AOTEAROA ART FAIR 2024
THURSDAY 18 – SUNDAY 21 APRIL 2024
VIADUCT EVENTS CENTRE
171 HALSEY STREET, AUCKLAND CBD, NZ
As a media partner of Aotearoa Art Fair again in 2024, VAULT had the opportunity to go to Auckland and experience the reformatted fair in its wonderful new home, the Viaduct Events Centre. Below, writer Zazie Duinker reviews her four days:
In an attention economy like today’s, an art fair can be a highly charged environment. Let loose in a cacophony of beguiling brushstrokes, seductive sculptures and captivating colours, restless eyes flutter from one gallery to the next. Not even a collapsing tower of Champagne coupes can bring them to a halt – although Michael Zavros’ performance that never was, arguably a more effective commentary on ‘art and life… [and] moments of celebration and togetherness’ in being knocked down by a poor fairgoer, certainly started the four-day event off with a bang. And yet, the artists at Aotearoa Art Fair 2024 successfully slowed down their flighty allotments of attention to stretch out time to who and what came before them.
As artist Kereama Taepa said in one of the many inviting talks on offer: ‘Contemporary implies that it’s new, but it’s so not. We’re at the end of a huge legacy.’ Indeed, legacies unfolded in all booths. In his zesty visual language ‘Tongpop,’ Telly Tuita explored his ancestry and cultural identity alongside fellow Tongan artist Benjamin Work (and many others in the striking salon hang) at Bergman Gallery, while at Two Rooms, Peata Larkin’s code-inspired paintings reminisced the labyrinthine process of tracing her whakapapa. Hannah Ireland, too, explored ancestry, home and identity in a strong solo at Jhana Millers Gallery where large-scale canvases inhabited by hazy tentative shapes re-envisioned the traditions of portraiture. Elsewhere, art historical traditions were probed by pink figures billowing from Sarah Drinan’s reconceiving of painting as an embodied practice at FUTURES Gallery, and in Ammon Ngakuru’s Ideas for Titles (2024) at Coastal Signs, transmuting between a grocery list and a list of titles from [Marcel] Duchamp’s oeuvre, depending on the viewer, questioning historical narratives.
Invoking history through textile traditions, at Masterworks Gallery mother-and-daughter duo Tui Emma Gillies and Sulieti Fieme’a Burrows preserved Tongan craft through contemporary reiterations of ngatu-tapa, while Made Wiguna Valasara rendered evocative imagery of Bali in voluptuous stuffed canvas to literally unfold the island’s deeper cultural layers at Redbase. Similarly speaking through materiality, Sung Hwan Bobby Park’s unmissable ceramic ‘bullet-proof’ helmets at Föenander Gallery alluded to his precarious experience as a queer man in the South-Korean military. As campy recontextualisations of the artist’s cultural background, they hint at the continuation of past into present. At Tim Melville, Joe Sheehan continued this trajectory through time in his Surface Tension (2023) drawing gazes downwards to where carefully carved vessels appeared to be casually strewn across the floor. Precious stones in the shape of Tupperware and screw-tops brought to mind images of a plastic-littered wasteland and extended our awareness into the future by nudging viewers to wonder, in the face of these gifts inherited from the land: what will our legacy look like?
