Interviews

Writing

Crossing Currents: Episode 4

By Contemporary HUM

13.07.2024

Architect, artist and mother Elisapeta Hinemoa Heta speaks to Contemporary HUM about her presentation The Body of Wainuiātea, which is featured alongside work by Latai Taumoepeau in Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania, an exhibition curated by Taloi Havini at TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice. She discusses the influence of the Māori pūrākau (mythological tradition) of the atua (deity) Wainuiātea, the need to re-establish a sacred relationship to the ocean and the conversations that guided the creation of the work, including with Havini and Taumoepeau.

Writing

Crossing Currents: Episode 3

By Contemporary HUM

06.07.2024

Contemporary HUM interviews artist Caitlin Devoy about BODYOBJECTS, her presentation in the 2024 edition of Personal Structures in Venice. Speaking to HUM in April 2024, Devoy discusses using humour as a feminist strategy to challenge the power relations encoded in gallery spaces, resulting in works that refuse disembodied objectivity in favour of tactility, subjectivity and intuition.

Writing

Crossing Currents: Episode 2

By Contemporary HUM

29.06.2024

Contemporary HUM interviews Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) about Wastelands (2024), his work in Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Graham discusses Wastelands as a commentary on extractive attitudes to land, the logistics of exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and what it’s like to be included alongside an intergenerational selection of Māori artists, including his father, Fred Graham.

Writing

Crossing Currents: Episode 1

By Contemporary HUM

22.06.2024

Aotearoa New Zealand artist Areez Katki speaks to HUM about The Rhapsode’s Tools Will Build the Rhapsode’s House, his presentation in the 7th edition of Personal Structures. Katki discusses the processes and politics of exhibiting in Personal Structures and the two series he produced for the exhibition, which take migrant and queer positionalities as points from which to restore notions of pedagogy and learning from patriarchal, religious dictates to an affectual, instinctual realm of care.

Project

Crossing Currents: Aotearoa New Zealand Artists in Venice

Podcast series

Despite there being no national pavilion for Aotearoa New Zealand this year, the 60th Venice Biennale is an historic edition for Aotearoa artists. Not only are there an unprecedented number of artists from Aotearoa featured in Venice – both within the International Exhibition of the Biennale and in concurrent events taking place across the city – but it also features the most Māori artists to be included.

In Crossing Currents: Aotearoa New Zealand Artists in Venice, Contemporary HUM speaks with the artists featured in the 60th Venice Biennale and parallel events Personal Structures and Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania as they reflect on presenting in Venice during an historic year for Aotearoa art, Ngā toi Māori and Indigenous art globally.

Writing

HUM live from the 2024 Venice Biennale

16.04.2024

From 16–21 April 2024, Contemporary HUM will publish live coverage, exclusive images and videos from the opening week of Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere, The 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Click through for coverage of the Aotearoa New Zealand artists presenting work in the curated section of the Biennale, as well as in other events held off-site.

Writing

“To see us on our best day.”

By Dávvet Bruun-Solbaak

15.12.2023

Offering a glimpse at the wide range of emotions and encounters that Aotearoa-based artist Maungarongo Te Kawa and Northern Sámi activist Dávvet Bruun-Solbaak share in their multifaceted experiences at different edges of the globe, this conversation takes Te Kawa’s recent residency and touring exhibition in Norway and Sámi territories as a departure point.

Writing

A Film Glossary

By José B. Segebre

29.11.2023

After a conversation with Frankfurt-based, Waipukurau-born artist Juliet Carpenter, José B. Segebre shaped the ideas discussed into this experimental glossary. The entries highlight the ways in which Carpenter’s practice is informed by film and theatre history, and is deeply engaged in the friction of contemporary politics and technologies.

Writing

Mataaho Collective at the Dhaka Art Summit

By Pauline Autet

21.04.2020

We finish our first series focusing on the Asia region with Contemporary HUM Editor Pauline Autet interviewing Mataaho Collective on their participation in the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh in February 2020, where they partook in panel discussions and practised a type of waiata (song) called a pātere.

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.

Writing

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.

Writing

Caretaker to Caretaker

By Bopha Chhay, Paula Booker

18.01.2022

In Part One of this interview, Vancouver-based Aotearoa curators Paula Booker and Bopha Chhay talk about Chhay’s work as director of non-profit artist-run initiative Artspeak, the meaning of care in a curating role, the relationship between writing and art, and the place of artist-run initiatives in Canada and Aotearoa.

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

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

Always in Transit

By Aaron Lister

18.09.2019

A conversation with Yona Lee about her new site-specific installation, In Transit (Highway) (2019), presented at the 15th Lyon Biennale, her training as a cellist, and the development of this ongoing project. With an introduction from Daria de Beauvais, Senior Curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Co-Curator of this year's Biennale.

Writing

Screaming Strawbears and other Strange Engagements

By Tessa Laird

05.07.2019

From Morris dancing to costume making, Berlin-based artist Matthew Cowan and arts writer Tessa Laird discuss Cowan's interest in folklore, the function of tradition in the modern world and the influence of surrealism on his practice. Cowan's exhibition The Scream of the Strawbear opens at Kunsthalle Giessen in Germany on 7 September 2019.

Writing

An interview with Dane Mitchell

By Contemporary HUM

24.06.2019

Contemporary HUM's editorial team sat down with artist Dane Mitchell to discuss his work for the New Zealand Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, Post hoc. The work, both ambitious in scale and subject, has sparked discussions on global climate change and meditations on what has truly disappeared from the world. 

Writing

Feminist Hieroglyphics

By Louise Lever

25.06.2018

A conversation with London-based artist Sriwhana Spong about Spong's practice and in particular her recent video work A hook but no fish, 2017, originally presented at the Pump House Gallery in London, which speculates upon a secret language invented by a mystic 12th century abbess, Hildegard of Bingen.

Writing

An interview with Bruce Barber

By Contemporary HUM

22.09.2017

As part of Contemporary HUM's series of interviews with New Zealand artists exhibiting during the 57th Venice Biennale, we talk with Bruce Barber about his work Party without Party (2017), included in the exhibition Personal Structures: Open Borders at the Palazzo Bembo.

Writing

A New Commonwealth Internationalism

By Aaron Lister, Damian Skinner

01.03.2017

Writer and curator Aaron Lister talks to art historian Damien Skinner about the 'New Commonwealth Internationalism', a moment of post-WWII postcolonial internationalism in the British art scene, and its influence on British and New Zealand art history.

Writing

Caretaker to Caretaker

By Bopha Chhay, Paula Booker

18.01.2022

In Part Two of this interview, Vancouver-based Aotearoa curators Paula Booker and Bopha Chhay talk about Chhay’s work as director of non-profit artist-run initiative Artspeak, the challenges of maintaining a space during COVID-19, what decolonisation in art institutions can be like and working on unceded territory, and curating recent projects around the relationship between art and writing.

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

Treatise as Exhibition

By Amira Gad

10.08.2020

In Part Two of this two-part conversation, curator Amira Gad and artist Simon Denny discuss Mine, an exhibition at MONA in Australia for which Denny created a 3D model of a proposed worker’s cage for Amazon; Proof of Work, Denny's 2018 curatorial project at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin; as well as his participation in Vaudeville, a theatrical journalism experience organised by the Financial Times.

Writing

Treatise as Exhibition

By Amira Gad

20.07.2020

In the first piece of this two-part conversation, Aotearoa artist Simon Denny speaks about his recent projects, including his 2020 solo show at Altman Siegel in San Francisco which included former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's scarves and 'Tech-Bro' Patagonia vests, and about corresponding with Peter Thiel after he came to see Denny's show at Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland in 2017.

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

An interview with Dame Jenny Gibbs

By Pauline Autet

05.04.2019

As the commissioner of the New Zealand Pavilion in the years 2001, 2003 and 2019, Dame Jenny Gibbs has unparalleled knowledge on the history of New Zealand at the Venice Biennale. HUM's Editor Pauline Autet, speaks with Gibbs about the forthcoming biennale and about Dane Mitchell's project for the prestigious international exhibition.

Writing

999, Alchemist Trauma Centre / Power Centre

By Jorge De Hoyos

11.07.2018

Berlin-based Jorge de Hoyos first experienced Alexa Wilson's current project 999: Alchemist Trauma Centre / Power Centre when both artists were auditioning for a Masters in Solo Dance Authorship in Berlin. In this part-essay, part-interview, they discuss the work, which is due to be performed in London, Berlin, India and NZ later this year, and exchange their views on feminism and challenging binary perceptions. 

Writing

An interview with Martin Basher

By André Hemer

16.03.2018

A conversation between two offshore New Zealand artists: Vienna-based André Hemer and New York-based Martin Basher. Their chat touches on producing art in Trump-era US, display-based practice, Basher’s doctorate, and living in NYC as a New Zealander.

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

An interview with Lisa Reihana

By Contemporary HUM

22.09.2017

As part of Contemporary HUM’s series of interviews with New Zealand artists exhibiting during the 57th Venice Biennale, we talk to Lisa Reihana, New Zealand's representative at the Biennale about her experience in Venice.