Past Exhibitions - 2025
Tocayo Collective
‘Floración de Corazón translates to “the blooming heart” A Karanga to Mexico is our response exhibition to a life changing month in Mexico. The tocayo_collective is comprised of eight Massey University fine art students who were fortunate to receive a Prime Minister’s scholarship to go to Mexico and absorb art, culture and chilli.’
— The Tocayo Collective
9-19 September 2025
Floración de Corazón: A Karanga to Mexico
Amazonia: Sapara Kaku
Amazonia, The Sapara Universe
Ruben Dario Diaz Chavez (Ecuador)
Current Te Whare Hera resident artist Ruben Dario Diaz Chavez is a researcher, curator and cultural manager whose career spans Latin America, Europe and Asia. His research touches on themes as diverse as quantum realism, independent art spaces in Latin America and Sapara Indigenous culture in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
He is the founder, director and curator of No Lugar – Arte Contemporaneo and Ripanu, both platforms for experimental and socially engaged art practices in Ecuador. His ongoing collaboration with Sapara leader Gloria Ushigua reflects his commitment to Indigenous rights, environmental justice and epistemic diversity, values he is eager to explore further during his time in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The focus of his residency is to develop a series of works exploring relationships with Indigenous peoples, acts of resistance and processes of cultural conciliation through the lens of contemporary art.
20th - 27th August 2025
Analogue (n.)
Over 80 works by alumni, staff, and contemporary artists who engage with analogue processes.
This exhibition marks the 50th anniversary of photography education at Massey University, celebrating the legacy and ongoing relevance of analogue photography. Bringing together over 80 works by alumni, staff, and contemporary artists who engage with analogue processes, the exhibition highlights the continued potential of physical photographic practice in a digital world. Through film-based photography, alternative processes, and handmade printing techniques, the exhibition considers how the material and tactile qualities of analogue photography offer resistance to the speed, uniformity, and disposability of digital image culture.
23 July – 9 August 2025
Photo: Peter Black, Woman with Lizard, 1984
Justine Fletcher
A Breath, A Leap
26th May-13th June 2025
Closing event 5.30 Friday 13th June
Justine Fletcher is a Pākehā contemporary jeweller seeking to understand, interpret, and locate her work within the socio-historical context of Aotearoa New Zealand.
A breath, a leap presents the final stage of the deconstruction and remaking of four axe heads into jewellery. The exhibition invites the viewer to observe this process and participate in this transformation. The installation, which the artist describes as jewellery for a building, enacts an offering that seeks to speak directly against the ideologies of capitalism and colonialism. The artist invites you to participate by selecting an axe piece that she will turn into wearable jewellery during the exhibition.
Image: Amber Jayne Bain, a breath, a leap (detail)
Tohu o te rangi
Group Exhibition
Opening event: 5:30pm Tuesday 13th May
Exhibition runs through 16th May
This exhibition celebrates the work of over twenty artists and members of the Wellington Art Teacher's association. As the title suggests, the ethos behind this exhibition project is open, expansive and a forum to bring this group of artists together. Very simply translated to the phrase “signs from the sky”, Tohu o te rangi refers specifically to the architectural space defined by The Engine Room gallery and its trademark “skylight” ceiling. This feature of the gallery connects all of the gallery's programme to the expanse of the sky above and a similarly expansive opportunity for artistic expression.
Image: Morgan Hogg, Self portrait, Acrylic on paper 2025.
Thomas Slade
Revealing Systems of Power
Revealing systems of power: How photography can contribute to awareness of the ongoing impact of colonisation in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Open to the public: 7th-11th April
Closing event: 5:30pm Friday 11th
Through this series of photographs and his writing Slade acknowledges, "systems including legislation and education provide the structure of everyday life for many people in Aotearoa New Zealand. As a Pākehā, my awareness of the impact of colonisation on Māori was restricted through these very systems. My own experience represents that of many Pākehā which leads to a failure to understand Māori grievances and colonial injustice. My photographs draw attention to institutions of power that continue to maintain a cultural imbalance and settler privilege. As Anne Salmond notes, it is through the dominance of Pākehā culture, these ‘forms of order’ are often invisible or are ‘naturalised’ as ‘common sense’.
Policy Wonks
Sean Grattan
Screening 5:30pm Thursday 13th March, 80 mins.
Q+A with the artist and Martin Patrick to follow
New Cinema, Room 10A02
Museum Building, Toi Rauwhārangi College of Creative Arts, Massey University Wellington
We are excited to invite you to this special screening of Policy Wonks, a new film by Los Angeles-based New Zealand artist Sean Grattan.
Policy Wonks is a pseudo-drama revolving around the ambitious Bureau of Advancement, a political action group operating in Los Angeles that loves money, guns and yoga. Mixing philosophical inquiry with political satire, Policy Wonks takes the cold logics of neoliberalism to their cinematic conclusion: twisting through a hollow core of violent irrationality, phony wellness practices. As the mind-melting ideological landscape unfolds like verbal jelly, the crisp California sky blasts bright light over the psychological shadows of the characters.
Sean Grattan graduated from University of Auckland with a BA (Philosophy) in 2001 and again in 2008 with a BFA (Honours) from Elam School of Fine Art. He graduated with an MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2012. Grattan lives and works in Los Angeles, USA.
Trailer link here
Aroha atu, Aroha mai
Angerlia Oliver
Ange Oliver (Muriwhenua, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Raukawa ki te tonga), is also a mokopuna of Hana Toi, Ngāti Korokoro, Te Roroa. As a mature ākonga and emerging artist, Ange has completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Māori Visual Arts through Toioho ki Āpiti. She was also the sole recipient of the Collin Post Memorial Scholarship in Sculpture in 2024. Recently her mahi toi has been an expression of mamae and aroha using natural materials and her own unique processes embedded with cosmological and customary knowledge. Her aim is to hold space for fragility and resilience that redresses cultural identity and belonging.
27 Feb - 14 March 2025
Performing the Archive: City to Sea Bridge project
Kate Linzey and John Gray
Performing the Archive is an installation of drawings from the collection of John Gray. Completed in 1994 Wellington’s City to Sea Bridge was a complex hybrid project: at once heavy infrastructure engineering, sculpture, and architecture. Negotiating the tidal edge between sea and the city, the project was a collaboration between architects Gray and Rewi Thompson, with artist Paratene Matchitt.
This installation of drawings from Gray’s archive will present the City to Sea Bridge as a play of ideas, technical working out, dreaming and imagining. A process of communicating across time, space, materials and cultures, from pencils and paper to pixel media. Attending to the emergence of the project, rather than its threatened demise, the exhibition questions the finitude structures planned for urban space: when they begin and how they end.
29 January - 5 February 2025