Ocula Conversation Artist Taloi Havini and Ruth McDougall, curator of Pacific art at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, discuss Havini's first Australian solo exhibition, Reclamation .
Ocula Report Sydney Biennale Connects Here with Everywhere By Soo-Min Shim, Sydney 'This year's Biennale of Sydney seems like a corrective,' writes Soo-Min Shim, 'prioritising autonomy in an international exhibition format that has all too often omitted or sidelined First Nations artists.'
Ocula Insight Hell is a Place on Earth: P·P·O·W Looks to History in Context of Covid-19 By Stephanie Bailey, London In the United States, parallels have been drawn between the HIV/AIDS crisis and what is unfolding with Covid-19. These connections feed into P·P·O·W's online exhibition, Hell is a Place on Earth. Heaven is a Place in Your Head .
Wellington, as the capital of New Zealand, is not only the host city for the country's parliament and various civil service organisations, but also the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. The institution on the waterfront houses national collections presenting Science, Art, and Social History. In March 2018, the new national art gallery Toi Art opened on the fourth and fifth floors of Te Papa, which has since exhibited the works of established New Zealand artists such as Tiffany Singh, Jeena Shin, and Kerry Ann Lee.
Read MoreCity Gallery Te Whare Toi in Te Ngākau Civic Square is administered by the city of Wellington, much smaller than Te Papa, and without a collection. Veteran curator Robert Leonard leads its team of curators to present an exhibition programme known for its dynamism and social currency.
A significant public institution funded by the Hutt City Council is The Dowse Art Museum, which is home to over 2,000 artworks. In keeping with its inaugural exhibition that focused on a survey of New Zealand art (Artists of the Wellington Province 1939–1971 [1971]), the Museum has displayed the works of both accomplished and emerging New Zealand artists, notably Fiona Clark, Shannon Te Ao, Ella Sutherland, and Imogen Taylor. Its extensive public programmes also include interactive and educational workshops that aim to bring the community together.
The most important venue in Wellington, in terms of scholarly research and debate about contemporary art, is the Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi. Part of the Victoria University of Wellington in Kelburn, the gallery is housed in a building designed by architect Ian Athfield. Under the directorship of contemporary art historian Christina Barton, it is a venue more rarefied in its interests than City Gallery. Another notable university gallery, The Engine Room, is at Massey University. Run by Litmus (a 'cutting edge' research hub), the smaller and less conspicuous gallery is aligned with artists' projects and a residency for international visitors.
Enjoy Public Art Gallery is a successful artist-run space (operative since 2000) that is not a 'public' gallery in the sense of a conventional, municipally administered institution, but much more pitched to the interests of recent graduates. Social and community oriented, it has a profile so slick that it appears corporatised, especially as it now has a brand new and much larger space in Cuba St. Its workshops places a big emphasis on creative writing and mentoring as an aid for developing critical art practices.
Nga Tāonga Sound & Vision (The New Zealand Archive of Film) is an organisation devoted to the national promotion of moving image and aural culture. Its collection encompasses popular mass media such as film, radio, and television, and the histories of the different communities that live here. Although it presents a lot of material online, it has curated exhibitions—to be seen, for example, in its Wellington branch in Taranaki St—that include videos, printed matter, and artefacts connected to the production of stories disseminated through Aotearoa's mass media.
There are about a dozen dealer galleries in Wellington. The pioneering Peter McLeavey Gallery launched the careers of historic icons Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston in the mid-sixties. Page Blackie Gallery, in Victoria St., has a wide range of styles within the mediums of painting and sculpture, extending from senior figures like Max Gimblett, Dick Frizzell, and Andrew Drummond to younger postcolonial artists like Jasmine Togo-Brisby and Reuben Paterson who reflect Pasifika and Māori sensibilities.
Ocula Insight Colin McCahon's Gate III (1970) has graced the walls of Victoria University of Wellington since 1972. Thousands of students and staff have walked past it over these years, and many remember their first encounter with the towering words 'I AM' that dominate its composition. Gate III was commissioned for the exhibition Ten Big Paintings at...
Ocula Conversation Seung Yul Oh By Laura Thomson, Auckland Born in Korea in 1981, Seung Yul Oh moved to New Zealand in 1997 and graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 2005. He has exhibited widely in New Zealand and Korea. In 2013 he was recipient of the SEMA Nanji Residency in Seoul and in 2011 was recipient of the Harriet Friedlander New York Residency, supported by...
