There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries,...

Auckland Arts Festival has dawned on the city, offering a delicious spread of ways to spend your time this month. However, if you have no idea where to start and prefer a slightly smaller menu of arts offerings then you've come to the right place. This month our review team of art critics Lucinda Bennett, Lana Lopesi and Francis McWhannell has...

What could a medieval female mystic have to offer a contemporary artist?Sriwhana Spong has seen a snake, befriended a rat, cast a spell for a critically endangered bird. She has engaged with all manner of living creatures in her work and yet her latest exhibition is titled for a lack of animal: a hook but no fish.For me, this is a foreboding...

Peter Stichbury's last portrait exhibition at Michael Lett's was of wonderfully delicate graphite drawings, but in this presentation he is back to his characteristically glowing, clean-faced, intensely psychological, painted heads. With a graphic flatness that links them to comic strip art, but with extraordinarily fine detail (such as precision...

A warning, perhaps, for reviewers. On the second floor of the Govett Brewster large sheets of paper are lit by vivid red lights. In the gloom, we can make out semi-deconstructed poems and brief statements: coherent, unclear, clear – she / shallowness-depth-she / Less-less-than lack-she. The artwork is Bad Review (2018), and in it Sriwhana Spong has...

Art Basel announced that the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist Zac Langdon-Pole has been named the next winner of the BMW Art Journey. An international jury unanimously selected Langdon-Pole from a shortlist of three artists whose works were exhibited in the Discoveries sector at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong.Langdon-Pole's installation at...

Auckland Art Fair puts the spotlight on this city as a place to see the best in contemporary art from the Pacific Rim. Dionne Christian asks some of the artists what 'place' means to them — in particular the space they work in.

Living in 12th-century Germany, Hildegard von Bingen was a well-known mystic and prolific polymath. At Disibodenberg monastery, where she spent most of her life, she wrote on science and medicine, composed one of the largest surviving repertoires of medieval music, penned what is perhaps the first morality play, and created what was arguably the...

For her first solo exhibition in the UK, London-based New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong excavates the Lingua Ignota, a secret language composed by 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Across the Pump House Gallery's four storeys, works ranging from costume to votive offerings, large-scale watercolours and a percussive instrument orbit the...

Steve Carr is well known for his inventive, spectacular and often funny videos, and unusual (often droll) sculptures, but this new show has an installation of sequential photographs (pinned to the wall) and is comparatively serious in mood, focussing on a ballerina’s hand gestures. The photographs are in the main gallery, but downstairs are two...

Visitors to collector Joop van Caldenborgh's newly opened Museum Voorlinden near the Hague are immediately drawn to a pair of glass doors that open upon a room filled about halfway to the ceiling with multicolored balloons.On a recent day, museumgoers old and young queued up to make their way through the balloons to the exit door. Some laughed....

The outcome of a summer residency with the Visiting Artist program hosted by the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in conjunction with the Dunedin School of Art, Eve Armstrong's exhibition Growing Demand has the artist developing from familiar territory in a specific response to place. Presented in two parts—on DPAG's 'big wall' overlooking the...

The world-renowned Biennale of Sydney is back next year to celebrate its 45th anniversary exhibition. Set to maintain its status as the largest and best-attended contemporary arts event in Australia, the 21st Biennale of Sydney is anticipated to once again bring an impressive and diverse range of contemporary artists and artworks to the...

From 23 to 25 March, the 5th edition of Art Basel, Hong Kong will showcase 242 premier galleries from 34 countries and territories—including Australia—presenting works of the highest quality, ranging from the Modern period of the early 20th century to today's most contemporary artists in three specific categories: Galleries,...

The arrival of a substantial new public artwork in the downtown centre of New Zealand's largest city is always an exciting occasion, but the 'opening' of Michael Parekowhai's The Lighthouse on the waterfront - on Queens wharf, at the base of the main street - is such that you would have to be made of solid rock not to get a real thrill. The work's...

From a studio beside Colin McCahon’s former Titirangi home, artist Imogen Taylor contemplates the art world sausage-ocracy, her pretty/ugly work and having a parent in the Act Party.“It’s really hard to make people laugh with art. Or it’s like a one-liner and you laugh once, and then it’s gone.” Imogen Taylor is speaking about the very funny zine...

There has long been a profound and complex relationship between sculpture and architecture, with many artists encountering or breaking down a boundary between the two disciplines. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, questions what we know and understand about design through [Re]construct, a group exhibition selected from the Arts Council...

A show about light: a light show – what might a curator put in? Just about all art concerned with making the world visible in some sense speaks of light, the very condition in which it was made.

hen Sriwhana Spong was shortlisted for the 2012 Walters Prize, no one in the art world was particularly taken aback.For several years, she had been making some of the country’s best video art: lush, elegant films, which often drew on her dual New Zealand and Balinese heritage, as well as her training as a ballet dancer.Things were going well. But...

This complicated teasing exhibition, Oratory Index, mainly features six suspended chrome casts, strung up with thick chains at different heights around the upper stairwell, and six softly lit, framed, coloured, digitally printed photographs. The latter are all enigmatic: some with confusingly located body parts; others images reflected on suspended...

Martin Creed wants you to fuck off. He says as much in Work No. 1358: Fuck Off (2012), in which an illuminated screen goes dark the moment the piece begins and a minute-long, post-punk-style audio track performed by Creed and his band plays. The only lyrics: “fuck” and “off.”The phrase has at least two meanings. Is he...

Few major exhibitions in recent memory have generated anything like the sort of intensely polarized response that greeted the recently concluded 9th Berlin Biennale, curated by the New York-based DIS, an increasingly notorious group of Gen X and Y “creatives” with close ties to the fashion and advertising industries. A recent publicity...

Borders between traditions and mediums blur in Sriwhana Spong And Maria Taniguchi: Oceanic Feeling, a rich and vivid exhibition of works from the two artists.The exhibition at Lasalle's Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore is the first major survey of the practices of New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong and Filipina artist Maria Taniguchi, who...

Don’t you wonder sometimes, ’bout sound and vision?” David Bowie, ever the trailblazer, perfectly expressed the impulse behind this show back in 1977. The Infinite Mix, a Hayward Gallery pop-up staged while its South Bank home is being refurbished, features 10 video installations in which artists, mostly from the UK, Europe and...