Public Seminars Term 1, 2024

Seminars are in P152 or online

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Thursday 29 February  |  Richard Reddaway 

Towards a Baroque Body 

“Towards a Baroque Body” looks for a history of ideas in an art practice: where they come from and where they might go, through a survey exhibition looking back over 40 years, on to a connection with social politics and arriving, eventually, at a definition of the body as a baroque performance. Such a body might necessarily be as much mad, badly behaved, even zany, as it is an erratic criticism of linear art history and the neo-liberal individual, as rigorous as it is ornate, as material as it is concept. 

Since the mid-1980s, Richard Reddaway has been making sculpture, both sticks-and-stones material and the stuff of photography, in which the body, the figural, carries meaning as well as formal delight. His practice fills space with often noisy, colourful objects to explore, amongst other things, chaotic complexity, globalism and the local, and what it might mean to be Pākehā. His latest obsession is making art “work” to find a way out of neo-liberalism into the social, perhaps through a contemporary understanding of the Baroque. Richard studied sculpture at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts (1986), spent six months at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1989), has an MFA from RMIT University, Melbourne (2000), and has undertaken residencies in the Netherlands, Mexico and Ecuador. He is currently an Associate Professor at Whiti-o-Rehua School of Art, Massey University, in Wellington. 

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Thursday 7 March  |  Ed Hanfling 

A Picture by Joanna Margaret Paul at the Hocken  

Otago Harbour is a painting, drawing and collage made Joanna Margaret Paul in 1978, acquired the same year for the Hocken Collections. This seminar closely examines the work’s several different modes of representation, and considers its art historical significance and relationships with other bodies of work by Paul (including the “Intimate Maps” and her photographs and films).  

Ed Hanfling is a lecturer in art history and theory and a postgraduate supervisor at Dunedin School of Art. He has published bulky articles and books, on New Zealand art especially, but gets more pleasure out of writing short critical reviews that confuse and sometimes irritate people. He is co-editor of Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue and of a 2024 special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Studies, titled “Art and Aotearoa New Zealand: Cultures, Controversies and Histories”. 

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Thursday 14 March  |  Hamish Coleman 

Recent Paintings 

Hamish will conduct a floor talk in his exhibition, Recent Paintings. Meet at the DSA Gallery, O Block (next to lecture theatre P152).

Hamish Coleman (Pākehā, b. 1989, Hakatere Ashburton) is best known for his shape-shifting paintings, made using iridescent pigments. His work has been shown in Australia and China, and throughout Aotearoa. In 2021, Ashburton Art Gallery hosted a significant solo exhibition, his first at a public art institution. In 2023, he relocated to Ōtepoti, after a decade living and working in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara. 

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Thursday 21 March  |  Hana Pera Aoake 

Cannibal Capitalism? On Coastal cannibals, land swallowing and actions towards repair through exchanging hau with taonga and the land 

At a time when Māori are making huge gains in political representation, and where our knowledge systems, language and ways of being are celebrated in mainstream society and taught within mainstream education, how do we as Māori navigate the potential rollback of this progress through the introduction of legislation that actively reinterprets Te Tiriti o Waitangi along liberal democratic lines as opposed to the line between tino rangatiratanga and kawanatanga? This paper takes its name from a book of the same title by the American critical theorist Nancy Fraser, which asserts that capitalism is not a kind of finance, but a society, and a society which must come together in order to address the entire crisis complex that the system of capitalism is formed around. This is a system where we simultaneously face climate catastrophe, a wholesale assault on our ability to awhi and manaaki to one another, as well as an ensuing and ongoing attack on the poor, working class, migrant and racialised populations. All of these harms are entwined and were exacerbated by Covid 19. In Aotearoa this mutually interdependent relationship between state and finance continues to drive colonisation and is reliant upon the state-driven expropriation of Māori land resources, whether this be through historical confiscations or pieces of legislation that continue to alienate Māori from their whenua. Thinking through these ideas in order to find solutions we can look to contemporary Māori artists such as Ngahuia Harrison, Brett Graham and Lisa Reihana whose works in very different ways consider models for repair from the harm of the expropriation of Māori land, resources and objects, especially from the mid to late 19th century. These artists think critically around what their own whakapapa tells them about the land they come from, and they question, criticise and offer moments for repair from our shared settler colonial past.  

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Hinerangi, Ngaati Mahuta, Ngaati Waewae, Tainui/Waikato, Kai Tahu) is an artist, writer, teacher and mum based in Aotearoa. Hana is the poetry editor of the Otago Daily Times, co-organiser of Kei te pai press with Morgan Godfery, an occasional lecturer in art history at Canterbury university, former curator of the Sir James fletcher Kawerau museum, a current participant in the Creative New Zealand and Creative Australia digital fellowship and later in 2024 will undertake a curatorial residency at the Delfina Foundation in London.  In 2020 Hana published their first book, A bathful of Kawakawa and hot water, with Compound press and their second collection of writing will be published by No more poetry in 2024.

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Thursday 28 March  |  Anya Sinclair 

Beauty and Terror: A life of painting with Anya Sinclair 

From fantasy, to landscapes, to flowers, Anya Sinclair will discuss the evolution of her arts practice and carving a path as a full time practitioner in Ōtepoti Dunedin. 

Anya Sinclair lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She has a BFA (Elam/Dunedin School of Art) and exhibits regularly including with Olga in Dunedin and Bowen Galleries in Wellington, and has had solo exhibitions at Tauranga Art Gallery and Ashburton Art Gallery. 

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Thursday 4 April  |  Anna McLean 

Giovanni Intra: Side Effects  

Giovanni Intra: Side Effects is a forthcoming exhibition at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, curated by Anna McLean, examining the inner workings of Giovanni Intra (1968-2002) as he traversed the social impacts of modern medical theory upon society. Intra was an artist, art writer, curator and gallerist working between Aotearoa New Zealand, where he grew up, and the United States. He co-founded artist-run spaces Teststrip (1992-1997) in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and China Art Objects (1999-) in Los Angeles alongside close friends. During the 1990s, Intra formed an observational critique of Western medicine, identifying it as a substitute for religious phenomena. He identified the significance of photography and its role in medical science, particularly in pathology, the study of disease and injury. The works in Side Effects acknowledge these psychoanalytical realisations of Intra’s, proposing reconsideration and relevancy in a present-day context.

Anna Mclean is the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Ihupukutaka Kairaupī Curatorial Intern, and was a recent recipient of a Govett Brewster/Len Lye Curatorial Placement.

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Thursday 11 April  |  Joanna Osborne 

Visual diffusion and spiritualist practice: a research project on three spiritualists in Aotearoa New Zealand. Minnie Chapman (1856-1949) Sophia Garland Allan (1867-1959) Berta Sinclair Burns (1893-1972) 

With an emphasis on primary research processes, Joanna will share some of her findings on the practice of “spirit drawing” in early 20th century Aotearoa New Zealand. Within a broader scope of new religious movements, histories of feminism and the arts, emerge questions that consider the international diffusion, material expression and interpretive complexities of this art as spiritual practice.

Joanna Osborne is an independent researcher in art history with interests in studies of religion and spirituality. She has a PhD from the University of Otago and was the Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2020 Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa Curatorial Intern. She has published on the work of Allie Eagle (1949-2022) and Joanna Margaret Paul (1945-2003), and is a current member of the publisher/artist group Spiral Collectives, established in 1975.

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*Seminars can also be accessed online via this link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NzU4MDc2MTYtNzM1YS00NTJmLWIzN2UtYTdhN2NmOTI5OTFj%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22450e6824-88ab-4ad2-914d-b0f385da600c%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%2248906f9c-eee2-474e-acb8-7720ac92f8fc%22%7d