Past Exhibitions - 2018
Eduardo Abaroa
Fields and Notions
4 - 19 Oct 2018
Fields and Notions is a solo exhibition of current Te Whare Hēra artist in residence, Eduardo Abaroa.
Abaroa’s work has engaged a myriad of artistic processes and topics that correspond to the ever-changing context of his home country. In Fields and Notions Abaroa excavates his personal archive of video works, dating back to the early nineties when he was an art student. Abaroa brings these works into dialogue with new videos, drawings and objects he has collected and made during his time in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The selection of works in Fields and Notions is connected by Abaroa’s investigation of the roles played by contemporary and public art: precarious narratives are transcribed to provoke thoughts and emotions beyond the artist’s intentions. Abaroa says “art is not practiced here as a place of propaganda or enlightenment, but rather as a misstep which forces us, under the proper conditions, to move in a previously unexpected direction.”
For more information on Eduardo Abaroa, see http://tewharehera.ac.nz/
Asian Aotearoa Arts Hui
@ The Engine Room
17 - 21 Sept 2018
The Asian Aotearoa Arts (AAA) @ The Engine Room presents work from emerging artists and designers alongside established researchers and educators from the College of Creative Arts at Massey University Wellington.
Curated by Yueyun Song and Georgiana Morison
This exhibition showcases student projects from the Bachelors of Design, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Masters of Design and Masters of Fine Arts programmes working across various media including sound, video, installation, illustration, fashion and textiles. The opening on 17th Sept 5:30-7:30 will include a performance by Yuri Zhigang Zeng. Associated with this exhibition is the masterclass Shaping Ink with Design Lecturer Yueyun Song and special guest artist Stan Chan.
The Asian Aotearoa Arts Huì aims to support Asian New Zealand arts practitioners through presenting practice, sharing ideas and networking. The Huì aims to make visible settlement histories in Aotearoa and the creative cross-cultural conversations generating from our relationships with Māori, Pasifika, Pākeha, other migrant communities and with each other. This is a result of five years of sustained creative conversations and collaboration since the inaugural Chinese New Zealand Artists Hui at Corbans Estate, Auckland (2013) and the first Asian New Zealand Artists Hui at Te Tuhi in Auckland (2017).
AAAH2018 will be taking place this year from 3 – 23 September in Wellington, Aotearoa and will be hosted by Massey University College of Creative Arts (CoCA) and National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Special thanks to our partners: Creative New Zealand, Wellington City Council, Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust, Asia New Zealand Foundation, Wellington Access Radio 106.1FM, Toi Pōneke Arts Centre, Te Tuhi, ST Paul Street AUT, Hainamana, Meanwhile Gallery, Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Blue Oyster Project Space, Pyramid Club, Big Thumb Restaurant & Carol Coutts Chartered Accountant.
Worry Works / Upper Lip Residue
27 - 31 Aug 2018
Emiko Sheehan
Nathaniel Gordon-Stables
Emerita Baik
Maioha Kara
Teresa Collins
A fleeting group show of fourth year student work, sharing hints and secrets, visions and uncertainties.
Le Sceau de Salomon
Chloé Quenum
16 July - 3 Aug 2018
Le Sceau de Salomon is an exhibition of new works by French artist Chloé Quenum, developed during her residency with Te Whare Hēra.
Le Sceau de Salomon is an installation with videos and different media collected during Quenum’s 6 month residency in Aotearoa New Zealand. The French exhibition title “Le Sceau de Salomon” has two meanings: it is both the name of a forest flower, and a legend related to King Solomon.
The exhibition brings together content from Aotearoa New Zealand, Benin, and Paris in a dreamy landscape. The artist builds connections between different times and places as she explains “everything is always linked to something else.”
Chloe Quenum describes her residency in Aotearoa New Zealand as a time of “being upside down”. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, on the other side of the world from Quenum’s home in Paris, things have changed for the artist including the way she sees things and understands them to be. During her residency with Te Whare Hēra, Chloé has travelled into and out of Aotearoa New Zealand, and her works reflect a certain type of dream-state experienced when travelling through different time zones: reality and imagination run into and out of each other seamlessly.
Building Structures 1979
Paul Cullen
Curated by Marcus Moore
24 May - 13 June 2018
This exhibition offers a reconstruction of Paul Cullen’s 1979 show Building Structures at Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland.
Presented with original drawings the project reveals Cullen’s fascination for structural anthropology and the synapses between human intellect, nature, and the material world.
Remade in 2018 the works hold renewed ecological significance.
Hive Mind
Laura Duffy
Maddy Plimmer
Sean Burn
19 April - 9 May 2018
THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH.
And the word was god.
We now have access to a mass net of information with ports in our home, workplace and pockets at any given moment. This is a public platform where visual and written material is constantly distributed and redistributed via the various social intranets that make up this dense tangled web of information. Intertextuality becomes a sub-language to the dominant text based communication. Connotations are social currency. A corporation pays a ‘millennial’ for a new buzzword. References are a byproduct of the linguistic basis for consciousness, a pattern-seeking mentality that can’t help but constantly adapt and expand all modes of collective understanding. This is the hive mind. A behavioural universality, that is mimicked in the extended online platform. The words are just the after-effect of this process of becoming conscious. This is the collective consciousness. What enables me to send information from me to you.
We are the gods of our own universe.
Video link HERE
Photobook as Object /
Photobook who Cares
7 - 11 March 2018
Michiko Hayashi
Ryo Kusumoto
Tammy Law
Yumi Goto
An exhibition in the form of a live performance revealing the book making process, from concept to material experience of the photobook as an object – created in the Whiti o Rehua School of Art Engine Room Gallery by Michiko Hayashi, Ryo Kusumoto and Tammy Law in association with Yumi Goto and the Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo.
Pelagic States
Sam Trubridge
26 - 29 March 2018
The pelagic term describes that part the ocean not defined by its proximity to the sea bed, coastlines, or the surface: a space of constant movement, liquidity, and change. An exhibition of fragments of performance works and projects conducted in spaces of growth, change, reflux, and liquidity. Trubridge attempts to capture the fleeting quality of working with nomadic, fluid, and evasive media using a collection of drawings, spatial interventions, and video documents. The works range across a variety of locations: from the interior of nomadic plants, to a farming station in the Murray River Basin, across a remote salt lake, and diving to the sea floor in The Bahamas. In each place a state of liquefaction, complex three-dimensionality, migration, and constant motion is examined in dialogue with the natural rhythms and cultural histories of that space.
Works featured include the performance-walk Night Walk, and Many Breaths (to lift an anchor from the sea bed) where the artist invited free diving athletes to help lift an anchor from under the Caribbean Sea. Videos and artefacts examine the difficulty of reinvoking these original performances, but also capture various planned and unplanned failures that are intrinsic to these works: their failure to remain, their failure to last, their failure to function as planned, or their inevitable failure of an unsustainable action repeated in unforgiving environments.
The performance work Many Breaths (to lift an anchor from the sea bed) was developed in the Deep Anatomy symposium in The Bahamas, 2015. In collaboration with freediving athletes competing in the annual Vertical Blue championship (‘the Wimbledon of freediving’ – NY Times) the artist attempts to lift an anchor from the sea floor using their combined breath.
https://www.samtrubridge.net/performance-art
Night Walk is a performance walk first developed at the Interpretive Wonderings symposium 2015 in collaboration with Culpra Milli Aboriginal Corporation. A large sphere is constructed from black plastic rubbish bags, inflated in situe, then walked into the landscape until it is torn apart, deflated, or blown away.