Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023-2024 i Art New Zealand

In dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times. Bertolt Brecht, ‘In Dark Times’ If Jane Dodd's work speaks to the Anthropocene, then she has been speaking to it since before it was cool. The Anthropocenic angle was mooted during a Q&A at the Masterworks opening of Dodd's latest show The Unbelievables (also shown at Brett McDowell Gallery and as part of Tablelands with Anna Wallis at The National and Nelson Jewellery Week). Proponents of the unofficial epoch contend that whether you mark the Anthropocene's dawn from the first time we planted crops or from the first use of the term in the 1960s, we humans have pillaged this planet with a voracity that sees no precedent in the millennia before we…

Adrienne Martyn's latest exhibition, Seen/Scene, at He Waka Tuia, Invercargill, is a series of 41 photographic portraits of people from the LGBTQIA+ community who have lived in Southland. Martyn, who now lives in Wellington, grew up in Invercargill; a self-portrait is included in the exhibition. Her return to the portrait genre also presents an opportunity to reflect on her well-known portraits of New Zealand artists in the 1980s, which were quickly acquired by many of this country's public art galleries. In between times, she has produced an extensive body of work focusing on architecture, particularly studies of the interiors of venerable buildings fallen into disuse or stripped of their previous contents or functions. There have been forays too into landscape, and a residency at the Dunedin School of Art in…

One is struck, on entering Bev Moon's exhibition Fortune, at the Hocken Gallery, by an abundance … of delicious food. The centrepiece of the main room is a yum cha banquet. Steamed bok choy, dumplings, spring rolls and rice rest on blue and white crockery, familiar to anybody who has ever eaten at a diasporic Chinese restaurant. There are chopsticks and spoons. My companions wonder if the teapots are full. Despite being under glass—we are in a gallery after all—the feast loses none of its vitality. Partly, this is due to the rotating lazy Susan on which some of the food sits, and a pair of lucky ‘waving cats’ positioned in one corner. These moving objects—no doubt—are also familiar; characteristic of yum cha dining. On closer inspection, one notices that…

Sometimes some truths are too severe to live on the page, or in a song, or in a heart. Hence, metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art. Nick Cave, Red Hand Files, 2022 … trying to be normal with the children & concentrate on their needs (is desperately hard)—they are quite relaxed & are only waiting it seems, for me to be the same. Christine to her sister Marian, 1969 From spring through to autumn, between about 3.30 and 4.30 in the afternoon, a small, weather-beaten greenhouse, polycarbonate walls patched with tape, glows with a golden light, translucent and diffuse, holding leaf, stem…

In his book Blind Spot, Teju Cole observes the social conditions that caution against retelling history. He writes, ‘we are advised not to say: “1965.” We are advised not to say: “the events of 1965.” We are advised not to say: “in 1965, following a failed coup, the Indonesian Army stoked communal hatreds leading to a massive anti-communist purge … All the Chinese shops in Denpasar, the largest Balinese town, were destroyed. Their owners were killed … There has been no accounting of these horrors.” We are advised, as visitors, not to bring the events of 1965 up in public discussion.‘1 I am reminded of this passage when thinking about the work of Rozana Lee. These events of 1965, which took place five years before Lee was born, are one…

In pristine urban and architectural environments different species of mammals amble quietly along— either unaware, unconcerned with, or benignantly accepting of each other's presence; apex predators share warehouses with ruminants; beasts of the savannah pass those of the barnyard anonymously, as if on a crowded city street; a lioness and a goat stand side by side in a living room. All around them is civilisation's imprint: industrial, commercial, civic and domestic scaled buildings of various eras; infrastructure and gardens; roads and pathways; colonnades, atriums and verandahs. The places they inhabit were designed and constructed for the benefit of humans, except here, currently, they are bereft of people. There is nothing to suggest a major catastrophe—no ruins, signs of war or natural disaster. Cranes in the background in some shots denote…

Most Sri Lankan Tamil families have sepia photos of their dead ancestors in the house. These photos are from a different era—a time when Tamils lived in Sri Lanka, before the Civil War and before the diaspora led to millions settling around the globe. In these photos, the gaze is unnerving, the grandparents and aunties and uncles unsmiling, inscrutable, direct to camera. What is notable about these photos is the lack of background, similar to a contemporary passport photograph. Abhi Chinniah is a photographer born in Christchurch and currently living in Auckland. Her background, though, is more complex than that. Chinniah's grandparents emigrated from Jaffna in Sri Lanka to the rubber estates in Malaysia. Her parents emigrated from there to Aotearoa New Zealand. After struggling for acceptance here, her parents…