poster for the exhibition with a lot of text on it

Sex Workers of Aotearoa: A Day in the Life of

Sex work­ers and artists have gone hand in hand for hun­dreds if not thou­sands of years.  Think of basic­ally nearly every nude woman in a clas­sic paint­ing by a white dude, or Moulin Rouge, or ‘Vic­tor­ia’ or count­less oth­er examples and you get the idea. Oh sure, they’re muses. But what if we did­n’t centre […]

Preview: Kia Mau Festival

The fourth Kia Mau Fest­iv­al is on from 1–16 June 2018. A con­tem­por­ary Indi­gen­ous theatre and dance exper­i­ence, the fest­iv­al cel­eb­rates Māori, Pasi­fika, First Nations artists and their com­pan­ies. Kia Mau Fest­iv­al is an innov­at­ive exper­i­ence for whānau and com­munit­ies through­out the Wel­ling­ton region to engage with Tangata When­ua and First Nations artists from across […]

A new taonga for Ngā Taonga

The 2014 amal­gam­a­tion of our Film, Tele­vi­sion and Sound Archives into Ngā Taonga Sound & Vis­ion saw its nomen­clature jus­ti­fied this week with the unveil­ing of an aur­al taonga for the ages. On the 35th anniversary of Wel­ling­ton Access Radio’s arrival on air, broad­cast mater­i­al dat­ing back through­out the station’s lively his­tory has been added […]

Something wonderful at The Dowse

Emma from Emma Makes kindly vis­ited and revis­ited  – Wun­der­rūma: New Zea­l­and Jew­ellery  exhib­i­tion at The Dowse  for us. Each time I return to Wun­der­rūma: New Zea­l­and Jew­ellery I find some­thing new I want to own. It began at the open­ing with Emily Valentine’s King­fish­er Brooch (2013). “Is that a bird?” said the friend I was […]

Maketorium – let the making begin

This week­end at Te Papa is going to be a grand one. Not only is it your last chance to see the very pop­u­lar Game Mas­ters, but kick­ing off at 10am and run­ning non stop till 6pm on Sat­urday is Maker­tori­um! Maker­tori­um is a cel­eb­ra­tion of New Zeal­and’s  crafters, cre­at­ors, tinker­ers and invent­ors, of all […]

theNewDowse goes ape sh*t

The spiders are coming!Taken straight from the Weta Hol­ics web­site:

As if you needed anoth­er reas­on to live in New Zea­l­and! The won­der­ful Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt has just re-launched and is now call­ing itself The­New­Dowse … AND they’re host­ing a King Kong exhib­i­tion from June to Novem­ber this year!

They’re call­ing it Becom­ing King Kong. I feel excited just think­ing about it!

It’s open­ing on 23 June and runs until 11 Novem­ber 2007. A wee bird tells me that it’s packed with insights into the ground-break­ing film-mak­ing tech­no­lo­gies used to make the movie, as well as the cre­at­ive pro­cesses used in the con­cep­tion of the char­ac­ter of Kong. That’s right – the grumpy ape that keeps on turn­ing up in the film he he…

The exhib­i­tion will take you behind the scenes to exper­i­ence the Weta way of work­ing, the expans­ive col­lec­tion of the sculp­tured creatures, the beauty of the sketches, the innov­at­ive tech­niques and the secrets of how these were achieved: it took thou­sands of draw­ings, hun­dreds of design maquettes and Weta Digital’s visu­al effects team years of work to cre­ate the char­ac­ter of Kong.

To cel­eb­rate the exhib­i­tion, we’ll be reveal­ing pre­vi­ously nev­er seen before online images from the mak­ing of the film in the new Weta Gal­lery

Coming soon

Muka

The Set­tlers Museum is host­ing the MUKA YOUTH PRINT EXHIBITION 2006.

The exhib­i­tion fea­tures a col­lec­tion of forty ori­gin­al litho­graphs by twenty prom­in­ent artists from New Zea­l­and, Aus­tralia and Europe.

The exhib­i­tion is unique in that it is only open to young people aged 5 to 18. The idea is that young people are giv­en the oppor­tun­ity to see, select and buy an art work that they like, unin­flu­enced by adults or the name of the artist. All the works reflect the nor­mal style of the artists and there is no “talking down” to the chil­dren.

The uni­form low price means that this is an excel­lent way for young people to get real works of art into their hands.

Set­tlers Museum
The Esplanade
Petone

25 and 26 Novem­ber
12 noon – 5pm

Eclectic Electric

Here are a few things to keep your mind off the weath­er this week­end.

The World Press Photo ’06 exhib­i­tion kicks off at Shed 11 today. It’s been inter­est­ing to see that the pub­li­city around town has taken a very polit­ic­al angle this year.

Just along the water­front at the Museum of Wel­ling­ton City and Sea (I wish they’d find a short­er name!), they’re already two weeks into the month-long Wel­ling­to­nia LIVE event. The word “eclect­ic” does­n’t even begin to describe the range of things going on there: there’s a per­form­ances from the Tinakori Hand­bell Asso­ci­ation, a Matariki cel­eb­ra­tion with Toni Huata, hurdy-gur­dies, shanty sing­ers, ghost tours, kete weav­ing and a debate on the con­tro­ver­sial Mar­ine Edu­ca­tion Centre. My main interest will be in the series of talks organ­ised by the Archi­tec­tur­al Centre entitled “Why I do archi­tec­ture”. These kick off at 1pm tomor­row with Anna Kemble-Walsh and Mar­tin Han­ley of Red Design and John Mills of John Mills Archi­tects.

Poster for debut gig by The Blush ResponseFrom eclect­ic to elec­tric: new synth-pop band The Blush Response have their debut gig at Sand­wiches tomor­row night. The band may be new, but the musi­cians will be very famil­i­ar to Wel­ling­to­ni­ans: Jerami­ah Ross (aka Mod­ule), Rhi­an Shee­han, Raashi Malik (of Rhom­bus, among oth­ers) and Paul McLaney of Gram­sci.

Finally, you could always try to fig­ure out the loc­a­tion of the cur­rent Mys­tery Bar. If you do, you’d bet­ter get look­ing tonight because it’s closed on Sat­urday nights (that’s a clue). It also has some­thing in com­mon with Sand­wiches.

Treaty2U

For those of you inter­ested in neither the Sev­ens, nor loc­al music… How about this? An oppor­tun­ity to see the Tour­ing Treaty exhib­i­tion TREATY 2 U, the Treaty of Wait­angi tour­ing exhib­i­tion which is trav­el­ling around New Zea­l­and over the next few months will be in the Wel­ling­ton region over Wait­angi week­end. It will be […]