You don’t need a map to meet your neighbours
Zara Stanhope
In considering Te Tuhi’s relationship to place, Zara Stanhope’s text cuts to the heart of the gallery’s origins by considering how the emergence of Pakuranga’s built environment influenced the exhibition programme. Stanhope explains how Te Tuhi was founded by local residents to create a sense of place in what was a new town centre, and through which a generative space could be established by running art and design classes. These classes gave students a sense of agency over their new domestic environs during a time when the city was expanding in all directions. With that urban growth over the decades, Stanhope examines how the exhibition programme shifted from presenting domestic forms to curatorial and artistic investigations of the urban condition in an expanded sense.
About Zara Stanhope
Zara Stanhope is the recently arrived Director of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, coming from Ngāmotu where she was the Director, Cultural Experiences including the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery|Len Lye Centre and Puke Ariki Museum and Libraries. She is concerned with engaging communities with contemporary art through meaningful exhibitions, publications and creative dialogues in galleries and in public space, and an enabler of collaborations that foster connections and understanding through art across the South. Zara was the Lead Curator for New Zealand at Venice at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia, 2019 and The 9th and 10th Asia Pacific Triennials at QAGOMA. A writer and editor, she has a PhD from the Australian National University and is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Art and Design at AUT University, Auckland and at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Odd Geometry: Artworks of the foyer
Balamohan Shingade and Erena Shingade
Balamohan and Erena Shingade traverse the threshold between the city and Te Tuhi by unpacking the architectural and social influence of the Pakuranga building. Focusing specifically on works commissioned for Te Tuhi’s transitory spaces such as the foyer, Project Wall and Speaker Space, they prompt poetic and philosophical reflection on how these idiosyncratic spaces and their communal function provide artists opportunities for experimenting with forms of collaboration, manaakitanga, and an appreciation of the quieter forms of creating a pause in the flow of space–time.
About Balamohan Shingade
Balamohan Shingade is a writer, curator, and researcher living in Titirangi. He has published essays on contemporary art, Indigenous-settler relations, authoritarian populism, and the Indian diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand. Currently, he is working on a doctoral thesis in social and political philosophy at the University of Auckland, where he is a teaching fellow. He is also an occasional singer of Hindustani music, and with Erena Shingade, he runs Spoor Books—an independent publisher, a community platform, and an online bookstore featuring titles from India and beyond.
About Erena Shingade
Erena Shingade lives in Titirangi and works as an editor and book publicist. A Master’s graduate in English from the University of Auckland and India’s Seagull School of Publishing, she is co-publisher of Spoor Books—an independent publisher, a community platform, and an online bookstore featuring titles from India and beyond. In 2023, she co-edited the anthology Past the Tower, Under the Tree: Twelve Stories of Learning in Community (GLORIA Books), and her poems and essays have been published by Art + Australia, Atlanta Review, International Gallerie, Ka Mate Ka Ora, Landfall, Mimicry, Minarets, RM Gallery, and The Spinoff.
Centre of the Changing World
K. Emma Ng
Urban changes due to demographic shifts inform K. Emma Ng’s contribution, which examines Te Tuhi amid the increase in Tāmaki Makaurau’s Asian population from the 1990s onwards. Ng assesses how Te Tuhi’s programming addressed this major change by supporting Aotearoa Asian artists to produce new work or featuring international Asian artists and culture. Pausing at various junctures in Te Tuhi’s history, Ng reflects on how curatorial trends, institutional ambitions and regional politics mixed to provide significant opportunities for Aotearoa Asian artists but also limited their representation.
About K. Emma Ng
Emma Ng is a curator and writer living in Wellington. Working within the fields of art and design, she has developed exhibitions and other programmes for galleries and museums across the region, including Enjoy Public Art Gallery, a contemporary art project space that she helmed from January 2014 to August 2016. As a writer, Emma has been published in The Pantograph Punch, ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic and The Spinoff, and has contributed to book projects for New York’s Urban Design Forum and Phaidon.
Fourteen Wild Ecologies at Te Tuhi
Susan Ballard
Susan Ballard pulls on a thread of ecologically responsive artworks and exhibitions. Summoning Te Tuhi’s namesake, the karamea mark left by Ngāi Tai tupuna Manawatere on a pōhutukawa tree, spawns a discussion of fourteen artworks as nodes within a web of human, plant, animal and land relations. Far from harmonious depictures of capital ‘N’ nature, Ballard emphasises that these “unruly ecologies at the core of the gallery begin to connect in ways unseen.” Works by Shona Rapira Davies and Emily Karaka highlight this need for ecological understandings that challenge European colonial perspectives and embrace the agency of whenua and its ability to transform human social and political systems.
About Susan Ballard
Susan Ballard is a Professor of art history and environmental humanities at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research is concerned with the intersections of art and nature, ecology and extraction, care and collaboration. Recent books include the award-winning Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (Routledge 2021) and Alliances in the Anthropocene (with Christine Eriksen, Palgrave 2020). She is currently working on a new book tracing an environmental art history of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Irirangi: The recurring calls of toi Māori
Karl Chitham
Karl Chitham charts the influence that Shona Rapira Davies, Emily Karaka and other wāhine Māori artists have had on the presence of toi Māori within Te Tuhi’s programme. Grounding his discussion in the 1986 exhibition Karanga Karanga by Haeata: Māori Women’s Art Collective, Chitham reflects on how Māori women artists featured strongly in Te Tuhi’s programme of the 1980s and 1990s, with several solo shows by artists who would later become influential. Other poignant moments include the commissioning of major works for international exhibitions as well as large-scale sculptures such as Michael Parekōwhai’s Atarangi II (2006) that towers over Te Tuhi’s Pakuranga venue. While Karanga Karanga signalled Te Tuhi’s embrace of toi Māori, Chitham reflects on how this relationship is just the beginning of an exchange that requires further work to fully embody the wero laid down by the likes of Haeata.
About Karl Chitham
Karl Chitham (Ngā Puhi) is Director of the Dowse Art Museum and was formerly the Director and Curator of Tauranga Art Gallery. He is co-editor of "Crafting Aotearoa: A Cultural History of Making in New Zealand and the Wider Moana Oceania", an Ockham NZ Book Awards shortlisted title. He has been involved in the arts in Aotearoa in a variety of roles. His projects have included a series of exhibitions and accompanying publications highlighting contemporary toi Māori such as "Whatu Manawa: Celebrating the weaving of Matekino Lawless", "Toi Mauri: Contemporary Māori art by Todd Couper" and "Whenua Hou: New Māori ceramics".
Creating Time and Space: Artist commissions at Te Tuhi
Andrew Clifford
Andrew Clifford's essay is an analysis of Te Tuhi’s legacy of commissioning new work. Clifford surveys the range of scales and types of commission, spanning gallery-based works in the 1980s through to Te Tuhi’s landmark commission of Atarangi II. In considering this variety, Clifford studies the impact these commissioning opportunities might have had on artists, and questions why a public gallery would focus its resources into producing new works. Being on the periphery of the country’s economic and cultural epicentre is one factor that Clifford suggests might have aided Te Tuhi in encouraging artists to “step outside their usual practice, or test the boundaries of what that practice can do.”
About Andrew Clifford
Andrew Clifford is the Director of Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui, which reopened in 2024 after a substantial redevelopment. He was previously the inaugural director of Te Uru in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland from 2013-2023. Before that, he was Curator and Acting Director at the University of Auckland's Centre for Art Studies, which managed the Gus Fisher Gallery and the university’s art collection.
His curatorial interests follow the worlds of contemporary art, performance, new media, sound and music. He has contributed articles and essays to publications throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including essays about Gavin Hipkins, Shannon Te Ao, Yuki Kihara, Bepen Bhana, Lisa Reihana, Phil Dadson, Billy Apple, and Reuben Paterson, among others. He has contributed articles to periodicals including ArtAsiaPacific, Art + Australia, Eyeline, Art New Zealand, Art News New Zealand, New Zealand Listener, New Zealand Herald, Pavement, Rip It Up and Vogue.
From 2002-2007 he produced music programmes for Radio New Zealand, preceded by ten years at 95bFM. He has been a judge for the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award, the Pattillo Whanganui Arts Review, the inaugural Jann Medlicott Award for Contemporary Art, and other awards programmes, a juror for the Walters Prize, and has sat on various other selection panels. He holds an MFA from the University of Auckland and is a trustee for the Len Lye Foundation, the Edith Collier Trust, and the Contemporary Art Foundation, and has been a board member for the Audio Foundation and CIRCUIT.
Thirteen shows to tell a story
Caroline Vercoe
Caroline Vercoe weighs up the impact Te Tuhi’s commissioning has had on Pacific art. Vercoe lists thirteen artworks or exhibitions that mark pivot points for the artists and curators involved and help tell a wider story of Pacific artistic practice beyond Te Tuhi’s walls. Her list spans a twenty-nine year period (1989 to 2018) and observes significant paradigm shifts. This list also reads as a roll call of Pacific artists who, through Te Tuhi, have made lasting contributions to Aotearoa’s art history, particularly in conceptual, performance, social engagement, video, painting and curatorial practices.
About Caroline Vercoe
Associate Professor Caroline Vercoe (Samoa, Aotearoa New Zealand) teaches Global Art Histories, Pacific Art Histories, and Contemporary Art in Aotearoa New Zealand at Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland. She specialises in contemporary Pacific art and performance art, with a particular interest in issues of race, gender and representation, and has been teaching, curating and researching in these areas for thirty years.
From where I stand, my eye will send a light to you in the North
Martin Patrick
From an expansion of artists’ and curators’ practices to the expansion in geographical reach, Martin Patrick zeroes in on Te Tuhi’s growing ambition of working with artists outside of Aotearoa alongside the support of early- and mid-career artists based in Aotearoa. Patrick traces this programming emphasis to the early 2000s onwards and provides insights from curators Emma Bugden and Stephen Cleland, who were influential in instigating this shift. Patrick notes that Te Tuhi’s international approach changed in the 2010s from presenting international artists within its gallery walls to commissioning works around the world and supporting residency opportunities for Aotearoa artists in the UK.
About Martin Patrick
Dr Martin Patrick, Associate Professor in Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, is an art critic, historian, and writer. A regular contributor to and reviewer for a variety of national and international publications, his research specifically involves critical writing on interdisciplinary practices and experimental uses of media in the contemporary visual arts. His books include Across the Art/Life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art (2018) and The Performing Observer: Essays on Contemporary Art, Performance and Photography (2023). A Fluxus Guidebook, Martin’s new book, is forthcoming in 2027 (all published by Intellect/University of Chicago Press).
From Map to Topology
Eu Jin Chua
Te Tuhi as a place in tension with its location and global aspirations is addressed by Eu Jin Chua. Resisting the convention of plotting out exhibtions as nodes in a timeline, Chua hones in on just two solo exhibitions presented only seven months apart, Andalucía (2007) by Maddie Leach and Entangled Worlds (2008) by Ruth Watson. Through these exhibitions, Chua speculates on how both place and history lure us into exploring and excavating “all sorts of elsewheres, the elsewheres of geography as well as the elsewheres of the mind.”
About Eu Jin Chua
Eu Jin Chua writes and researches on film, art and architecture. He recently co-edited a special issue of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, and has published in various other scholarly journals, book volumes, exhibition catalogues and media outlets. When based in London, he was a founding associate editor of the Moving Image Review and Art Journal. He is currently an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at his alma mater, the University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, and has also taught at AUT, Unitec and tertiary institutions in the UK.
To Tend a Tangle
Peter Derksen
It seems fitting to give the final word to archivist Peter Derksen to reflect upon the establishment of Te Tuhi’s archive, without which this publication would not have been possible. Derksen details the frustrations and intrigues of archival work, and how this duty of care is vital for organisational memory. While sorting through boxes, Derksen uncovered forgotten photos and documents for groundbreaking exhibitions. Derksen also draws attention to notable absences, material decay and fragility, particularly due to digital obsolescence, that complicate our ability to use the archive as a repository of memory. “This archive is not a relic,” writes Derksen, “it’s an organism,” and like all living things, its growth and decay are part of a vibrant ecosystem of activity and energy.
About Peter Derksen
Peter Derksen is an artist, archivist and writer based in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland. Since 2020 he has been developing the physical exhibition archive at Te Tuhi, as well as researching and digitizing content for the online archive. Recent group exhibitions include twisting, turning, winding at Objectspace, Tamaki Makaurau (2022), and iteration 16 with Rowan Thomson at mothermother, Tämaki Makaurau (2022).