Commissioned and compiled by Christina Barton

On November 29 I sent out 25 emails to colleagues around the world asking them for quick-fire responses to these four questions:

1. In what shape do you think the/your art world is currently? 2. What are the most important issues facing artists at the moment? 3. Is there an art work/artist/exhibition/initiative that you think is particularly relevant now? 4. What would you hope for/expect of art in the immediate future?

I knew the timing was lousy, catching people at the end of their busy year, but it seemed important that we take the temperature of the art world at a time when, as one respondent who couldn’t meet my deadline put it, ‘Aotearoa – [like the rest of the world] – feels like it’s on fire’.

Gathered here are the thoughts of 18 individuals who were able to offer a response.* This may be a random snapshot, but it tells me that despite the horrors facing the world and the challenges facing Aotearoa, those of us involved in the art system still believe art has a purpose and many are finding succour and sustenance in small and sympathetic activities that are more likely to be off rather than on the grid. And while there is consternation at the repercussions for the art world of the events of October 7 2023, the war in Gaza, and the change of government in Aotearoa New Zealand (amongst other conflicts, calamities and political turns) and frustration with art’s capture by the market and its ‘horizontalisation’ by the rule of ‘likes’, there is still a sense of hope that the structures that support and showcase art can play a role in leading debate and effecting change. I am struck by the variety of responses and thank everyone who contributed for sharing their insights and thoughts on this public platform.

For me the idea that art can lead debate and effect change was memorably demonstrated when Enjoy Contemporary Art Space responded with alacrity by printing and selling A3 posters of the redacted Treaty of Waitangi, the result of an action carried out in Te Papa’s Tiriti exhibition by members of the artist/activist group Te Waka Hourua on December 11 2023. Enjoy described the posters as ‘a reflection of the original artwork made by Te Waka Hourua… that is available to view at Te Papa’ and offered these for $10, with all proceeds directed to support the group’s legal costs. According to Enjoy Director, Daniel John Corbett Sanders, they literally flew out the door, with interest expressed from all over the world. When I contacted Sanders before Christmas he told me Enjoy’s Instagram post announcing the posters had already registered nearly 7000 likes (probably a record for a public gallery in New Zealand) and he noted there had been no negative feedback. Here a small, Creative New Zealand-funded institution took a bold but clearly endorsed stand; a gesture of solidarity only possible because the organisation found an effective way to sympathise with the cause and was small enough and at the edge of mainstream visibility to act swiftly and decisively.

To me the take-aways of this are twofold. On the one hand I am struck by the power and effectiveness of social media in communicating a message and building an audience, one that is powerfully galvanising in comparison to the so-called ‘legacy’ media. Linked to this, I am intensely aware of the growing breach between the larger institutions and the forces that control them, and smaller cultural agents who are calling them to account. On the other, I am intrigued by the activists’ claim that their action has produced a work of art.

Te Papa will have to interrogate this statement as it impinges on their core function as guardian of the nation’s art. If they decide this is an act of vandalism against cultural property, then what exactly was vandalised? A text mechanically reproduced as a visual element in a display designed to inform and educate the public? A graphic component of a contracted design team’s creative labour in finding a way to ‘translate’ Aotearoa’s founding document? In either case the panel was never imbued with the mana of art (it was not made or designated as art by an artist). This means the crime of cultural desecration does not hold (though a charge of wilful damage may).

In contrast, Te Waka Hourua’s declaration that the result of their redacting this controversial text is art turns the tables on the display. Now their work hangs in the museum as a document of a performative act, it is in this guise that visitors are thronging to see the work, and it is in this capacity that Enjoy has made an affordable poster for us all to access. Hail to the power of art! Here the legacy of the critical avant-garde (post-Duchamp) meets a powerful display of political activism meets the distributed formats in which all art circulates today. This panel-that-was-not-art has become what it was not: a painting, a poster, a cultural event. What a potent way to see in the new year!

*Writers have kindly agreed to donate their fees. In lieu of payment and following the suggestions of authors, ArtNow is donating to Contemporary Hum’s Boosted campaign and to the UNICEF Children of Gaza campaign.

Christina Barton is a member of the ArtNow Essays editorial advisory. She is an art historian, writer, curator and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.

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Kim Meredith

There are almost 2000 images in the 12 metre × 3.5 metre photomural Stolen/Time II, across three walls in the Hastings Art Gallery, depicting the current Gaza landscape by Janet Lilo (Te Rarawa, Sāmoa, Niue).

The first version of Stolen/Time was part of group show, Vital Machinery, curated by Lucy Hammonds and Sophie Davis, which launched at Dunedin Public Art Gallery in November 2022. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland-based Lilo, renowned for capturing the minutiae of life, produced Stolen/Time II, compelled into action by the Gaza siege that has seen around 18,000 Palestinians killed so far, including 6,600 children (that’s roughly eliminating the population of 24 primary schools in Aotearoa, New Zealand).

She describes the work (a five day install with the gallery team) as an honest and very large-scale response. ‘This is not an afterthought, I couldn’t not respond to what is happening right now.’

Using photographs from her hand-drawn images, depicting the work of Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Asaiza, Lilo has painstakingly pieced the images together like a giant jigsaw puzzle; perhaps a reference to the bombing that’s reduced the Gaza strip to rubble. Stolen/Time II recreates this landscape featuring the symbolic watermelon (a defiant gesture of the once banned Palestinian flag) magnified to the same scale as buildings and other landmark structures.

Her fondness for using an analogue approach alongside the digital medium, has resulted in a work that enamours the viewer, drawing them in, before there’s even a real sense or understanding of what’s going on.

‘Which is what I’ve always been interested in… I like to track time. And whatever is happening, be it small or a large global situation, sometimes those things crossover. And it really landed at a time, where I couldn’t ignore what was happening in Palestine,’ she said, referring to the hesitancy of world leaders to take action.

Lilo, a 40 year-old mother of three, has symbolically matched the sheer scale of the Gaza siege with Stolen/Time II; convincing me this is a conversation we must join. The capacity and ability of artists in Aotearoa, and around the world, leveraging their social capital to implore action in the Gaza strip, has been nothing short of impressive. Through their work and platforms, the arts world, including Lilo, have been highly vocal and visible in calling for an end to the attacks.

I recall telling my students that as creatives they hold one of the most important roles in society—archiving the world around them in real-time, producing what will be unfettered snapshots of history. They were doubtful. But take a look around, from the moment footage appeared across social media showing the siege, artists acted swiftly and incisively. It’s taken world leaders two and a half months to end their silence and finally join this all-important conversation.

Kim Meredith (Sāmoa, Tokelau, Portuguese) is a gallerist, writer and multimedia artist and heads Kim Meredith Gallery, an artist-led, tagata moana space in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

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Misal Adnan Yildiz

When I think about the shape of the art world currently I would say that institutions have been in crisis for a while. I don’t think it ever got back on track after the pandemic. The new ways of crisis management in art culture have become more brutal, politically incorrect, and elusive; agendas, dynamics, and positions change suddenly. Who would believe that Hito Steyerl, Dorothee Richter, and Johann König would be on the same side in a political dispute? My world is also upside down.

I have been working for more than three years in a German state institution, sharing salary and insisting on the possibility of collective authorship. Our struggle has been not only against the conservative context of provinciality or state bureaucracy, but also systematic racism, discrimination, and cultural misunderstandings. Since October 7, the political climate has shifted from post-liberal to a sort of witch hunt. The committee for finding the next documenta edition resigned with a dramatic statement! We are now talking about cancellations of awards and exhibitions just because the artists and authors make pro-Palestinian statements. There are also protests from different factions and even police at the university. The Germany I know has never been this fucked up, and I think we are seeing turbulence that has not been experienced for 60 years.

I think the most important issues facing artists are, first, freedom of speech and expression. Second, institutions are limiting us with their formats and asking artists and others to fill them with their content, and I am not sure whether anyone is open to breaking these formats, even to question! I would also say that the art world has become the playground for collectors, elites, and oligarchs. When I came into the scene during the early 2000s there was room for change, engagement, and politics. Art is becoming an entertainment, power arena, and social club for self-design. If we leave criticality, politics and community, what stays with us?

In terms of hope or expectations for the future, I propose to develop autonomous structures, free spaces and open access. I think it is time to invest in art history more and more, especially, the history of conceptual art. Works by Etel Adnan, Mutlu Çerkez, Harry Hachmeister, Aslan Goisum, Juliet Carpenter, and Jesse Darling among others inspire me a lot.

Misal Adnan Yildiz is a curator, educator and writer. Since May 2020 he has been sharing the post of Director at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden with Çağla İlk.

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Tamsen Hopkinson

In Francis Carmody’s latest show A Relic Remains, a huge decaying tooth is suspended in the middle of the gallery. It’s a farcical scene that imagines Atlas, condemned by Zeus to an eternal hell of holding up the heavens, with a toothache. The absurd sense of scale links something as ordinary as tooth decay to the universal, commenting on the world’s insatiable appetite for progress and its contribution to our present deterioration.

The cognitive dissonance of contemporary art is illuminated by the current and growing tensions between artists and art institutions. We have witnessed the censorship of artists across the world condemning the ongoing genocide in Gaza and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Art institutions aiding in the process of colonisation by prioritising money from patrons and funding bodies is a dangerous misuse of privilege and power. It creates a monoculture that serves a select few at the ultimate expense of many. What is the relevance of art institutions without artists? I’m reminded of the words of Hāmiora Tumutara Pio in Ralph Hotere’s 1972 painting I saw as part of Toi Tū Toi Ora curated by Nigel Borell:

I have an ancestor of my own. You keep to your ancestor and I will keep to mine . . . Rangi is my ancestor, the origin of the Māori people. Your ancestor is money.

Addressing the decay of the past propels artists into the future faster than institutions can keep up with. Artistic agency is stronger than ever and leads to a varied and interesting mix of spaces that prioritise artists and facilitate a diversity of ideas across contemporary art, music, film and literature. In Greek mythology Atlas is the god of both endurance and astronomy. As Māori we are experts in celestial navigation so we turn and face Rangi and the Sun. Here is a short, inconclusive list of a few initiatives between Naarm and Aotearoa that I am excited by or often refer to: Asbestos, Best Soup, Coastal Signs, Composite, Discipline, Efficient Space, Guzzler, Hyacinth, HOEA!, Kei Te Pai Press, Lulus, nattysolo, Omniversal HUM, Perimeter Books, proppaNOW, Negative Press, Read the Room, recess, Robert Heald, TCB, The Psychic Weather Report, this mob, Treadler, un Projects.

Tamsen Hopkinson (Ngāti Kahungunu ki Te Wairoa, Ngāti Pāhauwera) is an artist and curator from Aotearoa based in Naarm Melbourne, Australia.

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Elle Loui August

Perhaps the ancient world had finer language, more fitting metaphors for periods of rupture, splitting apart—a goddess of wisdom emerging from the cracked open skull of her father; a son forcing his parents apart to invite the flow of lifeforce, light; myriad monsters whose ire stirs beneath the earth. Summoning a sense of events within the greater lived continuum—attempting to grasp a thread of what is termed rather weakly in English ‘hope’ or is perhaps better expressed through the Arabic notion ‘sabr’—seems to rest on locating a vocabulary that offers dignity and purpose in the face of extreme violence.

In October, I pulled Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force from the bookshelf, thinking it an apt text to look into far and near distances. Yet its stirring meditation on subjugation and war offered only nausea. Reflecting from the eve of a modern world war on a poem which is the vessel for an ancient one, Weil’s essay surmises that dehumanising force is the true character of the Iliad, the (anti) hero of the day. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) require repeating here that for the past eleven weeks we have been witness to the same dehumanising force, that this has shaken the world, breaking open the global heart. As such we have borne witness to texts and images that both empower and resist the operations of force, to the distortion and policing of language, to manipulative struggles for narrative control. To censorship.

In Aotearoa me Te Waipounamu too, language has been weaponised, threatening distressing, real world consequences. How does one bear it, what can one say (Toitū Te Tiriti!), how will we align our commitments to understanding and action? The contemporary media worlds in which art participates often move sharply to diagnose and catastrophise, using language that fosters an anglophone smokescreen. In contrast, I’ve been reflecting on a memory of Ngahiraka Mason, former Curator Māori at Auckland Art Gallery, calming an anxious young person during a public seminar: reminding them that it was a Pākehā worldview and patterns of thought that cultivate this notion of crisis, that this did not reflect her own worldview.

In Moeraki in December, looking out on the fishing boats, I read again the words of art historian T’ai Smith writing on artist Anni Albers, herself no stranger to conflict and war. Smith reflects on a period of Alber’s intellectual work as marking a shift from a ‘philosophical lens (to)...a philosophical net’. This shift looks slight on the page, yet the possible worlds it points to are manifold. ‘It is the story that makes all of the difference’ writes Ursula Le Guin in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. It is the story that weaves the world back together. I think of one of my favourite exhibitions of the year, Hīnaki: Contemplation of a Form at Te Papa, how it demonstrated this idea so gracefully.

Sources mentioned: War and the Iliad: Simone Weil & Rachel Bespaloff, introduced by Christopher Benfey. New York Review Books, 2005.T’ai Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ignota Books, 2019.Hinaki: Contemplation of a Form, Te Papa Tongarewa, Museum of New Zealand*

Elle Loui August is a writer and curator based in Ōtepoti Dunedin.

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Evangeline Riddiford Graham

Pottery is, necessarily, in conversation with dirt: our first artistic expression, pulled from clay, and last relic of our buried civilizations.¹ This summer Times Square smelled like a campfire as black ash blew down from Canada’s forests. We went to the Blackberry movie then drank disgusting cocktails at Margaritaville, 32 floors high in smoke. In the haze of New York City in 2023, what more could we need or want from art than the sympathetic magic of ceramics? The clay bust summons its body. The raku cup calls back to the rock.

In the Bronx, Grace Sachi Troxell’s Cosmic Daikon mingles slip-cast body parts—her aunt’s stomach, partner’s arm, mother’s breasts—with plaster outcroppings of fennel, garlic, and radishes. These bulbous hybrid torsos thrust from the gallery floor on a tangle of steel legs, like new growths spurting so vigorously from the ground they bring some rhizome with them. Troxell’s father, Robert, is also a ceramicist, and between them, clay amounts to a lost-and-found heritage.

In Jumana Manna’s Break, Take, Erase at MoMA PS1 in Queens, land reclaims ceramics as a political vessel. Creamy earthenware sculptures riffing on ancient Levant food storage systems perch atop pillars of contemporary infrastructure: galvanised metal grids and concrete H-blocks. Nearby, ‘Old Bread International’ recreates the Mediterranean tradition of bread left out for passersby—and to the elements. The interchange between earth, food, custom, and dispossession carries into Manna’s video works. In ‘Wild Relatives’, Svalbard’s Global Seed Vault opens its emergency store to rebuild the Aleppo seed bank in Lebanon; there, local farmers forsake crops for the stable income of renting their fields as refugee camps. In ‘Foragers’, displaced Palestinians dodge the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority to pick ’akkoub and za’atar herbs amidst the rubble of their former homes. Geopolitics destabilise the very soil that grows our seeds, and Manna’s clay holds this legacy of displacement.

Too big to relocate for her New Museum retrospective Herstory, Judy Chicago’s ‘The Dinner Party’ remains in leviathan splendour at the Brooklyn Museum. The installation is so monumental one can forget the erupting vulva plates at the centre are porcelain. Despite that steely satin glaze and sea-creature bristle—not to mention museum security—Chicago’s sculptures lead a precarious existence. The Primordial Goddess, to whom the first plate is dedicated, could call them back any minute.

And at Canal Projects in downtown Manhattan, Candice Lin invokes a primordial earth that doesn’t just beckon: she rises through the plumbing to come get you. In Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory, the battery plant’s work stations have gone a little weird: electroplating machines are powered by fermenting soybeans piped into giant onggi and desktop monitors are supplanted by ossified-looking ceramic frogs that display deliciously glitchy animations of a six-teated demon with a shining, psychedelic pelt (is that the lustre of a lithium glaze?) as she falls through an abyss, smokes a used tampon with her colleagues, and battles with a martial arts master over the body of a female factory worker while flying through a galaxy neither malevolent nor caring. ‘An exorcism of what is forbidden and cannot speak up for itself’ observes pencil scrawl on a Post-It note. The worker may be alienated, but the sex demon dug from the ground is going to put up a fight for her.

Note ¹ Prudence M. Rice, ‘On the Origins of Pottery’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 6, no. 1, March 1999, p. 4.

Evangeline Riddiford Graham is a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand currently living in New York.

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Teresa Collins

I’m based in Limerick / Luimneach, a city in the mid-west of Ireland. Where I’m placed, my mind is split between arts activity here and drawing links back to Aotearoa.

TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is held each year in Galway, this year’s programme was curated by Iarlaith Ní Fheorais. Borrowing its title from an Irish folk cure, Honey, milk & salt in a seashell before sunrise weaved experiences of disability with home and intimacy, taking on issues such as access, health and medicine in the West of Ireland. Artists in this programme expressed the complex lived experience of queerness, illness and disability, as interlinked parts of the social construction of our bodies, in ways both extremely generous and uncompromising. Rouzbeh Shadpey’s Forgetting Is the Sun (2023) features the artists grandmother as she counts tesbih (prayer beads) while undergoing a medical memory test, alongside borrowed footage from films that challenge regimes of remembering. Weedkiller (2017) by P. Staff, shares an account of cancer and trans experience through monologue, choreographed gestures and lip-sync performance.

Recently, I visited Sorawit Songsataya toward the end of a residency in London, leaving their studio with a renewed awareness of time. When talking about the process of filming Shoulders of Giants (2023) Sorawit described how, in response to the geology, history and mana of the landscape, the piece became longer in duration than initially intended. Sharing their work in progress, two or three voices are given room to be heard, rather than many. Alongside this navigation of time are light-handed methods of introducing and adorning details that communicate queer experience and attitudes which feel very immediate; fake lashes fleck the grain of handmade paper, acrylic varnish coats the fabric of cassette tape vinyl. Sorawit’s practice synthesizes components to activate and redefine relationships to ecology, doing so in a way that feels sensitive, enchanted and interconnected.

I’m part of a new artist-run project in Limerick city called STARLING. My hope for this space is that it can be a threshold between worlds (artists, locations, disciplines, communities). Limerick is special, it holds a population with the drive and energy for the city to have a vibrant music and arts scene despite lack of affordable space. The response to the emergence of STARLING has been so heartening. I think we are experiencing a collective surge for interconnectedness. We are seeing expressions of solidarity between nations through shared histories of resistance and of reckoning. Right now it feels like artists have a strong desire to work collaboratively and are fuelled by the excitement of raw possibility. I’m hoping to see more art happening in alternative spaces, with an urgency and immediacy that can channel tangible social energies; that can hold and communicate care, love, support, nervousness; that can locate the extreme preciousness of encounters, gatherings and happenings.

Teresa Collins is a Pākehā artist from Aotearoa New Zealand and Ireland. They are the co-founder of artist-run space STARLING in Limerick city, Ireland.

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Hanahiva Rose

I have been inspired recently by the programming being done by small arts organisations here in Aotearoa and around the world—programming that works at pace, finding ways to respond with urgency to the pain and the beauty of the world we live in. Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, The Physics Room, HOEA!, Kei Te Pai Press and STARLING have been particularly instructive.

I find myself leaning more heavily on individual artworks and texts—circling around them, returning again and again. Marilyn Webb’s Floating shadows and dark water feels like the hazy memory of a dream, and though I know the unwieldy lines coursing through the floating figure are shadows, I can’t help but think of them as roots. Colleen Maria Lenihan’s Kōhine shares this sense of fleeting familiarity and its depth, darkness and grace have stayed with me over the year. Hearing Colleen speak about writing at the Adam Art Gallery, standing beside Ana Iti’s A dusty handrail on the track, opened up new ways of thinking about how to write through whakapapa. And then! Rachel Buchanan’s luminous, spiralling Gordon H. Brown lecture bought whakapapa and art history together with energy and force. Our ever-expanding constellations of Māori artists, writers, thinkers: so vital, so determined, so dearly needed.

I am uncertain about what the future will bring and there are many things I feel deeply worried by. But I am thankful, as ever, for how art gives me a way through the world. It cracks things open, pushes past—shapes and re-shapes how and what I see. I’m so grateful to the artists and art workers who make that possible.

Hanahiva Rose is a curator, writer, and PhD candidate in art history at Victoria University.

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Rex Butler

It’s a photo of people taking photos of a banana. Underneath, it shows the number of people who have liked the photo.

Why are the people taking a photo? To prove that they have seen the banana. We might even say that they did not see the banana, or at least have no proof they saw the banana, until they took a photo of it. But then, of course, in another way, it’s not them who are actually seeing the banana, but the camera in their phone. The banana has slipped away and all there is is this photo. The banana just is its photograph.

And then there are the likes down the bottom. In a way, it doesn’t matter what is liked or why it is liked. It’s just that it is liked. The likes take the place of the thing itself. And that’s the way it is with everything nowadays. Click onto a serious academic article, even in a serious refereed journal, and you’ll find on the journal page before you read it the number of people who have already read it—well, who have actually opened the page—before you. And you know that, whatever you think of the article, your reading it will add to that number and make it seem more important than another article with fewer numbers. Even the number of times an article is cited—the kind of thing universities look at when they evaluate the ‘impact’ of research—does not take into account whether that citation is positive or negative, understood or not. It’s only the number. And universities certainly don’t have the time or the desire to evaluate seriously the ‘quality’ of the research. No one has the ability or authority to do that anymore, and any criteria they would bring to bear upon the exercise would be endlessly disputed.

It’s all in the numbers, and increasingly—numerically—so. Numbers are the measure of all things. And it’s all very well for academics to be snobbish about art galleries rating themselves by visitor numbers—like the National Gallery of Victoria showing Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian and David Shrigley’s Melbourne Tennis Ball Exchange in the current Triennial—but their own enterprise is also entirely, or at least increasingly, ‘populist’ in exactly the same way.

And, in another way, art is a reflection of its audience or even just is its audience (or, at least, that would be its ideal). Take two recent exhibitions: Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia in 2020 and Who Are You at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2022. Importantly, towards the end of Know My Name, an exhibition about the historical under-representation of women artists in its Australian art collection, the NGA unveiled a Gender Equity Plan in which it committed to collect 40% male, 40% female and 20% gender diverse artists. This was not a policy of over-collecting women artists to make up for their historical under-representation, but an attempt to demographically reproduce the Australian population. Equally revealingly, Who Are You, a large exhibition that used portraiture as a way of showing contemporary Australian society what it looked like today, was also conceived as a visual reflection of its audience. In both cases, art or the collection of art was understood as the same as something being judged by the number of likes it received or the equivalent number of spectators who came to see it.

What would it mean to think about this critically or even in some way to oppose it? Would it make one reactionary or conservative? In fact, in America it’s Donald Trump who opposes this numerical democracy, although we would also say that this emptying out of values and the reduction of things to numbers is precisely the populist project of Trump. But then what would be the supposed ‘higher’ value in the name of which we could challenge this ‘horizontalisation’ of art and its audience? In one way, it could only be a higher number, a bigger audience. That would be democracy. But, in another way, it would be to break this assumed equivalence between quality and numbers, art and its audience, the merit of an academic article and the number of people who have clicked on it.

However, today this feels increasingly impossible. After all, the merits of this little piece will rise or fall on the number of people who read it (luckily, I will be counted along with all of the others on the same webpage). What I say—a bit like certain understandings of the ‘death of the author’—will only be what people think I say. Indeed—even more dead than Barthes’ dead author—I will only be how many readers think I say something. As people realise when they try to steal Cattelan’s banana, there is actually no need for bananas anymore, just for people to take photos.

Rex Butler is an art historian and writer currently teaching art history and theory at Monash University in Melbourne.

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Tessa Giblin

In an increasingly polarised world, museums, galleries and art spaces can hold an essential space open for the diverse opinions, complicated histories and entangled communities that make up our cultures. They can uphold a promise to hear and see the cultures, forms and stories of our world with open minds. They can still—if we want them to—provide a platform for debate that intersects with wider cultural, societal and political conversations, celebrating the complex over the reductive. Our institutions can be places in which issues can be explored and histories excavated through the lens of art —which means seeing things from alternative, creative and unfamiliar positions—in a spirit of discovery. But, to be so open in these polarised times is to be exposed.

To be able to build safe environments for artists and their artworks that try to ‘stay with the trouble’ can be stressful, but it can also be deeply rewarding, enlightening and hopeful too. When I watch the stance taken by Candice Breitz during these last weeks of December, as she is de-platformed for (essentially) being Jewish and calling for ceasefire in Palestine, I’m inspired by her rigour and total confidence in her own artistic voice. I’m reminded of the pressure artists put on each other during Juliana Engberg’s Sydney Biennale (2014) to boycott the biennale (for legitimate reasons). It’s a story not easily forgotten, but what really stuck in my mind was the grace with which Juliana rode the storm she found herself in as the artistic director, and most clearly, how she encouraged artists to use their art to voice their opinions, rather than be silent through boycott.

It requires research, sense-checking, thinking in the round, hunting out allies and experts, and a certain amount of courage to be able to navigate through difficult, polarised situations, whilst trying to hold a space open for artists to negotiate and engage through their artworks. Institutions—if they are willing to walk into the fire with artists—need to prepare themselves, and to work out whether it is their opinion or the platform they hold open for artists that matters. Part of being prepared is being able to be hospitable to others’ perspectives; to avoid being trapped inside our own echo-chambers. Being prepared might even require an institution being willing to destabilise its own authority to enable other versions of what art can be.

Tessa Giblin is director of Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Gregory Burke

Following the merciless Hamas attack in southern Israel and Israel’s consequent devastating invasion of Gaza, Walter Benjamin’s 1940 writing on “the angel of history” sprang to mind. An antithesis to the idea of history as progress, Benjamin pictured an angel looking back in dread as it is propelled into the future by a series of accumulating catastrophes. Inspired by Paul Klee’s monoprint Angelus Novus, 1920, this trope, conjured by Benjamin during the holocaust, also seems acutely apt in considering conflicts subsequently enveloping eastern Mediterranean territories, not least, the worsening cataclysmic crisis in Gaza.

I think of Benjamin also, considering the stream of cancellations of artists and intellectuals voicing concerns over this crisis. Fleeing Berlin in 1933 Benjamin carried Angelus Novus with him until his death in Spain in 1940. Faced with deportation to Paris, Benjamin took his own life knowing he faced certain death in Gestapo hands for being both Jewish and high on their hitlist as a Marxist-leaning intellectual critical of German fascism. Notably, while Benjamin embraced Judaic spirituality, he was also an early critic of the racial foundation of Zionism, which illuminates the incongruity of the German Government conveying zero tolerance for antisemitism, through an imperative to silence any critique of Israeli policies. For it was the persecution and elimination of many groups, including intellectuals like Benjamin and artists branded degenerate like Klee, that empowered the silencing of the German people in the face of atrocities committed in their name.

One result of such disavowal of critique is the turmoil currently enveloping documenta; particularly ominous given its bellwether status in the artworld. Following condemnation by Germany’s culture minister, Finding Committee member Ranjit Hoskote was alarmingly forced to resign, followed abruptly by the rest of the committee who concluded the event was untenable in the current climate. Hoskote’s ‘infraction’ was signing a group letter years ago comparing the racially determined ideology of Hindutva in India with Zionism. His views should not have come as a surprise. Like Benjamin censuring the racial basis of Zionism, Hoskote has long been similarly critical of Hinduvta. More relevant is the depth of Hoskote’s work as a theorist, curator, and poet, which repudiates dogma in favour of the ‘reflexive agency’ of critique, an approach documenta sorely needs at this point.

In Germany concern is mounting that museums will increasingly self-censor and lean toward anodyne programming. Already much on offer at larger institutions, while worthy, is curatorially safe and often market friendly. A standout exception is the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). Festivities surrounding its June relaunch, under the new leadership of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, released a palpable sense of joy among the most culturally diverse audience I have witnessed at an opening in Europe. The programme since has been exceptional too, focussed mainly on artists from colonized and neo-colonized territories and marked by curatorial nous, and poetic engagement with stories of empowerment and survival. The programme’s prescience provides documenta an exemplar, but ironically while the German government funds HKW as a ‘lighthouse of culture’ it thwarts the transformation documenta needs to continue as a beacon of intellectual freedom, critical enquiry, and curatorial reinvention.

Gregory Burke is an Aotearoa/New Zealand-born curator and writer based in Toronto and Berlin.

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Melanie Tangaere-Baldwin

My art world is primarily Māori/indigenous/marginalized/oppressed-peoples focused. And non-commercial. In the majority of ways that I interact in this community it feels generous, supportive and safe—while also being heavily overworked and undercompensated.

I think, at this particular point in time, safety for our community is paramount. Our people are the vanguard of solidarity movements/actions, risking and giving so much of themselves to ensure that we are bearing witness, speaking truth to power and working to force change on many, many fronts. Our artists are carrying heavy loads and we need to make sure that that weight is shared and that we are keeping an eye on and caring for one another.

We are fortunate that we can oftentimes find that care in each other’s work.

Lissy and Rudi Robinson Cole and Ron Te Kawa are creating outstandingly important mahi that shifts wairua—as are the Kauae Raro Research Collective.

Lissy and Rudi's Wharenui Harikoa makes me feel like what beauty I thought was missing in the world isn't missing anymore. It is a masterpiece of tactile love.

I wish I could have gone to Scandinavia to see Ron's work shine, to see him appreciated by strangers for the absolute Māori delight that he brings.

The Kauae Raro Research Collective are creating tangible connections to whakapapa through whenua—to very past and very future—and are sharing their hard earned matauranga openly, with sincere aroha and excellence.

I hope the future of mahi toi is this generous. That it is brave and uses its power for good. That it is collective and collaborative. That it values community and service above ego. That it is supportive, not competitive. I want radical generosity that is happy and unselfish in every way.

That is my dream future.

Arohanui

Mel

I am a mum, an artist and a curator and I want my Māori babies to grow up in a world that loves them.

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Henry Davidson

We’re living in strange, unstable times. It’s not just the art world that feels precarious, the entire world feels deeply troubled. We’re living in an age where it’s very hard to say what you mean and for what you mean to be understood. It's becoming difficult to make sense of the world and often unbearable to witness it. But amongst this chaos we have language and its ‘fine’ forms—music, poetry, art. Language is kind of the gift that we got. It’s what makes us human, but it feels like we aren’t very good at it or comfortable with it and it feels like it's getting harder to work with all the time. I think the greatest challenge for artists right now is to speak, through their practice, with precision, clarity, and immediacy; to use their language to commune with something true and divine. When you see that in an artwork—or read it or hear it—it’s powerful.

It’s difficult to transact with the truth when we’re overwhelmed with a disorganisation of information and it's difficult to make images when we are surrounded by so many. I believe an artist’s language has to undergo a kind of purification in order to see and work in the world. An artist’s job isn’t to judge what is happening on the planet but to somehow bear witness to it, publicly, or in a way that engages with others. We’ve become spectators to the world and spectators to ourselves. Artists need to cut through that way of seeing somehow.

I think a good way to do this is to be open to as many voices as possible— including those we don’t agree with or even feel that we can’t stand—and to incorporate ongoing learning into one’s practice. Recently I’ve participated in ‘Invisible College’, a sort of alternative study programme led by the poet Ariana Reines. We’ve just read John Milton’s Paradise Lost, studying one book of the 12-part epic each week. To read and study this poem right now has been an unexpected, invigorating experience, partly because we didn’t analyse the text according to literary or any other theory but rather through our own personal responses, through the prism of the moment, and through sharing the experience of reading itself. I hope artists continue to practice what it might be like to study the world in different ways in order to see with clarity and in turn to make the world visible in their work.

Henry Davidson is a producer and curator currently based in Berlin, Germany.

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Mercedes Vicente

Writing in its manifold ways — art criticism, curatorial, academic, and diarist writing— has been my persistent act for three decades. Writing is how I think through ideas and shapes my actions in the world. I subscribe to Marilyn Strathern’s manifesto: ‘it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with’. Lately, I have been gravitating toward the role of writing for social change and climate justice, as well as the text and interpretative knowledge in cultural storytelling. Storytelling seems to be a buzzword. The MA Writing programme at RCA, placed in an Art School and seen as practice, sees ‘writing is in the world, and of it, rather than simply being about it’.

My reading has gravitated towards feminist writers that engaged in life-writing and criticism—auto-theory, -ethnography, -fiction—anchoring their biography in cultural, political and activist debates and concerned with not just how to articulate politics but enact them—Sarah Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Maggie Nelson, Deborah Levy, Olivia Laing, Moyra Davey, Olga Tokarczuk, bell hooks, Audrey Lorde, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Saidiya Hartman, among others. Anna Poletti theorises life-writing as a performative act in the Butlerian sense—as constituting life through the act of writing—rather than as an expressive form—describing life that exists before the act of writing about it. To deploy one’s own life experience as an engine for thinking, but thinking in the performative act of writing, as constituting life experience and a catalyst through which to shift our perceptions and rupture what we understand as a reality. Grounding biography in theory in contemporary social and political contexts and tied to social and climate justice activism, I have been looking at writers, artists and performers experimenting with forms of life-writing and storytelling as a radical space of possibility across literature, performance art, and moving image.

During Covid, a friend in New York opened an online space for social writing that she holds weekly every Friday afternoon for an intimate group of women. Writing is a solitary act, so joining a group of fellow like-minded writers has been a platform for social writing, listening and recalling, testing and exploring what ideas we use to think other ideas with in these difficult times.

Mercedes is a writer and curator based in London. Her book, Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice, has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

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Laura Preston

In recent years I have taken a break from production. I wanted time to research and attune to what I really value in art and exhibition-making. I had also become increasingly wary of the dominant economic and political conditions that pressure artists to use language reductively to market themselves and to follow a certain trajectory of what might be termed accumulative visibility. This time hasn’t been inactive. I have been reading and sharpening my critical tools with a cohort of other writers and artists, critics and curators, mainly women, mentored by the German art historian Sabeth Buchmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. One of our colleagues is reviewing the histories of textile production in Palestinian refugee camps, another is re-examining artistic work dealing with Jewish post-war repatriation. I am reclaiming the object forms of conceptual art with a strong focus on the work of women artists to complement the historical emphasis on dematerialization. Art is not so much of its own world, the art world, but part of the world, a process and a site for reimagining.

Laura Preston is an artist, curator and editor based in Berlin.

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Jarrett Earnest

I've been thinking a lot about art school critiques as a unique technology: people gathered around an object pushing each other to see differently.

Sometimes, when you’re really looking, an electricity fills the air, and an unfolding verbal description literally transforms the nature of the thing in front of everyone’s eyes.

As perceptions sharpen, implications broaden.

There is always more to see and another way to think about it.

Just from focusing on the way the light bounces off that lip of magenta paint, casting a sliver of shadow onto the chartreuse beside it, making the perception of a line, and how that affects the interactions of the colour, the construction of space, the object in the room, where you all are standing together.

It is also a lot of effort, predicated on how different everyone is from each other—coming from different cultural backgrounds, personal associations, intellectual ambitions—but we meet to learn from each other, to find a language, to better understand others and ourselves, united by this thing outside of each of us personally—a work of art.

When it works, the effect is humbling, because we grasp how little we understand of what we think we see, how parochial are our individual personalities, which float atop this much vaster communal reality.

The crit models, with all its intensity and artificiality, what I believe the art world is and should be: a sprawling network of roughly intersecting groups joined by their devotion to looking at and thinking about art with other people who care as much as they do.

I find very few spaces where this kind of work takes place in what gets called the ‘art world’, especially in art magazines.

The focus becomes about the market, critical theory, curatorial practice, designer footwear—literally anything to avoid the matter at hand, the difficult work of being together and trying to see something new.

Jarrett Earnest is a writer and curator based in New York.

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Maddie Leach

I live in Sweden and once a month, for a small annual fee, I receive a newsletter in my inbox from an organisation called Konstpool. Founded by MFA graduate Ragna Berlin in 2012, it is now a comprehensive online announcement service that includes open calls, residencies, and culture jobs with a focus on Sweden in particular, but also Denmark and Norway. Konstpool’s largest activity is in relation to ‘procurements for the visual art world with the goal to give an overview, inspire and create a dynamic market,¹ For example, a typical monthly newsletter might include eight to ten new listings connected to local, regional or governmental agencies for competitive ‘sketch assignments’ for new public artworks with first-stage fees of anywhere between €4,500 to €11,000, and final project budgets between €50,000 to €400,000. The commission context might be modest, such as a mural for a school gymnasium or swimming hall— or more significant, such as a new monument to a city’s LGBTIQA+ community.

Without question, this scaled ‘procurement’ process is a system that makes artistic livelihoods potentially viable in this part of the world. Once you have been here for a while, you come to understand the activity of many artists includes making new artwork to decorate the interiors and exteriors of public buildings and urban developments. Large procurements offered in relation to transport infrastructure projects in Sweden have drawn international attention and—thanks to highly transparent public information protocols—one can see the names of formerly A-List artist studios vying for jobs. The city of Gothenburg is soon to install a large pink synthetic rock balanced on a rail overpass, by Katharina Grosse, and an enormous skeletal metal snake in a new underground station, by Huang Yong Ping.

Each month, as I scroll through these calls, what interests and unsettles me is how Konstpool’s announcements matter-of-factly reflect a Swedish modernist desire to embed art (and access to art) into social environments, and how this effort has fuelled a public art industry that requires and sustains a primary logic of material production. Put simply, over the last 85 years, public artworks have appeared everywhere in Sweden. Some thousands of seemingly benign, often abstract, artistic objects arrived in administrative buildings, city squares, urban parks, on redeveloped waterfronts, hospitals, schools, and university campuses—objects often commissioned without public consultation and with intentions of permanence or longevity.

Although this gives the country a vast experience in artistic commissioning for public spaces, the predominant intention of these calls remains bound to reproducing logics of visibility, material presence, and aesthetic effect. It fosters a persistent demand for art to be seen, to turn up, to do something. How artists might avoid servicing this logic of adding more is one of the questions I return to repeatedly. So, I end here with a speculative call for a future public art that does something with almost nothing.

Note ¹ For example, in 2018 95% of announced procurement for art in Sweden was advertised via Konstpool.

Maddie Leach is an artist from New Zealand, now based in Lund and Gothenburg. She is currently working on a four-year research project about a failed public artwork on the campus of Lund University in southern Sweden.

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Dane Mitchell

I recently started reading Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Allen Lane, 2023) and picked up on a thread in the introduction which I think points to an important issue artists are currently facing: the rampant multiplication of doubles, sameness fatigue, and the duplicity we are experiencing, whether we are aware of it or not. Klein outlines various forms doppelgangers take and the crisis they can evoke, ‘…evil twin, the shadow self, the anti-self, the Hyde to our Jekyll…the appearance of one’s doppelganger is almost always chaotic, stressful, and paranoia-inducing, and the person encountering their double is invariably pushed to their limits by the frustration and uncanniness of it all.’

Forms of duplicity (in both senses of being ‘double’ and ‘deceived’) and similitude abound in the art world. This issue seems to me to be an underexamined, deeply ingrained predicament that the rise of AI and deepfake is perhaps a symptom of, rather than a harbinger. Duplicitous doubles proliferate outwards, having less to do with a question of authenticity than with how they deny both their own existence and refuse to be one among many, making the ground under us so unstable. Some examples include: the not-for-profit profit-making Venice Biennale-adjacent organisation which spams countless artists congratulating them on being invited to participate in the Biennale, preying on the ambitions of artists who reply to the clickbait and pay-to-play; the dual role of impresario gallerists operating simultaneously as ‘independent’ art advisors proffering the work of artists they represent, double-dipping by clipping the ticket at both ends, through to the reinvention of many gallerists globally into their doppelganger the art advisor; the duplicity of a gallery which fires an artist for their political statements yet states they ‘in no way intervened nor censored’; artists publicly self-proclaiming to be more than they are, be it a philosopher without anything to validate the claim as real, or living in two cities at once; the uncanny experience of the duplication of an artist’s ideas in another time and in another part of the world by another artist; the endless, ever-persistent duplication of a particular kind of painterly abstraction found on social media in which a succession of mirror-image artists sit in front of their self-expression staring back at us.

Granted, these might not be your art world, but these mirror worlds that perturb the real are someone’s, and the audience figures for these online avatars would make any public art gallery in Aotearoa blush. We would be naïve to think they don’t count for something, if only as being representative of a further doubling-down and duplication of clichés about the art world, as well as those double-dealing modes of action and self-description which result in a distortion of the real. These widespread duplications posit an important and pressing issue for artists: What can we believe? What’s real? What can be trusted? How do we tell the difference?

As Klein notes, ‘That difference is what accounts for the strangeness so many of us have been trying to name—everything so familiar, and yet more than a little off. Uncanny people, upside-down politics, even, as artificial intelligence accelerates, a growing difficulty discerning who and what is real.’ Perhaps, though, just as the doppelganger produces uncanniness and doubt, I’m mistaken, and as Nabokov’s protagonist in Despair discovers, there is no resemblance whatsoever.

Dane Mitchell is an artist. He recently moved from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to Naarm Melbourne to take up a position as Lecturer in Art at the University of Melbourne.

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James Gatt

The art world, like a planet, is shaped by opposing forces of inward and outward pressure. At its core is art, which produces nuance and potentiality under conditions of resistance to contextual norms varying in ideological, ontological, and historical degree. A quick scan of recent events reveals a critical imbalance in this relationship. Applying Rauschenberg’s theory that art operates in 40-year cycles,¹ we can track a general art-world shaping since 1983, figuring neoliberalism as its primary external force. What could describe the atmosphere for art post-1983 better than Reaganomics and Thatcherism?

Executed just one year prior, Agnes Denes’ iconic 1982 work Wheatfield—A Confrontation emerges in rear-view as a vestige of a time where ‘everything seemed possible,’² that is, harking back to the countercultural zeal of 1960s and 70s art, which embodied a fervent social progressiveness. Notwithstanding its amplified pertinence amidst current social and ecological crises, it seems unfathomable that Wheatfield could be made today—a work for which Denes planted two acres of wheat on 4.5 billion dollars’ worth of undeveloped land in New York city before harvesting grains to send around the world in an attempt to ease hunger.

So, what’s changed?

Despite the exponential growth in numbers of artists, galleries, festivals, residencies, degrees and funding bodies over the past four decades, art’s assertive resistance is dwindling in the same conditions that have galvanised its ostensible support networks, which have become increasingly and incompatibly risk averse. Put simply, more resourcing means more answerability. Though art like Denes’s was not easily accommodated in its day, since neoliberalism’s burgeoning we find such gestures more often sublimated into pure style. Now the means of art production are metricised and commodified, leading in many instances to oversimplifications of its ‘products’. Artists still make work responding to important issues, but under growing threat of financial and visibility repercussions. Since October 7, Artforum sacked its editor-in-chief; Ai Weiwei has had several exhibitions cancelled; the entire documenta selection committee has resigned, and Mike Parr was dumped by his gallerist of 36 years—all as a result of attempts by art’s core to address the war in Gaza.

Rosalind Krauss diagnosed this problem in her cogent 1990 essay ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum.’ As Claire Bishop sharply summarises, art institutions in this context have been reshaped into ‘populist temples of leisure and entertainment’.³ Dave Hickey similarly credits art’s increasing passivity to supply-side economics,⁴ while Mark C. Taylor has mapped this entanglement in the parallel dematerialisations in art (minimalism to conceptualism) and the economy (capital to finance).⁵ Uniting these theories is a critique of the co-dependent relationship between art and trickle-down economics. Indeed, neoliberal capitalism has achieved its fundamental aim of confusing market freedom with egalitarianism. Vulnerable to these conditions, art’s core has acquiesced. We see it, perhaps most nefariously, through the guise of identity politics, a framework with Black feminist lesbian roots,⁶ which has been appropriated to more closely resemble Foucault’s critique of care as control.

Thus, for me, the biggest challenges facing artists—without whom there is no art core—can be summarised in the following questions: Is it possible to benefit from and resist a system concurrently, like Jens Haaning’s Take the Money and Run famously failed to do in 2021? Will people turn to art for provocation or placation? And, following Francis Alÿs’ apt 2004 video performance The Green Line, who will draw the boundaries that continue to shape the art world?

Notes ¹ Dave Hickey made this point in a lecture, ‘The God Ennui,’ at the School of Visual Arts, New York, 28 May 2021, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0x5IDjQLNs. ² I borrow this phrase from Richard Cork, Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s, London: Yale University Press, London, 2003. ³ Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? Koenig Books, London, 2013, p. 5. ⁴ Dave Hickey, op. cit. ⁵ Mark C. Taylor, ‘Skinning Art’ in Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2004. ⁶ The Combahee River Collective, ‘The Combahee River Collective Statement,’ copyright © 1978 by Zillah Eisenstein.

James Gatt is currently Curator at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery.

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