On 24 March 2023, a large anti-trans rights rally was scheduled in Te Ngākau Civic Square in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Situated on the edge of the Square, and at the heart of public debate, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi often takes precautionary measures during events such as this. The front doors of the […]
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‘Don’t you see,’ implores Sergeant Neil Howie as he is led to the sacrificial bonfire in The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973), ‘that killing me is not going to bring back your apples?’. In this classic folk horror film, the modern worldview clashes violently with fertility rituals, human sacrifice, and ancient superstitions. Eerie Pageantry […]
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Angela Lane paints wondrous scenes of atmospheric and celestial phenomena. Mysterious messengers or omens hover in the skies, just in sight but almost always beyond our comprehension. Her small landscapes are grounded in the real world but seek out otherworldly or preternatural experiences. They ask us to look up and out, but also back — […]
Read more "Angela Lane: Phosphene"
‘…What changed everything was the portfolio itself’ — Philip Leider, Artforum. In 1969, Diane Arbus put together a portfolio of ten of her photographs. She selected the images, supervised the printing, wrote the accompanying captions on vellum sheets, and worked with artist Marvin Israel on the case that ingeniously doubles as a frame. Arbus had […]
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In 2015 a number of plans were floated to redevelop the interior of City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi. One idea proposed the opening up of the entire ground floor space. The north-facing windows at the far end of the Hancock Gallery would be removed, and replaced with a second entrance, directly opposite the existing […]
Read more "Entering The Room of Time"
There was once a great paint-off between 5th century BC artists Zeuxis and Parrhasius. A master of illusionism, Zeuxis’s painting of a bunch of grapes was so realistic that birds flew up and attempted to eat the sweet fruit. In its ability to outperform reality, Zeuxis’s art sets out a number of relationships between painting, […]
Read more "Sour Grapes: Martin Basher/Ben Buchanan"
US artist Josh Azzarella unmakes classic films. He painstakingly extracts all signs of human presence through a frame-by-frame process of digital collage. Familiar scenes are turned into eerie, abandoned wastelands that encourage us to look beyond the content and consider the strange relationship between film, time and memory. Triple Feature brings together Azzarella’s reconstructions of […]
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Wish You Were Here kicked off with a delivery. Glen Hayward dropped his archive off in a crate. It landed with a thunk on my desk, and in my brain. Putting aside the question of content for a minute, the physical dimensions of this archive immediately had me on edge in a comfortably familiar way. It […]
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Artists: John Akomfrah (UK), Ed Atkins (UK), Marco Brambilla (Italy/US), Walead Beshty (US), Lauren Brincat (Australia), Thomas Demand (Germany), Simon Denny (New Zealand), Brian Eno (UK), Charles and Ray Eames (US), Andreas Gursky (Germany), Naeem Mohaiemen (Bangladesh/US), Adrian Paci (Albania), Alex Prager (US), Taryn Simon (US), and What We Found After You Left: A Project by […]
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Gate 1 The empty airport is one of the most haunting and defining images of our time. As the coronavirus response enforced travel bans and closed borders, images of deserted airports have come to hold a set of often wildly contradictory ideas: the fragility of human existence, the failure or success of government responses to […]
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AARON LISTER 