Various Artists with Sofia & Maya

Spoit Objects is Artists Angela Pan’s Current exhibition on now at Grace.

 Angela engages within a multi medium practice, drawing from personal experience to navigate ideas of epistemological slippages, femininity and an investigation into our perception of reality. 

Spoilt objects brings together elements of sculpture, video and sound. Inviting us into a site of mystical encounter in which objects slip into entities surrounded by sounds of orchestral breaths.

Maya had a chat with Angela about the show.

Tala o le tau is an exhibition showing new and significant work by Angela Tiatia and Yuki Kihara opening tonight at Gus Fisher Gallery.

The exhibition title, Tala o le tau, meaning ‘stories from the weather’ in Sāmoan, borrows its name from the poetic translation of ‘weather forecasts’ used by Sāmoan weather services. Collectively, the works explore themes of the climate crisis in the Pacific, engaging with indigenous knowledge systems, femininity, and matrilineal histories to navigate into an uncertain future. 

Kihara’s work is a collaborative piece made with women from the Moata’a Aualuma Community, a group of skilled weavers and embroiderers based in the central north coast of Upolu Island, Sāmoa. Together, they have created five vibrantly coloured mats, reflecting a community, collective, and indigenous approach to issues of climate change. 

The exhibition is also showing a moving image work of Tiatia’s, The Dark Current, which is a three-part video acknowledging the past, present and future through a Sāmoan lens, exploring the intersections between colonialism, femininity, and our relationship with the virtual and physical realm. 

Sofia had a kōrero with Angela Tiatia about her work in Tala o le tau and her practice as a whole.

Life in Forms is a survey exhibition of Pauline Kahurangi Yearbury’s practice, currently showing at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery. It is the first solo exhibition of Yearbury’s work in a public art gallery. 

Yearbury is considered a leading practitioner in Māori modernist art and was one of the first Māori artists to introduce Māori mythology into contemporary art. Her work is characterised by a bold and illustrative style, of which she is most renowned for her incised wooden panels featuring figures from Māori whakapapa narratives.

She was one of the first Māori women to attend the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, where she worked later as a tutor too. 

Sofia had a kōrero with curator Hester Rowan about Yearbury’s life, practice, and legacy as well as Hester’s curatorial process for putting together Life in Forms

Dominic Hoey is a poet, author and youth worker from Tāmaki Makaurau. 

1985 is Dominic’s highly anticipated third novel. Set in pre-gentrified Auckland, it follows the story of Obi, who faces impending teenagehood after a childhood marked by poverty, dysfunctional family dynamics, (dis)organised crime and violence.

Beth caught up with Dominic about the writing of 1985.