Edith Amituanai Tup$ hits the human flag 2016. Digital photograph mounted on dibond. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2022
Maungarongo Te Kawa Rangi Takere Hau 2022. Mixed media quilt. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2022
Shannon Te Ao Untitled (malady)(still) 2016. HD digital video file. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, gift of Sheelagh Thompson marking her 86th birthday and honouring director Jenny Harper's dedication to Christchurch Art Gallery during the five years of its closure after the 2010–11 Canterbury earthquakes
Sriwhana Spong The painter-tailor (still) 2019. 16mm film transferred to HD video and HD video shown as single-channel video, colour, sound, duration 32 min 10 sec. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2021
Angela Tiatia Heels (still) 2014. Single channel HD video 16:9, colour, sound 1 min 50 sec. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2021
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, installation view, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 2022.
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, installation view, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 2022.
Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, installation view, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, 2022.
This exhibition is now closed
Making room for fresh voices, untold narratives and disruptive ideas.
Art can tell stories about ourselves and the world around us. Conventional narratives allow only a narrow section of society to dominate our galleries – often male, Western and heterosexual. With a title that acknowledges the complexity of the task, Perilous considers the challenges and possibilities of making space for fresh voices, untold narratives and disruptive ideas. This expanded view of the collection combines many kinds of art-making and introduces exciting new acquisitions. Within it, artists draft relationships between our histories and future, creating new forms of seeing and communicating – and uncovering some unexpected, exhilarating ancestors along the way.
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Date:
6 August 2022 – 21 July 2024 -
Location:
Contemporary Collections Gallery -
Curator:
Peter Vangioni, Melanie Oliver, Felicity Milburn, Ken Hall -
Exhibition number:
1131
Collection works in this exhibition
Related
Exhibition
Edith Amituanai and Sione Tuívailala Monū: Toloa Tales
8 June – 13 October 2024
New video works trace migratory threads across Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa as the artists return to their ancestral homeland.
Exhibition
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil
From 24 August 2024
Exploring the relationship between tākata and whenua – people and land – through Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
Exhibition
Mataaho Collective: Tīkawe
15 September 2022 – 11 March 2025
An ambitious installation that soars across the architecture of the Gallery.
Exhibition
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
30 May 2020 – 3 July 2022
Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.
Commentary
What Can Exhibitions Tell Us?
In a corner of Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, two self portraits are placed as if in conversation with one another. Made by Allie Eagle and Olivia Spencer Bower in 1974 and 1950 respectively, the pairing creates a striking vignette, and hints at some of the important themes that drive this exhibition.
Commentary
Whenua is a Portal
Manawa mai tēnei i Ahuone mai
Manawa mai tēnei i whenuatia
Manawa mai tēnei he kapunga oneone
Tēnei te mauri
o Papatūānuku,
o Tūparimaunga,
o Parawhenuamea,
o Ukurangi
E whakaata mai nei e
Kōkiri!
Interview
Joyful Glitch
Melanie Oliver: I first saw your work in 2016 as part of a one-night-only exhibition, NOWNOW held at 17 Tory Street in Wellington. It was a sculptural installation with fluids dribbling from a hanging form and I was at once delighted and disgusted. It was visceral and bodily, the drips a reminder of saliva, snot, discharge or cum, but also beautiful and joyful. It had vitality. While your more recent work is primarily video, it retains this abject, sculptural, gooey, oozing quality – it’s biological, or ecological. Why are you interested in grossing people out, in a pleasurable way?
Laura Duffy: I like to think I am interested in (my version of) bodily honesty, more than grossing people out, which could be read as the same thing, especially in earlier works...
Director's Foreword
Director's Foreword
Welcome to the summer 2022/23 issue of Bulletin. Since our last magazine was published I’ve been enjoying the view from my office window, which takes in a new installation that fills the high void above the Gallery’s reception desk. Tīkawe is the first work the Mata Aho Collective have created with harakeke, braiding 530 metres over several months. An exceptionally beautiful addition to our foyer, it’s lovely to watch the shadows Tīkawe casts move and morph as the spring sun tracks across the sky. My thanks to the W. A. Sutton Trust for funding this new commission and addition to the Gallery’s collection.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Interview
New Photographs in the Collection
Our new collection exhibition Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection features a number of newly acquired works from Aotearoa New Zealand artists that expand our contemporary photographic collection. Melanie Oliver asked a few of these artists to share their thoughts on photography and the works that have found a new home at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū.
Interview
Pecking Order
Felicity Milburn: Judy, it’s great to be working with you again, this time on a work for the entry wall leading into our new collection rehang, Perilous. It’s made up of a frieze of photographic panels combining images of handwritten lists and pieces of bread that have been partially eaten away by birds, and you’ve called it Pecking Order. Can you tell us a little about how it came about?
Judy Darragh: Thanks, it’s great to have this new work included in Perilous, it was already in existence and fitted well with ideas in the show.
Life over lockdown became reduced – we were at home, everything was shut down and it became a surreal and shared experience for us all. While out walking I observed the flourishing of bird life, and I had time to hear and feed them in the back garden every day. Feeding the birds was very satisfying.
Director's Foreword
Director's Foreword
It’s been great to watch our visitors returning to the building over the past weeks despite the ongoing effects of Covid-19. This issue is coming to you regretfully late due to the pandemic; it’s one of a few changes to our published schedules as we find our feet again. I urge you to keep in touch via our website and social media for updates on what’s happening as we return to our full and vibrant programme of exhibitions and events.
Commentary
A Gathering Gravity
My encounters with Grant Lingard’s works have been few and fleeting. My information derives largely from the archive. The show has yet to open and I know only the title. But I am deep in speculation about what it will bring.
Commentary
Ka Mua Ka Muri
Our histories are always with us, but who is telling the story? The Gallery’s new collection hang, Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection offers up a range of different perspectives on how the past and future might intersect, and invites us to rethink how we commonly see our heritage. Here, the exhibition’s curators have each selected a work from the exhibition for a closer look.