Join us in the Gallery surrounded by the beautiful collection of mahi toi in the Kingii Tuheitia exhibition to discuss being Tangata whenua working and creating in the Aotearoa arts industry.
In this kōrero with our panelists will discuss ideas and stories about their creative processes and kaupapa , their challenges and successes. This panel is about giving emerging artists and anyone else who is interested some insight and ako, that can tautoko them in their own creative practices.
This event is free to attend, our Gallery does accept koha.
Chair of the panel:
Suzanne Tamaki
Suzanne Tamaki (Maniapoto, Tuhoe) is an artist and social provocateur who uses fashion and photography to create visual narratives that respond to cultural-politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her works often investigate the nature of indigenous feminisms in the South Pacific, challenging the colonial gaze and Western ideas of nationhood within a bi-cultural nation.
As an individual artist and as a member of Pacific Sisters and the SaVAge K’lub art collectives, Tamaki has exhibited works extensively throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, with exhibitions at The National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (2018), Sharman Gallery Winnipeg (2017), The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (APT8, Brisbane, Australia, 2016), Expressions Arts Centre (Upper Hutt, 2015), City Gallery Wellington (2011), the British Museum (England, 2008), the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (England, 2005) and the Dowse Art Museum (2004).
Panelists:
'From Coastal Light, by Ophelia and Ryder Jones, Courtesy of the Art Paper'.
Arapeta is a Takatāpui curator and artist of Whanaunga, Ruanui, Mahuta, Koata, Te Wehi, Kahu, Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri, Ngāpuhi, Porou, English, Scottish and Croatian descent. Their creative practice is conceptualised as a vessel that is used to explore their cultural identities. They consider themselves a weaver of stories told through adornment, textiles, objects, sound, performance and cinema often drawing upon various traditional Māori art forms passed down through their whakapapa (lineage).
Arapeta is a Māori weaving specialist within their hapū, cultural centres, as well as international museum institutions such as the British Museum and Smithsonian in Washington DC.
They are widely known for their Masters research He Taonga Tuku Iho conducted at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland in 2020. A celebrated research, their Masters incorporated ancestral knowledge from their whānau and kaumaatua as a catalyst to revive the art of Parakiekie (Māori garments made of Kiekie, Freycinetia banksii). They are currently undergoing doctoral research titled 'Te Wheke o Te Rangi' at Waipapa Taumata Rau.
Arapeta has curated and exhibited across Aotearoa, Te Wai Pounamu (New Zealand) and internationally and is represented by Southern Stars Projects in London, England.
Image credit: Samuel Hartnett courtesy of Season.
Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi) is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and co-director of Season. Season is a new contemporary art gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau that works with Robyn Kahukiwa (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Konohi, Te Whānau-a-Ruataupare, Te Whānau-a-Te-Ao, Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti), Neke Moa (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Ahuriri, Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Tūwharetoa), Maia McDonald (Ngāti Mutunga, Te Āti Awa) and Maungarongo Te Kawa (Ngāti Porou). As an artist and curator Townsend operates at the intersection of her Māori, Pākehā, and British heritage to explore themes of identity and dual-consciousness. Born and raised in Whanganui, she moved to Liverpool, UK as a teenager. Exposure to a wide range of accents, dialects, regional slang, folktales, and pūrākau made her aware of the limitations of translation and cultural hybridity as a transparent process. Through a range of hand-made interventions including paint and collage, she interrogates materials and surfaces to reveal their transformative qualities.
'The notion of being two very opposite things at once—'native' and 'foreign', a symbol of the 'authentic' and also an 'imitation'—is of ongoing fascination for me. I find myself attracted to the artificial or synthesised aspects of culture as a beginning point: the hyperreal, the exaggerated.'
Townsend has been Artist in Residence at Objectspace and Artspace in Aotearoa and internationally at Slade School of Art in London and Red Gate Gallery in Beijing. In 2024 she will take up the prestigious residency at Tylee Cottage in Whanganui. She recently exhibited at Murray Art Museum in Australia and Gus Fisher Gallery in Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds a BA Hons Fine Art degree in Painting from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Tyson Campbell is a curator and artist based in Taamaki Makaurau. He has worked in both grass roots and instutitional contemporary art settings.
Tyson’s current work focuses on Indigenous strategies toward shifting institutional structures and how culturally grounded and communitarian ways of knowing - conversational, celebratory, and respectful kanohi-kitea - can initiate change within such settings. Tyson is interested in cultural mechanisms that move us away from the polarised dichotomy of Indigeneity and institutional critique and from representation as a determining ideology in contemporary art discourse.