Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Luke Willis Thompson is a Fijian New Zealand artist, currently based in Tāmaki. His politically geared practice circulates various mediums that are often conceptually driven; working amongst moving image, photography, performance, installation, and sculpture, as modes of exploration.

His current solo exhibition at Ngutu Kākā gallery, B42040A1A1A presents Two major moving image works, Whakamoemoeā (2024), and Soro (2025). Each work utilizes this visual language of political theatre to imagine a decolonial future for Aotearoa. 

This exhibition includes the first presentation of Whakamoemoeā in Aotearoa since its first viewing at the Shajah Biennial. The work set in 2040 centres a powerful address in te reo Māori on the Waitgani grounds by recognised broadcaster, journalist, and politician, Oriini Kaipara.

The Second work shown within this exhibition Soro, envisions a re-enactment of the 2021 Dawn Raids Apology. Set 10 years on from former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s apology, Where an unnamed Prime Minister delivers the speech out of frame, the camera Instead focused on recognised NZSL interpreter Alan Wendt. 

Maya caught up with Luke about the show, and overall practice. 

Dreaming From Afar is a new group exhibition showing at Gus Fisher which brings together the practices of Gian Manik, Brunelle Dias Primbs, and Tyrone Te Waa. The show circulates the complexities of history, and nostalgia through this painterly language that seeks to morph the physical with the imagined. 

Gian Manik is a Naarm-based painter, who produces mesmerising works that play with ​​various tropes preserved within the historical painting genres of still life, landscape, and portraiture. Within Dreaming From Afar Manik showcases a beautiful body of paintings that includes various methods of painterly application. Intimate and finely rendered works on oil on canvas, as well as these lively frescos that become one with the gallery space itself. 

The works themselves bring together Manik's fascination with historical painting, and old masters, alongside his research and exploration of orientalism and queer representation within art history. Pulling these themes together in space to produce works that grapple with the entrenched hetero and ethnocentric hierarchies of the western art cannon.

Maya caught up with Gian about the show and overall practice.

 Maya caught up with with curator and artist Millie Dunstall about Portal, showing at Artspace Aotearoa’s The Kit. Alongside Millie's interview Maya also spoke to two of the 17 artists showing work within Portal, Emma Stretch and kyung Baro.

Maya also had a kōrero with Fiona Connor about her current show at Coastal signs, Blanket Games. And alongside Fiona, Maya also spoke with Bailey Connolly about their artist collective Polyhymnia.

Whakarongo mai <3 xx

Fiona Connor is an Aotearoa born artist currently based in LA. Connor has an expansive sculptural practice in which she produces site specific installations, that really play with the spaces inherent architecture. Developing this conceptually enriched sculptural language that seeks to shift objects, and their environments through this process of reproduction.

Her current show on at Coastal Signs, Blanket Games includes 5 large-scale drawings of segments of hurricane fencing. In which Connor utilises an alternative method of drawing, monoprinting. A method that demands a different kind of connection. Allowing her to not only record the object of the fence itself, but also of her own body's movements during the making of the work. Smudges, and scuffs, made from the weight of her body while tracing the fence intertwining within the woven marks of the lattice fence. Creating a beautiful frottage of the body, and it’s record of interaction.

Alongside her individual practice, Connor is passionate about creating, and being amongst artist run initiatives. So in light of Connor's collaborative projects Maya also spoke to her and Bailey Connelly about their latest artist run collective, Polyhymnia.