Ngā takunetanga
Events

Huikaau – where currents meet celebrates the past, present, and future of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection – Aotearoa’s first civic collection of art, which was established in Ōtepoti Dunedin in 1884. This exhibition upholds the stories and ideas carried within the collection, welcomes new arrivals, and continues to work in partnership to bring Māori and indigenous perspectives to the fore.

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‘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.

Step into a vast space, where tradition is not only preserved, but transformed – where the carved line becomes light, movement and code.

Whakairo by Kereama Taepa is a bold fusion of tradition and technology, in which the ancestral art of Māori whakairo (carving) meets the evolving language of augmented reality (AR). In this interactive exhibition, Taepa explores the role of whakairo in contemporary Aotearoa, extending its presence beyond physical form into the digital realm.

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This exhibition is a deeply personal retrospective that honours the artist’s whakapapa (heritage, family line), life journey and enduring legacy in Māori art. Presented for the first time in Tauranga Moana, this major exhibition draws together a curated selection of drawings, paintings, jewellery, and carvings spanning nearly six decades of practice. It is both a homecoming and a tribute to the ancestors, landscapes and stories that have shaped his world.

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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.

Presented alongside the survey exhibition Fred Graham: Toi Whakaata / Reflections, this exhibition provides a focused, in-depth look at Graham’s body of work made about the Waikato River.

This exhibition features a series of works that trace significant places and historic sites along the Waikato awa. Rich with symbolism, the exhibition tracks the length of Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest river from its beginnings at Mount Ruapehu to the powerful currents rushing past the Museum, and onwards to the sea at Te Puuaha o Waikato (Port Waikato).

Image: Fred Graham, Te Puaaha o Waikato (Port Waikato), kauri, swamp kauri, paua shell, custom wood, 2012. Courtesy of the Waikato River Authority.

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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.

After the undercurrents

Gordon Bennett,Emily Karaka

31 January – 11April 2026

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UNSW Galleries - Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021

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‘All the World’s Memories’ brings together 10 artists from Australia and Aotearoa whose practices consider how memory can be seen and understood.

Fiona Clark
J Davies
Nick FitzPatrick
Matthew Harris
Pat Hoffie
Ana Iti
Zac Langdon-Pole
Lillian O’Neil
Grant Stevens
Desmond Woodforde

The exhibition’s title references Toute la mémoire du monde 1956, Alain Resnais’s short film on the ambition (and ultimate impossibility) of preserving human knowledge. Following a book through the Bibliothèque nationale de France, from classification to storage and circulation, the film presents the library as a site where memories are abstracted from lived experience and rendered only legible through institutional authority.

Curated by José Da Silva

An exhibition of mahi toi by Bethany Matai Edmunds-Cook (Ngāti Kuri), featuring woven taonga sculpted from Far North fibres and celebrating the natural colours of our taiao. The exhibition speaks to return, reconnection, and landing - replanting roots back into Muriwhenua through contemporary Māori art practice.

Visual artists and poets were invited to meet, pair up and work together to create original works in their respective disciplines. The results of these collaborative partnerships are presented in ConFluent.

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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Manaia Carswell's first solo exhibition 'Aupiki', explores different aspects of herself, her whakapapa and what it means to be māori today.

Using muka, harakeke and the Māori art of weaving raranga and whatu, she will create installations that will offer up a different perspective.

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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Navigating Slowly interrogates our relationships with whenua by demonstrating forms of traversal that are slow, that are circuitous or circular, that give still time to place, seeking out new knowledge in the land via reversals, retreats, returns, and hauntings. The programme brings together contemporary artists from Aotearoa who share a meditative approach in their visual practice that runs counter to the accelerated narratives of colonialism and capitalism. The works sit with whenua, telling tales of travel, whakapapa, geology, language, and wairua.

Educators - attend a workshop run by 2026 Studio Artist Reuben Paterson, explore the exhibition spaces through collaboration and play and create your own artwork that lives on in our Gallery.

$25 includes professional learning, coffee, morning tea and lunch.

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Details to come

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

CREA (211B, Giudecca Island, Venice)

For two weeks between April and May 2026, Māori artists John Turi-Tiakitai, Kereama Taepa, Neke Moa, and Suzanne Tamaki will gather in Venice to wānanga (share knowledge), share space, and create, culminating in a series of powerful site-responsive activations during the 61st Venice Biennale Vernissage and public opening weekend (5–10 May).

Developed as a partnership between Te Tuhi and CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo on Venice's Giudecca Island, Paerangi: Venice sees the rōpū working collectively and individually across a variety of mediums. Emerging from the kaupapa of Paerangi: Waipawa (2024), presented by Te Tuhi in the small rural Central Hawke's Bay settlement of Waipawa, this international project continues a journey of artistic collaboration, cultural exchange, and community engagement.

Curator Karl Chitham says Paerangi refers to the seat of Ranginui or the horizon, a place of unlimited potential and change. For the artists, all visiting Venice and the Biennale for the first time, Paerangi: Venice offers a horizon of new possibilities, including the opportunity to exhibit work within the context of the world’s most extensive and high-profile art exhibition. The project also provides space to explore cultural exchange and community engagement that

1: John Turi-Tiakitai, Pākē Pōkinikini (detail), 2021. Harakeke, paru. Courtesy of the artist. | 2: Kereama Taepa, Whakaahuapai, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Jhana Millers. Photo by Emily Hartley-Skudder. | 3: Neke Moa, QUEEN!, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Season Aotearoa. 4 | Suzanne Tamaki, For Māori. For Sure, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Norm Heke.

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