Ngā takunetanga
Events

‘Te Paparahi Toi Māori’ the Auckland Art Walk guide, which brings Māori culture and history to life in the city’s public spaces for Aucklanders and tourists to explore.

Taimoana | Coastlines explores the art of Aotearoa New Zealand, locating it within Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the wider Pacific region. Taking the concept of the coast, or shoreline, as a starting point, the exhibition navigates a sea of ideas, offering multiple perspectives on New Zealand art through a selection of works from the collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

From dazzling UV-light installations to delicate work in harakeke, experience the art of Maureen Lander (Ngāpuhi, Te Hikutu, Pākehā). Lander is one of News Zealand's foremost expert on raranga and a master weaver herself.

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📸 Maarten Holl.

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Two monumental artworks - one made from burnt timber, the other from fired clay. An unmissable opportunity to encounter two icons of contemporary Māori art.

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📸 Jane Harris. Te Papa

Grounded invites visitors to see land not just as terrain, but as a foundation for exploring ecology, sovereignty, memory, and home. Featuring 35 artists based in the Americas and the Pacific, the exhibition showcases 40 works, spanning the 1970s to today, with many on view for the first time. Works include Lisa Reihana’s monumental video installation In Pursuit of Venus [infected] that reimagines colonial narratives from her perspective as a Māori artist; photographs and video by Clarissa Tossin, Laura Aguilar, and Ana Mendieta that trace the artists’ bodies in dialogue with the earth; paintings and sculptures by Eamon Ore Girón, Courtney M. Leonard, and Rose B. Simpson that blend technology with Indigenous iconography and craft; and works by Leslie Martinez and Abraham Cruzvillegas that upcycle everyday materials to document consumption and to suggest possibilities for renewal.

NGV INTERNATIONAL​

180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne​

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This display brings together works by artists and designers from Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia (including the Torres Strait). Spanning diverse periods, places and media – including photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture, video, fashion, tapa and lei – these works explore both contemporary innovation and the preservation of customary cultural practices. Seen together, these works highlight the vitality of art from the Pacific, and its role as a powerful vehicle for storytelling, ceremony, resistance and the transmission of culture across generations.

Along the 60km scenic stretch of State Highway 1 from Oaro to Waiau Toa (Clarence River), experience this unique art trail centred around seven safe stopping places. Pull over to see murals, pouwhenua and tekoteko (carved pillars), beautiful native planting and information panels that share the rich stories of the hapū of Kaikōura.

This collection comprises more than 60 graphic works and paintings by major New Zealand contemporary artist Ralph Hotere. A long-time supporter of the Eastern Southland Gallery, Hotere chose to gift 36 lithographs to Gore in 2001.

Here, “life” takes on many meanings. It could gesture to the unstable and surprising nature of materials, which—despite the best efforts of the institution to halt decay—act in ways that exceed human intention, and inevitably change over time. It could speak to the ways artists transform earthly matter to come to terms with, reclaim, and regenerate ways of seeing, feeling, knowing and being in the world. Life, or liveness, may also signal the aspirations artists hold for artworks to act in service of transformation—to play an active role within the world, or in struggles against injustice.

He Waa Uenuku Queer Horologies showcases the work of ten queer and takataapui artists whose art engages with time. These range from recent NCAA winner Zena Elliott’s trans-microbot installation ‘Hinekahurangi AKL-780’ and choreographic artist val smith’s installation ‘TRUSS’, to Neke Moa’s works of adornment ‘Ko te aroha noa’ and ‘Ngāti’, to Shannon Novak’s AI-altered digital photographs (originally drawn from the Collection of Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum & Gallery and painstakingly modified). Diana Lee-Gobbit, a Suffolk-born multimedia artist is represented by the earliest pieces in the exhibition, three works on paper with futuristic and science fiction themes created in the 1980s. Alongside local artist Elliott, other Kirikiriroa Hamilton artists include 2023 Te Tumu Toi Arts Foundation Springboard recipient Tia Barrett, as well as Kelly Joseph, Nadia Gush and Kahurangiariki Smith. Former Wintec lecturer Lisa Benson is also represented in the exhibition.

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An immersive installation considering the legacies of deforestation and significance of kauri trees.

In this new commission, Ana Iti (Te Rarawa, Ngāi Tūpoto, Ngāti Here) references kauri logging, an industry that flourished in Te Tai Tokerau during the nineteenth century. Drawn using charcoal from burnt kauri timber, large saw teeth cut into the substructure of the gallery. Chain and metal pipes hint at the form of a marine crane, or how logs are bound for transport in waterways. The relationship of rākau to wai, or tree to water, reflects the kinship of kauri to tohorā, the Southern right whale. Both now face the threat of extinction, a sign of broader ecological devastation.

Ana Iti, research image 2025

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He whetū i te rangi, he whetū ki te whenua
A star in the sky, a star on the earth

Taku Rau Tīkumu explores the enduring relationship between people and alpine landscapes through the story of tīkumu, a resilient mountain plant bound to generations of knowledge, skill, and care. Featuring a significant collection of tīkumu taonga, the exhibition weaves together mātauranga Māori, science, oral histories, photographs, and rare records from across Aotearoa.

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Tātai Tuarangi: Star Seeds, Sound Waves and Ceremonies gathers together practices attuned to the sky - to lunar time, celestial movement, seasonal transitions and the vastness of the cosmos.  By chance, the exhibition period of Tātai Tuarangi, crosses into the season of Matariki, the rising of the star cluster that signals both an astronomical event and a cultural observance grounded in remembrance, collective reflection and renewal.  The works of Albert Refiti, Ana Iti, Mara TK, Megan Brady and Saffronn Te Ratana unfold within this moment of heightened celestial awareness. Together, their offerings move between sound, installation, drawing, sculpture and research, to consider astral and planetary forces, rhythms and cycles, and human connection and relationships.

A space to create, connect and share!

No pressure, no expectations - just time set aside for creativity and good company.

What to expect?

- casual kōrero

- creative flow

- tea & coffee provided

- space to share and get feedback on projects

- occasional guest speakers

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Join us on Thursdays as we explore screen printing, cyanotype, etching and more, with every second workshop following our social club - A toast to Toi.

We'll be working toward a Matariki exhibition, with the chance to exhibit work made through the workshops.

Open to all levels - come make, learn and experiment with us.

Initial fee for materials - $50pp

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Te Ahikāroa is an exhibition celebrating the artists and stories of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection within the unique context of Ōtepoti Dunedin. Building from a new book of the same title, the exhibition uses artworks to explore ideas of arrival and departure; ways of occupying and experiencing land and the natural environment; buildings, structures and spaces of shelter and protection; and the sharing of stories through art. Acknowledging mana whenua and the concept of ahi kā as an expression of the continuous occupation of land through whakapapa, Te Ahikāroa offers audiences a rich sense of the unique location and history of this institution, the wide range of artists represented in the collection, and the artistic, cultural, and historic context of their works.

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RALPH HOTERE and BILL CULBERTP.R.O.P.1991 (detail). Corrugated iron and neon tube lights. Collection Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Reproduced by permission of the Hotere Foundation Trust and the Bill & Pip Culbert Trust

Across many Indigenous and diasporic communities, colour has been regulated through systems of shame and aesthetic discipline. Throughout different colonial contexts around the world, Indigenous people have been marked through local slurs that cast them as excessive, vulgar, dirty, or unrefined whenever they sustain their own colour systems and refuse assimilation into whiteness. This exhibition names that refusal as a sovereign knowledge system and as continuity. Bringing together twenty-three artists working across Indigenous territories and diasporic networks spanning Abya Yala, Turtle Island, Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, Sápmi, and Yorubaland, the exhibition traces how colour operates as a living system of knowledge across distinct lineages, materials, and relations.

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Image: uku from Stevie Houkāmau 📷 @labelleprovenance

Drawing from the waiata tangi Te Tangi a Tamapāhore, the exhibition traces the ancestral pathways and explores how whakapapa and kōrero tuku iho continue to shape contemporary practice. Together, mahi toi and taonga are presented in conversation, across time, material, and perspective.

Fiona Pardington presents seventeen striking large-scale portraits of birds. Rich with impossible beauty and aching loss, they continue her exploration of taxidermied native birds from museum collections around Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Highlighting the deep material and cultural significance of birds in the Māori world, she engages directly with them as ancestors and messengers between physical and spiritual realms. A flock reappears from the darkness; renewed, enigmatic and vividly present.

Some of these birds are extinct; others, critically endangered. All underscore the ecological and cultural losses wreaked by humans. Pardington’s attentive approach gives them new life, creating a powerful tribute that acknowledges our shared responsibility.

These towering birds meet us eye to eye, not merely replicated, but reborn. In their frank gaze, we see glimpses of their original habitats, taken from 19th century photographs. This act of care counters the isolation of museum drawers and vitrines, returning them once again to the wild.

What does it mean when an artist tilts our view skywards? Horizons mark the limit of our vision, the curve where knowledge gives way to mystery. Taharaki Skyside holds us at this threshold between the familiar and the unknown.

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Silent Kōrero is conceived as a gathering - a quiet hui of conversations that have unfolded in Peata Larkin’s studio over the past two decades. It brings together works created across time, uniting the past to the present. Each artwork carries the memory of the one before it, where the symbolism of tukutuku, tāniko and raranga operate as a personal and collective visual language and acts of reclamation. They embody knowledge and genealogy, and embrace the rhythms of the artist’s tūpuna, who wove, bound, and carved before her.

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The Old Library Ōmokoroa, 9 McDonnell Street, Ōmokoroa 3114

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‍Threads of Connection explores the visible and unseen ties that bind people, stories, and creative practice. Like woven threads, these connections move between generations, communities, and the natural world.

Featuring Guest Artist Darcy Nicholas with new works, alongside Que Bidois, Arohanoa Mathews, Garry Webber, Alie Henderson, and Alison Badger, the exhibition reflects a bicultural exchange grounded in shared knowledge and creative dialogue.

Threads appear in many forms: fibre and weaving in textiles; line and pattern carved into wood; gesture and layered surfaces in painting. Each carries memory, process, and meaning.

Together, the works reveal creativity as fluid and interconnected. Like the winds of Ururangi that signal change and the Māori New Year, each piece connects artist, environment, and community.

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Katie Brown & Co presents Show Us Your Brooch, a group exhibition celebrating the creativity, craftsmanship and individuality of the brooch.Behind every brooch is a story, a tiny sculpture, a statement, a memory, a moment of wearable art.The exhibition brings together an inspiring lineup of contemporary makers, jewellers and artists, exploring how small objects can carry big meaning through adornment, material and personal expression.

An exhibition about whenua and friendship and heartache and community and bones and whakapapa and grief and love.Based across Te Whanganui-a-Tara and Ōtautahi, Turumeke Harrington (Kāi Tahu, Rangitāne) works across sculpture, painting, jewellery, design, and installation to explore how colour, material, and form embody mātauranga Māori. Her playful works sit between art and design, combining humour and whakapapa to reimagine cultural narratives within contemporary space.