Various Artists with Beth & Sofia

Today on Various Artists... <3

Sofia had a kōrero with gallerist and curator Melanie Roger about a new group exhibition at Melanie Roger Gallery, The Secret Life of Plants. 

Beth had a kōrero with author Alex Scott about her new graphic novel, Episodes, out via Earth’s End Publishing.

And for Stage Direction this week: Alice Canton is in to chat with Donna Brookbanks about her latest show, Green Fingered. 

And as always, your weekly arts guide! 

Resetting the Coordinates is the first anthology/reader of performance art of Aotearoa New Zealand. It invites the reader into its lively, 50-year critical survey of Aotearoa’s globally unique performance art scene.

It includes 18 chapters by researchers that explore the post-object and performance art of the late 1960s to the rich vein of Māori and Pacific performance art from the early 1990s.

It discusses the work of Jim Allen, Phil Dadson, Peter Roche and Linda Buis, performance art initiatives in post-earthquake Christchurch and queer performance art, among many other topics.

Beth caught up with Professor of Visual Art at the Auckland University of Technology, Dr Christopher Braddock, about Resetting the Coordinates.

New Painting is a new exhibition at Gow Langsford Onehunga by Shane Cotton (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Hine and Te Uri Taniwha) opening tomorrow.

Cotton is an internationally renowned artist whose career has spanned over three decades. His practice is underpinned by recurrent questioning of his own bicultural identity, and our collective cultural identity in Aotearoa. 

In these new works, Cotton explores the collision of Indigenous and European time systems, placing ancestral figures in surreal, cosmic landscapes, exploring hybridities, transformation, and the nature of history.

Accompanying the exhibition is an essay by writer Anthony Byrt, Super Radiance, which explores this new body of work further. You can read Byrt’s essay here.

I had a kōrero with Shane about the exhibition and the ideas behind these works. 

 Last Friday, the winner of the Walters Prize for 2024 was announced, as chosen by this year’s international judge Cameroonian Berlin-based Professor Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. 

The $50,000 Walters Prize - which is now awarded every three years - was decided this year between artists Owen Connors, Juliet Carpenter, Brett Graham and Ana Iti.

On Friday, artist Ana Iti (Te Rarawa) was announced as the winner for her sculpture and sound installation entitled ‘A resilient heart like the mānawa’, which is currently on display alongside the other candidate’s works at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. 

Sofia caught up with Ana about celebrating the win, the creation process behind ‘A resilient heart like the mānawa’, and what’s next for her and her practic