Art Summit 2024 | Contemporary Hum (2024)

Taking notable films from Aotearoa New Zealand contemporary cinema as a thematic basis for a series of abstract paintings and drawings, Michael Dell creates alluring colour gradients with delicately blended palettes and that are rich with subtle textures anddetails.

Despite the association with storytelling, the works in Distant Pictures contain an ambivalence toward narrative, conveying instead an intense and absorbing stillness, using colours and abstract gradients referencing shots from the opening sequences of Dell's chosen films. Drawing inspiration from physical elements of cinema, such as the image frame, the light of the projector beam, and imperfections that appear on celluloid film, Dell’s approach to art-making is led by a commitment to materiality, whether he’s creating abstract or representationalwork.

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Kate Newby’s exhibition anything, anythingaddresses the Klosterruine Berlin as a place of permanent change, drawing on the processual and allowing the outside world to become a part of it. Through subtle and expansive interventions into existing structures, she draws attention to often overlooked details in everyday life. In doing so, she gives preference to direct experience and establishes a relationship with the built space and its livedenvironment.

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The Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture (FestPAC) is the Pacific’s largest regional cultural gathering of First Nations and Indigenous Peoples and one of the largest cultural gatherings in the world, bringing together artists, cultural practitioners, scholars and officials from the 28 member nations of the PacificCommunity.

The 13th edition of FestPAC is guided by foundational values of preservation and revival, exploration, awareness, unity and Indigenous languages, and features live performances, cultural workshops, hands-on demonstrations, film, storytelling and more, exemplifying the diversity of traditional and contemporary arts and culture across the Pacific. The event also underscores the urgent issues facing the Pacific region – from rising sea levels, climate change, sustainability and the death of coral reefs to widening social inequality – as a way to illuminate our path toward thefuture.

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Marking the gallery's 20th anniversary, Copperfield's group exhibition Intension aims to celebrate the strength of neurodiversity without sugarcoating its hardships, continuing founder William Lunn's habit of addressing challenging topics with thought andcare.

Among the exhibiting artists is London-based David Rickard, whose sculptural piece Sound of a Circle makes physical the activity of three neurodiverse minds, all responding to the same stimuli. Referencing wall mounted platinum LPs, the surface of each record maps brain energy fluctuations through EEG recordings, looping the process of looking and thinking, while venerating the material encoded. Sound of a Circle was made in collaboration with Prof. Tina Forster, Body & Brain Laboratory and City University London. The artist thanks those who generously shared their time and brainwaves.

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After being presented at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and touring Sydney's Powerhouse Museum in 2023, Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp returns home to Sāmoa, opening on 1 June to coincide with Sāmoa’s 62nd Independencecelebration.

Paradise Camp is centred around a suite of twelve photographs which recast and “upcycle” select paintings by French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848—1903) believed to have been inspired by Sāmoa. In addition, Kihara's works feature Fa’afafine and Fa’atama models – a third gender community unique to Sāmoan culture, who also make up part of the cast and crew of close to one hundred people, photographed on locations including rural villages, churches, plantations and heritage sites on Upolu Island. This iteration of Paradise Campalso features new works byKihara.

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Glasgow-based artist Sarah Rose participates in the June/July 2024 residency programme offered by the art collectiveVersam.

Open to artists who want to spend a period working in the village of Versam in the Safien Valley, the residency offers an opportunity to engage in dialogue with the collective, the local population and their cultural landscape. Artists-in-residence are also encouraged to become involved in the tasks of the collective during their stay, and to present their work in the Kunst Garage Versam, a former parking garage at the entrance to the Safien Valley that has been converted into a exhibitionspace.

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Archipelago Area 51 continues Andy Leleisi’uao's evolving Ufological narrative first appearing in the 2003 show The Umu Collection of Titles (Whitespace Gallery, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland). Fusing Polynesian mythology with urban legend and set against a backdrop of contemporary western cultural canon, the artist creates an otherworldly narrative of peace andserenity.

Leleisi’uao states, "Archipelago Area 51 is an alternative reality that disregards time and space. These villages are inhabited with extraterrestrial and human sentiments who have created their own culture and history. They are impossible collectivist and joyful societies that revel in the simplicities of theirexistence."

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Embracing the arts for systemic change, NaturArchy is an exhibition that probes issues of deep ecology, sustainability and the decolonisation of nature. It features a number of art and science works explore and query the entanglement of human and non-human, green technologies and new materials, nature and law, ecology and economy, ancient and newknowledge.

Among the works in NaturArchy, is a four-channel video installation by Berlin-based artist Jemma Woolmore, titled These Relations Are Forever, which brings together agricultural policy, toxicology, water quality research, environmental law, and art around the common theme of chemical pollution. Using the scientific practices of four women researchers as a thematic thread, Woolmore's work looks in particular at Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDCs) and their increasingly frequent and lasting presence within our bodies and lives, via food, soil andwater.

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In this new site-specific exhibition that connects Art Sonje Center's hanok structure, internal staircase and rooftop garden, Yona Lee has broken down the various binary distinctions and boundaries within social structures by linking stainless steel pipes—a universal component of urban environments around the world—to everydayobjects.

Twisting the conventional ideas and norms associated with the spaces where her work is displayed, even as she accepts their original architectural structures and grammar, Lee's work erases vertical hierarchies and horizontal boundaries of space. In Yona Lee: An Arrangement for a Room in Seoul, she physically and conceptually wipes away the boundaries between the building interior and exterior or between private and public settings, while weaving together the various layers of time and speed present in Seoul as acity.

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Alicia Frankovich curates I wanna be your anti-mirror, a group exhibition featuring seven early career artists whose experimental, materially complex artworks reveal new languages, sensations and attitudes. Anti-mirroring characterises the way the artists champion and proliferate ethical and material forces to make way for new spaces, realities and subjects. Coming from places of desire and independence, the works neither conform to, nor report back on any particularparameter.

I wanna be your anti-mirrorallows each artwork to be itself in the world, unfixed yet forceful. The processes of becoming, illuminating, sprouting, solidifying, repositioning, transitioning, interrupting, remodelling, living and decaying, underscore the works’ very existence. Artists include Hugo Blomley, Christina May Carey, Georgina de Manning, Erin Hallyburton, Ashika Harper, Rachelle Koumouris and ZeïnaThiboult.

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Rosie Park draws inspiration from nature, art history and everyday moments, primarily creating still life paintings that balance natural and artificial elements. By depicting familiar objects with detailed precision, Park explores diversity and harmony from various perspectives, expressing the innate individuality and beauty in all of us through the objects in her stilllifes.

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Spanning moving image, sound, sculptural intervention and performance, this group exhibition tests the limits of the ‘arena’— the setting where people come together to collectively witness and participate in public life. Works consider the social and structural architectures that bind these spaces, and by extension, the elastic nature of performance and reality, audience and participant. The same crowd never gathers twice invites audiences to consider their own presence and agency inside the gallery: their role as passive spectators versus the potential for a more active form ofengagement.

Yona Lee presents a new installation spanning Buxton’s Heritage Gallery. The artist’s steel-pipe sculptures are known for their playful, symphonic conjurings of public space and behaviours, which collapse and remix the usually-separated spheres of the home, the city andtransit.

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Caroline Earley and Kate Walker are part of a group of three artists and two scientists from Boise State University, Idaho, who present studio and research projects in the 2024 Personal Structures exhibition, looking at human relationships to landscapes and land use in the western United States during a time of climate crises and landdegradation.

Earley’s ceramic sculpture consists of interdependent biomorphic forms inspired by ideas of symbiosis; her work aiming to embody the complex interrelationships between plants and microscopic life within the soil food web, and its role in carbonsequestration/cycling.

Walker’s performance-based videos feature group actions in Idaho landscapes, and includes the work, Region 10, which features performers singing in front of a backdrop of 1950’s nuclear airplane engines in an expansive desert backdrop of grass and sagebrush.

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Kāpiti-based Mizuho Nishioka’s photographic presentation in Beyond Boundaries, the 2024 Personal Structures exhibition organised by the European Cultural Centre, forges a representation that involves multiple perspectives and interconnectedness, oscillating between subject and performance, where recording devices are liberated into the natural environment and allowed to interact throughout the duration of the recordingprocess.

Movement_17; Tasman Seaaims to navigate the landscape guided by the interplay between the sea's organic processes, its creatures, and static legislative boundaries. This intentional engagement allows the sea to shape its likeness, free from our attempts to stake claims or impose limitations. Nishioka's body of work embraces duality and paradox, exploring the tension between the disrupted, the natural, and the human-made, and highlights the complex interplay between these contrasting elements within the naturalenvironment.

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The 60th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia is titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere and is curated by Adriano Pedrosa, Director of Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Drawing its name from a series of multilingual neon sculptures by the art collective Claire Fontaine, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywherehas two points of focus: theNucleo Storico, which focuses on modernisms in the Global South, and the Nucleo Contemporaneo, which focuses on four subjects related to the notion of the "stranger": the queer artist, who has moved within different sexualities and genders, often being persecuted or outlawed; the outsider artist; the folk artist; and the indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her ownland.

This year's International Exhibition includes the most Aotearoa artists to date: Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), Fred Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui), Mataaho Collective, Sandy Adsett (Ngāti Pahauwera) and Selwyn Wilson (Ngāti Manu, NgātiHine).

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Leading contemporary Māori artist Robert Jahnke presents Te Wepu MMXXIIIin Beyond Boundaries, the 2024 edition of the Personal Structures exhibition, organised by the European Cultural Centre.

A tribute to the Māori prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki (1830–1893), Te Wepu MMXXIII repurposes symbols loaded with significance—the crescent moon, cross, mountain, bleeding heart, and star—alongside colours alluding to the Union Jack, to reinvigorate them as symbols of resistance within the neo-colonial present. Known for a practice that straddles design, illustration, animation, and sculpture, Jahnke's work is typically based on political issues that face Māori, the relationship between Māori and European colonisers, and the impact of Christianity on Māoriculture.

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As part of Beyond Boundaries, the 2024 Personal Structures exhibition organised by the European Cultural Centre, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington-based artist Caitlin Devoy presents a new series of silicone sculptures and a short video work that combines humour with the erotic and explosive politics of the body. Body Objects pits laughter and parody against sexist and binary attitudes to gender, bodies, and value in artmaking.

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As part of Beyond Boundaries, the 2024 Personal Structures exhibition organised by the European Cultural Centre, Areez Katki presents a series of textile and earth-based works that reframe the practices and lineages of language and learning as rooted in care, play, and communion with one'sancestors.

This installation includes nine tiles made with kaolinite clay found in the artist's family's backyard in Aotearoa New Zealand to create a sensitive portrait of his late grandmother, together with 17 embroidered handkerchiefs that respond to the 17 Ha’s of the prophet Zarathushtra’s Gathas, the foundational hymns ofZoroastrianism.

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This exhibition offers fresh perspectives of photography from contemporary practices. Encompassing still and moving image, installation and sculpture, photography is presented beyond its formal traditions as encrypted images purposefully eluding easy categorisation. The artworks cross genres, resisting a narrow view of how photography is usuallyperceived.

Extrapolating photography for its potential to manipulate light, anti-lens dogmas, spatial parameters, movement, processes and phenomenological experiences, the artists utilise camera(less) techniques to blur passive spectatorship into buoyant new forms of engagement. At times, the lens is turned back onto the audience as a form of mirror, both physical and psychological, returning the gaze to reflect on upon past andpresent.

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Presented during the 2024 Venice Biennale, Veronica Green's exhibition From Where I Stand, explores our identity based on two interrogatives; Who and What we are. Green is interested in who we are and our personal perspective of that definition, the contribution of our life experience and how that has attributed to theWho.

Presented are two large abstract paintings each owning Green's renowned technique to transform into three different scenes. Weaved with paint and mixed media, Green, references kākahu—cloaks—to represent a mantle of prestige, leadership, and responsibility in how we view our identity and the influence that has on ourenvironment.

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Hana Pera Aoake, a Māori artist, writer, teacher, and curator, is the second recipient of the Delfina Foundation residency, a three-month opportunity offered to a curator from Aotearoa New Zealand interested in testing and developing new approaches to a collaborative practice bridging artists and communities. The Delfina Foundation residency, offered in partnership with Te Tuhi and Metroland Cultures,offers the opportunity for a curator to gain training, skills, and experience by being embedded part-time for three months in the curatorial workings of Metroland Cultures in Brent, London. In addition the curator will benefit from free time to pursue their own research, receive mentorship and engage in peer-to-peer exchange by means of being in-residence at DelfinaFoundation.

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Four years after being accepted into the NARS Foundation Residency programme, Justine Walker joins 12 other international artists in New York from 1 April—24 June 2024, with the support of Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa. The three-month residency culminates in an exhibition, open at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, from 31 May—18 June 2024, and includes two open studio days, on 31 May and 1 June2024.

Based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Justine Walker is an interdisciplinary artist interested in feminine subjectivity. Her work explores the lengths we go to, changing and molding ourselves, into something else to satisfy what others – family, friends, society – expect of us. Using repetition, performance and lived experience to produce video and photographic works that are performative in nature, Walker grapples with themes of longing, loss, acceptance andfamily.

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Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania by TBA21–Academy is a new exhibition curated by Bougainville-born artist Taloi Havini and comprising two new site-specific commissions by Indigenous artists from the Pacific: Latai Taumoepeau and Elisapeta HinemoaHeta.

For the new commissions, Havini has invited artist Latai Taumoepeau who uses faivā ("performing art") grounded in Tongan philosophies of relational vā ("space") and tā ("time") to make visible the impact of the climate crisis in the Pacific. In response to Taumoepeau‘s new solo commission, a live project space emerges at Ocean Space that is imagined in collaboration with Wāhine architect Elisapeta Heta, a Māori, Sāmoan and Tokelauan leader and advocate for change, whose work provides Māori and Pasifika perspectives on the importance of place to design and culturalidentity.

In her response to this exhibition Heta presents a new multi-sensory installation, The Body of Wainuiātea, embodying ritual and ceremony guided by the Māori concept of tikanga, derived from the word "tika" which means "right" or "correct", so to act in accordance with tikanga is to behave in a way that is culturally proper or appropriate. Collaborators include Dr Albert Refiti, Hiramarie Moewaka, and RhondaTibble.

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Does heritage only serve to record a bygone era and feed the nostalgia of those living in changing times? How can we collectively learn from the past and forge a betterfuture?

The Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT) celebrates its 5th anniversary with the group exhibition Factory of Tomorrow. Featuring CHAT’s own contemporary art collection and newly commissioned works, it endeavours to critically examine the past and evoke imagination for what is to come. From textile works and sculptures to immersive installations and videos, it brings together creations by 19 artists and collectives of Asian backgrounds, reflecting their takes on textile technology and materials, diversity, climate change and ourfuture.

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Ikon and macLYON present Friends in Love and War — L'Éloge des Meilleurs Enemies, works from the British Council Collection and macLYON that explore the theme of friendship. Based on mutual trust and affection, friendships are among our most valued relationships. With friends we share life experiences, broaden our horizons and build collective futures – yet the nature of friendship is difficult to define. How do we choose our friends? How do society, politics, culture and social media influence friendships? As trusted critics, friends have the potential to hurt us. Do the secrets friends share make them naturalenemies?

Taking place in the partner cities of Lyon and Birmingham (during Autumn/Winter 2024/25), the exhibition also looks at diplomatic friendships, and how regional capitals and cultural institutions can create new ways of living and working together in a post-Brexit climate. It includes painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, film, textile, sculpture and installation, alongside existing and new works by artists with longstanding connections to eachcity.

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David Rickard unveils Synthesis (Heavy Chain), a new permanent sculpture for UCL Institute of Immunity & Transplantation at the Pears Building in London. Developed over two years, the work has been informed by lab visits and many discussions with the researchers at the IIT who are working on groundbreaking cures for such a diverse range of illnesses by decoding the building blocks of immunesystems.

Guided by the coding of Messenger RNA, four different sized chain links sequence all the amino acid types within human biology and a single antibody ‘heavy chain’ suspended into the building entrance, connecting the public space with the research areas above. A short film documenting the work from concept through to installation screens at the opening event on 25 January2024.

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As a celebration of the rich history and contemporary vibrancy of Australia’s First Nations culture, Badu Gili continues the traditions of Bennelong Point, formerly known as Tubowgule (‘where the knowledge waters meet’), a gathering place for community, ceremony and storytelling for thousands of years. Badu Gili: Celestial, the vibrant new animation of powerful First Nations storytelling features the work of Meriam artist, Gail Mabo from Mer Island in the Torres Strait, and international First Nations artist Nikau Hindin, a Te Rarawa and Ngāpuhi woman from Aotearoa NewZealand.

Using Mabo’s star maps constructed out of bamboo and cotton, and Hindin’s Māori aute (bark cloth), the digital animation explores the ancient practices of celestial navigation across two cultures, with vibrant symbols and sounds bringing to life the stories of our skies and waterways. A soundscape accompanies the animation, with powerful music by Nigel Westlake supporting Mabo’s work, and Te Kahureremoa Taumata (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Tūwharetoa) and Te Kuru o te Marama Dewes (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Rangitihi) complementingHindin’s.

The lighting of the sails occurs daily from sunset, 8pm, 8.30pm, 9pm and9.30pm.

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Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice, by Mercedes Vicente, is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences intoproducers.

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Land marks is a new multi-component outdoor work from Rotterdam-based artist Ilke Gers, the first in a series of commissioned public artworks by various artists for the three-year cultural project Border Buda.

Spanning the municipalities of Brussels, Vilvoorde and Machelen, in Belgium, Border Budais an iniative from curators Anna Laganovska and Koi Persyn aiming to revitalise an industrial grey zone. It invites nine artists to realise projects around the transport axes that forms Buda's identity—the railway, the Vilvoorde viaduct, the water, and future bike arteries, and will result in an exhibition and public programme from 26—28 April2024.

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