid - how does a medium that relies so much on physical presence, collaboration, audience and space respond to global lockdowns and a forced shift online?
Writing
Music from the End of the World
By Sharmini Aphrodite
28.01.2021
In September 2019, Joseph Michael's installation Voices for the Future lit up the United Nations, General Assembly and Secretariat buildings in New York ahead of the UN’s Climate Action Summit and global school strikes. Sharmini Aphrodite talks to the artist about his process of recording the icebergs featured in the artwork and reflects on the dissolution of the spatial and aural boundaries between Antarctica, New Zealand and New York.
Writing
Looking for Home
By Jungah Lee
13.01.2021
A look at Yona Lee's site-specific work En Route Home at the 2020 Busan Biennale, its references to migration, the concept of 'home', and our new and developing relationships towards stability and roots in the era of globalisation.
Writing
Social Imagination
By Lance Pearce
20.11.2020
Xin Cheng's Seeing Like a Forest, made during her study at HFBK - University Of Fine Arts Hamburg from 2017-2019, focuses on issues such as sustainability, communities, and resourcefulness. Artist and writer Lance Pearce discusses these themes and their relevance to a world in the midst of a pandemic.
Writing
Everything Stops for the Baby
By Chloe Lane, Peter Gouge
23.09.2020
In this correspondence, writer Chloe Lane and artist Peter Gouge discuss the origins of Gouge’s MFA final exhibition at the University of Florida, the functionality of objects, the intersection of parenthood and practice, and the upcoming exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery in Auckland where the documentation of Gouge's project will be displayed.
Writing
Odysseus escapes the cyclops
By Zoe Crook
10.06.2020
A review of Invisible: a collaborative exhibition between the Detroit Cranbrook Academy of Art, Wellington’s Massey University and the Wrocław Academy of Art and Design. Held at BWA Gallery in Wrocław, Poland, in February 2020, the second iteration of Invisible includes New Zealand artists Kerry Ann-Lee, Simon Eastwood and Lisa Munnelly, Lee Jensen, Angela Kilford, and Jason O’Hara.
Writing
Resistance through Koloa
By Ysabelle Cheung
06.04.2020
The second publication from our special series focusing on the Asia region, looks to Hong Kong gallery Para Site, and its exhibition Koloa: Women, Art, and Technology. The exhibition centres on koloa, or customary women’s arts in Tonga, and features three artists from New Zealand: Tanya Edwards, Nikau Hindin, and Vaimaila Urale.
Writing
Moana, Unimagined
By Millie Riddell
08.01.2020
The 16th Istanbul Biennial, titled The Seventh Continent, had a thematic focus on the large garbage patch currently occupying 3.4 million square kilometres of ocean, near Hawaii and Japan. Despite focusing on this area, Pacific artists were not present at the Biennial. Writer Millie Riddell explores the omission of Pacific artists, and what it means to not address or include the people most affected by environmental pollution and climate change.
Writing
What's for - Decolonial - Dinner?
By Tania Willard
18.12.2019
Co-curated by Lana Lopesi, the exhibition Transits and Returns at Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada presents the work of 21 Indigenous artists from Northern America and the Pacific, and includes Aotearoa artists BC Collective, Louisa Afoa, Ahilapalapa Rands, and Edith Amituanai. In this essay, Indigenous Canadian artist and curator Tania Willard contextualises the work within a wider art history and personal history.
Writing
A Question of Identity
By Grace Lai
08.11.2019
New Zealand jeweller Johanna Zellmer's practice focuses on national identity and the varying bureaucracy that can divide us. In this essay, Curator Grace Lai looks specifically at Zellmer's recent three-month residency in Gothenburg, Sweden, and her exhibition of crafted and altered coins which acted as a vehicle to comment on the current political climate.
Writing
The Factory and its Memories
By Kari Schmidt
16.10.2019
A look at artist Matthew Galloway's residency at Cripta 747 in Turin, Italy, and the resulting exhibition The Factory and its Memories, which concentrates on the now defunct Nebiolo factory building, whose history is engrained in Italian graphic design and typography, reflecting Galloway’s own background as a graphic designer.
Writing
On Emptiness
By Rosa Gubay
02.10.2019
Oliver Perkins and Patrick Lundberg’s recent show On Emptiness at FOLD Gallery in London presented a conversation between the two artists' work, focusing on their object-centric painting practice. Writer Rosa Gubay analyses their use of negative space and the varying forms it can take.
Writing
Something Different
By Laura Preston
05.09.2019
A look at a series of exhibitions by women artists held at Secession in Vienna, including by New Zealand artist Fiona Connor, who has been based in Los Angeles since 2011. Connor's show, #8, Closed for Installation, Sequence of Events, presented cast bronze pieces alongside architectural interruptions, and was shown in conjunction with German artist Nora Schultz and Palestinian-English artist Rosalind Nashashibi.
Writing
Sriwhana Spong’s Ida-Ida
By Leah Reynolds
09.08.2019
London-based artist Sriwhana Spong has been exhibiting widely throughout the UK in 2019. In this essay, writer Leah Reynolds reviews Spong’s recent exhibition Ida-Ida at Spike Island in Bristol, considering the key, interrelating ideas of her work, and Spong’s use of a variety of mediums.
Writing
An abundance of loss
By Zara Stanhope
12.05.2019
As part of HUM’s coverage of La Biennale di Venezia, we’ve invited Zara Stanhope, Lead Curator of the New Zealand Pavilion, to analyse Dane Mitchell’s work Post hoc and its lists of bygone things, as well as the artist's other major works exhibited at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Auckland Art Gallery and Raebervonstenglin, Zurich.
Writing
Design solves problems and art creates problems
By Eleanor Woodhouse
23.04.2019
A closer look at Biljana Popovic's 12-month Visual Arts Residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, and how her previous work as a commercial designer informs her current visual arts practice by integrating elements of interior design and architecture.
Writing
Test Run
By Jennifer Thatcher
13.12.2018
We hear from three artists who, over the last three years, have completed, or are completing, a three-month residency at London art centre Gasworks. Sriwhana Spong in 2016, Katrina Beekhuis in 2017, and Hikalu Clarke, who is half-way through his, all share their experiences and thoughts on this important opportunity.
Writing
Hotel Jaguar
By David Lillington
11.10.2018
HUM commissioned David Lillington to review Amanda Newall's recent project at Exposed Arts Projects in London, which occupies an old Jaguar car dealership. Newall's site-specific response, called Hotel Jaguar, encompasses an eclectic range of works and collaborations with other artists, on topics ranging from Jaguar and Brexit; Trump and witches; social dreaming and murders.
Writing
Dane Mitchell: An Aesthetic Contagion
By Marie de Brugerolle
06.09.2018
Dane Mitchell's exhibition OTIUM #3 at the Institut d'art contemporain - Villeurbanne in France, was an invitation to produce and exhibit works related to the dimensions of time and space, as part of an ongoing prospective series of exhibitions linked to 'métaphysiques cosmomorphes', a term taken from Pierre Montebello's philosophical research. French art historian and curator Marie de Brugerolle explores Mitchell's work within this context and his wider practice.
Writing
Kate Newby: I can’t nail the days down
By Chloe Geoghegan
14.08.2018
I can't nail the days down is Brooklyn-based Kate Newby's first Austrian solo exhibition, presented at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna in 2018. Based both inside and outside of the Kunsthalle, the work invited visitors to take a closer look at Newby's engagements with the context of exhibition.
Writing
The Symbolic and Actual Order of Things
By Carter Imrie-Milne
25.05.2018
Auckland-born Zac Langdon-Pole's recent accolades include the Charlotte Prinz Scholarship in Darmstadt, Germany, being shortlisted for the BMW Art Journey Prize, and being one of the prestigious ARS VIVA prize recipients. Carter Imrie-Milne explores the artist's most recent series of objects and experiences featured in his presentation of the ARS VIVA at S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium.
Writing
Valuing the Handmade
By Kim Paton
09.05.2018
Munich Jewellery Week is one of the oldest and most prestigious contemporary jewellery exhibitions in the world; this year, Renee Pearson became the first New Zealander to win the Talente Prize at the fair. Objectspace's Director Kim Paton walks us through the exhibition and explores Pearson's win within the landscape of funding cuts and dwindling education opportunities for makers in New Zealand.
Writing
Ka Mua, Ka Muri
By Louise Garrett
28.02.2018
Nathan Pohio’s Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun! was one of three projects by artists from Aotearoa New Zealand presented at documenta 14. Louise Garrett explores Pohio’s presentation in Kassel and invites the artist himself to reflect on his participation and to discuss the work he presented in Athens, documenta’s parallel location in 2017.
Writing
Judy Millar: The Sinew of Space
By Jodie Dalgleish
12.02.2018
Jodie Dalgleish considers Judy Millar's exhibition Swallowed in Space at Galerie Mark Müller in Zurich (2017), reflecting on the way Millar's affective paintings can activate space to create a 'bodily-felt' experience and extensively draws on a dialogue between the writer and the artist evaluating 'what painting does to us'.
Writing
A Man for all Seasons
By Anna Cahill
16.02.2017
Writer Anna Cahill looks at the life and work of New Zealand painter Douglas MacDiarmid, from his early life in Taihape and Christchurch to his life as an expatriate painter in Paris, where he has been living permanently since 1951.
Writing
Reporting from the Front Desk
By Chris Winwood
08.12.2016
Paris-based architect Chris Winwood considers Future Islands, the New Zealand contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016.