Join NZPG in the Gallery surrounded by the beautiful collection of mahi toi in the Kingii Tuheitia exhibition to discuss being Tangata whenua working and creating in the Aotearoa arts industry.

In this kōrero with our panelists will discuss ideas and stories about their creative processes and kaupapa, their challenges and successes. This panel is about giving emerging artists and anyone else who is interested some insight and ako, that can tautoko them in their own creative practices.

This event is free to attend, our Gallery does accept koha.

Chair of the panel:

Suzanne Tamaki (Maniapoto, Tuhoe) is an artist and social provocateur who uses fashion and photography to create visual narratives that respond to cultural-politics in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her works often investigate the nature of indigenous feminisms in the South Pacific, challenging the colonial gaze and Western ideas of nationhood within a bi-cultural nation.

Panelists:

Arapeta is a Takatāpui curator and artist of Whanaunga, Ruanui, Mahuta, Koata, Te Wehi, Kahu, Te Rarawa, Te Aupouri, Ngāpuhi, Porou, English, Scottish and Croatian descent. Their creative practice is conceptualised as a vessel that is used to explore their cultural identities. They consider themselves a weaver of stories told through adornment, textiles, objects, sound, performance and cinema often drawing upon various traditional Māori art forms passed down through their whakapapa (lineage).

Arapeta is a Māori weaving specialist within their hapū, cultural centres, as well as international museum institutions such as the British Museum and Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Jade Townsend (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Ātihaunui-a-Pāpārangi) is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and co-director of Season. As an artist and curator Townsend operates at the intersection of her Māori, Pākehā, and British heritage to explore themes of identity and dual-consciousness. Born and raised in Whanganui, she moved to Liverpool, UK as a teenager. Exposure to a wide range of accents, dialects, regional slang, folktales, and pūrākau made her aware of the limitations of translation and cultural hybridity as a transparent process. Through a range of hand-made interventions including paint and collage, she interrogates materials and surfaces to reveal their transformative qualities.

Tyson Campbell is a curator and artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He has worked in both grass roots and institutional contemporary art settings.

Tyson’s current work focuses on Indigenous strategies toward shifting institutional structures and how culturally grounded and communitarian ways of knowing - conversational, celebratory, and respectful kanohi-kitea - can initiate change within such settings. Tyson is interested in cultural mechanisms that move us away from the polarized dichotomy of Indigeneity and institutional critique and from representation as a determining ideology in contemporary art discourse.

Read more about the panellists HERE.