Launch of 2023 programme

Where does my body belong?

Each year we orbit around one question in the company of artists and through exhibitions and other programmes. Across the year we explore the edges of what this question offers us, and what artworks and their authors can weave together. In 2023 we ask “where does my body belong?”  You can think of this as one exhibition in five parts, as a score played across a calendar, or maybe even as a forest. 

To have a body is a pre-existing condition we all live with and in, and spend our lives coming to know what that could mean. While we are all born with a body, each body comes with its own unique capacity and limitations. The whether or how these capacities and limits unfold is greatly determined by the polis into which we emerge. This year’s programme explores the vast range of what it is to have a body, be a body, and participate within the systems that enlarge or confine us in a dynamic friction between a sovereignty project and a drive to participate.

The programme includes works produced in the 1950s through to new commissions and ranges from rarely seen journals and sculpture, to film, drawing, printmaking, and live experiences. The five cornerstone exhibitions are woven together into all aspects of our public programme that includes online publishing, panel discussions, screenings, workshops, visiting practitioners, and more.
Join us.

Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm 
February 11–April 6, 2023

Bringing together two pioneering female voices from Aotearoa New Zealand this exhibition is located within the realm of the domestic and the different roles and rituals that take place there. Horner and Sturm take up the challenge that it is to process and make a life whole through practice. Through their incise gestures that span writing, sculpture, and drawing they both ask, could this be otherwise?

Far, far away
Chevron Hassett
April 22–June 10, 2023

Writing letters to a past and future self through his photographic and sculptural practice, Hassett defines a sovereign production of biography grounded in the concept of whanaungatanga.* Emerging from the specific Aotearoa New Zealand experience of urban Indigeneity, he explodes the often limiting misconceptions of this context, and evolves a project of cultivation. 

Scores for Transformation
Özlem Altin, Judith Hopf, Laida Lertxundi, Rosemary Mayer and others
June 24–August 19, 2023  

Multiple generations, contexts, and mediums are brought together in this group exhibition that highlights the ways in which the body becomes an agent for revolt, decline, collapse, as well as reform and regeneration. Here “bodies”—in the most expanded sense—are not metaphors for a process of reflection or transformation but are indeed instruments for both the writing of and keeping of the score. 

Alanis Obomsawin  
September 2–November 4, 2023

The work of Indigenous film director Obomsawin begins in the sacred space of listening. Emerging out of her decades-long career engaging with particular communities, her work tells their stories in a mana** enhancing way. This exhibition presents a selection of films made in the last fifty years that chart the impulse to resist and the impulse to heal in order to offer a nuanced outlook on what it would take to live in a just world.

Chartwell Trust and Stout Foundation New Commissions 
November 17–February 3, 2024

This is the first iteration of a newly formed commissioning platform for emerging artists in order to provide a significant early career exhibition opportunity. The small annual cohort of Aotearoa New Zealand based artists are commissioned in summer and engage with the organistion across the year and finish out the programme with an exhibition that sets the tone for the following year.

*connection between people.

**prestige, authority, influence, spiritual power—mana is a supernatural force in a person, place or object. 

Please check our website and social channels to stay up to date.

About Artspace Aotearoa
Artspace Aotearoa is a non-profit contemporary art gallery located in the heart of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Founded in 1987 by artists, it centres the ways in which art contributes to our understanding and reimagining of the world in which we live. We work within a specific city context, and spiral out into national and international conversations that promote practices that present emancipatory world views. With a specific focus on developing an intergenerational kaupapa, we seek to present established, emergent and under-recognised positions.

Team
Diane Blomfield, Manahautū General Manager
Ruth Buchanan, Kaitohu Director
Tyson Campbell, Kaitakatū Curator
Kaitlin Dedman, Kaiwhakapā Communications Coordinator 
Robbie Handcock, Kaiawhina Whakaaturanga Assistant Curator
Sally McMath, Tauira Mahi Intern 
Denise Porter-Howland, Kaitiaki Gallery Host
Anto Yeldezian, Kaitiaki Gallery Host
Dexter Edwards, Web Design 
HIT, Print Design 

With gratitude to all participating artists and contributors and the extended Artspace Aotearoa whānau. With thanks to our core funders Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa, Auckland Council, Foundation North, the Chartwell Trust, and the Stout Foundation. Mauri ora!