Light Night 2023 – Auckland Arts Festival

Light Night 2023

Sat 18 March, 5.30pm–9.00pm

For one night only, embark on a journey of unmatched after-hours access, where the visual and live arts collide.

The city’s most iconic galleries are open late, playing host to a thrilling suite of exhibitions and curious delights. With offerings that include captivating performances by Dance Plant Collective and IDCO, a series of DJ sets by M4URI M4STA, RNG†sus, Sezzo, and Jess Fu, and a wide range of stunning artworks, everyone can find something to delight in on this art hīkoi throughout Auckland.

Follow the trail to see illuminating live entertainment alongside exceptional visual art from Aotearoa and beyond. Experience your favourite galleries in a rare new light.

All Light Night events are FREE, except for ticketed entry to exhibitions and performances at Auckland

Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

IMAGE (front cover):

Dance Plant Collective, by Sean Drader

GALLERY / EXHIBITION

Auckland Art Gallery

Toi o Tāmaki

CNR OF KITCHENER RD & WELLESLEY ST, CBD

Light from Tate: From 1700s to Now *Ticketed exhibition

Karangahape Road

Artspace Aotearoa

292 KARANGAHAPE RD, CBD

Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm

Studio One Toi Tū

238 KARANGAHAPE RD, CBD gap [黄馨贤박성환嫦潔] filler

Q Theatre (Bar)

305 QUEEN ST, CBD

Aotea Square

291–297 QUEEN ST, CBD

Through the Eye of Tāmaki Makaurau

Ellen Melville Centre

2 FREYBERG PL, CBD

Wāhine

Gus Fisher Gallery

74 SHORTLAND ST, CBD

The sentiment of flowers

Objectspace

13 ROSE RD, GREY LYNN

Cook & Company

DEPOT

28 CLARENCE ST, DEVONPORT

The Realists

DANCE PLANT COLLECTIVE is a contemporary dance-theatre company based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Dance Plant Collective’s vision is to create politically challenging and transformative performance work and the roots of our practice are planted in a desire to nuture community, honour the body as a locus of understanding and uphold the interconnectedness of all things.

Co-founded in late 2016, Dance Plant Collective offers a unique

collaborative practice inspired by the genius of rhizome ecosystems. The collective embraces both absurdity and authenticity, trusting the spontaneous cross-fertilisation of view-points to produce startling new material staged in equally surprising spaces.

Dance Plant Collective’s work has spread throughout New Zealand and nationally with award winning and sold out performances that offer collaborative opportunities and a community based approach.

ROBYN PENN was born in 1973, in South Africa and lives in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Penn is an artist whose practice includes drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and film installations. The foci of her work are of the natural world, the elusive nature of time, the sublime and the threat of the Anthropocene. The artist spent one year training in Fine Arts at the University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg before receiving an Honours degree in Fine Arts from Ilam, Canterbury University, New Zealand. She also read for a BA in Psychology at the University of the Witswatersrand. Penn is a fellow of the prestigious Ampersand Trust. Her art has been seen internationally in galleries, in solo and group exhibitions, and art fairs since 1999. Her first solo exhibition was in Johannesburg in 2009. Penn has collaborated with internationally acclaimed master printmakers Mark Attwood (SA), Jillian Ross (CA), Nathi Ndlandla (SA), Georgina Berens (SA), screen printmaker Wim Legrand (SA) and Risograph printmaker Candice Ježek (SA).

IDENTITY DANCE COMPANY

(IDCO) is an Auckland-based dance company world-renowned for their unique flavour.

This has shown in their successes at the World Hiphop Dance Championship (HHI), where they have won multiple medals (one Gold, two Silver and two Bronze) and are still the current Varsity National Champions. Other successes include being the first winners of The Stage – Haka

Fusion and having many dancers featured in New Zealand’s first hiphop movie, Born to Dance

IDCO have also danced and choreographed for various international companies such as Laservision Mega Media Dubai, various K-pop groups, and for TV shows and advertisements including XFactor, Sony and Steinlager Tokyo Dry.

CLAIRE CHAMBERLAIN (MA Art History with Honours, PGDipEd) has taught for Te Tuhi’s Art Today programme since 2018 and has over 20 years’ experience as a secondary teacher of art history. She was co-head of Patrons of NZ at Venice in 2022 and has been a patron herself since 2017. A keen supporter of Aotearoa arts and artists, Chamberlain is passionate about communicating her love of art and art history in an accessible and enjoyable way.

JESS FU is a Chinese-New Zealand DJ and music journalist. Whether busting down the dancefloor, pushing the boundaries of radio, or making documentaries, Fu is a force to be reckoned with.

She has a monthly residency on L.A.’s Dublab, and has previously appeared on local and international stations like NTS, Half Moon, and 95bFM. Her fiery and fierce DJ sets exhibit the raw power of the Aotearoa underground.

M4URI M4STA (A.A.J @a.ro.ha) is the DJ/experimental personae of artist, Abigail Aroha Jensen. Oro collaborator and sound selecta with an interest in taonga puoro adlibs.

M4URI M4STA is on a haerenga of haututu, exploring the essence of hā in relation to textures of wai, te taiao and ngā taonga puoro. Here 2 pl4y.

RNG†sus aka Mariadelle ‘Abbey’ Gamit is a queer Pinoy interdisciplinary artist and DJ based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their main practice revolves around themes of the post-digital, hyperreality and the relationships surrounding identity and data. With these themes manifesting in their mixes as well; expect different genres in one set.

RNG†sus is here to take you on a trip with mixes that are “determined largely by luck, chance or randomness” on the dance floor. Divine intervention or hellish chaos? Either way, it’s a guaranteed good time!”

Not only is SEZZO a proud Ngāpuhi DJ, writer, curator, medical student, and is spiritually connected to kōtare (kingfishers), but she’s also known to be a booty shaker specialist! Her exploration of what it means to be takatāpui and the magic of the club scene have led her to create the mindbendingly experimental art club night Precog and found the Māori-Australian art collective Ngāti Kangaru. Sezzo has performed at prestigious venues like Palais de Tokyo Galerie (Paris) and events like Dark Mofo and the Falls Festival, sharing the stage with music legends like Cher, Big Freedia,

Moor Mother & Black Quantum Futurism, Klein, Le1f, Coolio, and Charli XCX. Starting in Meanjin (Brisbane), Sezzo quickly became a beloved figure in the underground music scene, and as a regular host on 4ZZZ 102.1FM, then creating shockwaves in Naarm (Melbourne), she cemented her place as the High Priestess of the Australian/ NZ Underground DJ scene. Now based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, Sezzo continues to push boundaries with her brilliant mind, heart for healing, irrepressible energy, and booty-shaking moves!

Wāhine

He mea whatu ngātahi i ētahi kōrero ā-oro whai wheako me ētahi whakaahua kiritangata mana nui, ko Wāhine tētahi whakaaturanga e rumakina ai te tangata ki ngā reo wāhine Māori e whakakahangia ana huri i Aotearoa.

He mea whakawātea i te ara e whai hua ai ō tātou hapori i ngā kōrero mō ngā rā o ngā ao o ēnei wāhine, otirā, e ākina ai te māramatanga taupuhipuhi, he whakaaturanga hāereere a Wāhine ka whakawhānuihia ki ia o ōna tūranga hou huri i Aotearoa, mā te pōhiri i tētahi wahine nō te iwi hau kāinga kia whai wāhi ki te kaupapa.

Tūtakina te wahine o Tāmaki Makaurau me te nui noa atu, ki te puku o Tāmaki Makaurau hei tēnei Māehe.

WĀHINE AT AAF

SUPPORTED BY

Weaving together intimate audio stories and powerful portrait photography, Wāhine is an immersive exhibition that amplifies Māori women’s voices around Aotearoa.

Offering our communities the opportunity to be enriched by their life stories while fostering mutual understanding, Wāhine is a touring exhibition that will expand at each new location around Aotearoa by inviting a wahine from a local iwi to join the kaupapa.

Discover the Tāmaki Makaurau wahine and more in central Auckland this March.

Image: Loren Pasquier

This is an outdoor exhibition. Audio stories are accessible via QR-codes. Smartphones and headphones are required to listen.

Artspace Aotearoa

10 February–6 April FREE

Door, window, world: Maree Horner, J.C. Sturm

Door, window, world presents a powerful selection of rarely seen work by two pioneering female voices from Aotearoa, artist Maree Horner and poet J.C. Sturm.

Spanning drawing, sculpture and writing, this exhibition highlights their capacity to embody courage as they developed practices that explore the edges of what it is to be a creative in the world. The selected work draws attention to rituals, objects and language that construct our daily lives, and asks could this be otherwise?

Cook & Company

Cook & Company draws on the nature of jewellery as both a distinctly public and private art form.

The largest survey of work by leading Aotearoa jeweller Octavia Cook, this exhibition expands on her long-held interest in the private life of jewellery – how it is worn, housed and collected by its users.

For Cook & Company, the artist is joined by six practitioners spanning craft, design and architecture, each commissioned by the artist to design a one-of-a-kind storage system for jewellery.

Objectspace

11 March–7 May FREE

Artwork: Octavia Cook, S.H.A.L.L.O.W brooches, 2021.

Image: Samuel Hartnett. Courtesy of Anna Miles Gallery.

Artwork: Maree Horner, Familiar Monuments. Cupboard, 1994–1996.

Auckland

Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

25 February–25 June

Light from Tate: 1700s to Now

From the world-renowned Tate collection, experience the magic and beauty of light in an exhibition that captures it with startling force.

View paintings by visionary artists and infamous rivals J.M.W Turner and John Constable, and experience how their artworks have influenced generations of artists. As you travel through the exhibition, discover how light has captivated artists for over two centuries, from the impressionistic brushstrokes of Claude Monet to the experimental photographers of the 1920s, to mesmerising installations which immerse you in the transformative power of light’s brilliance. Be illuminated, be entranced, be inspired.

gap [黄馨贤박성환嫦潔] filler

A ceramic exhibition centring around themes of food, body and identity through a pan-Asian lens, showcasing works of three of Auckland’s most exciting emerging Asian artists: Cindy Huang, Ruby White and Sung Hwan Bobby Park.

gap [黄馨贤박성환嫦潔] filler is an invitation for artists to gather around and tell their stories. Aiming to subvert traditional ideas around ceramics and explore how artists blur the boundaries between art and craft, the exhibition delves into the idea of how the body exists in a liminal space between past and present, art and craft, belonging and alienation.

Studio

One Toi Tū

2–30 March FREE

Artwork: Bobby Park, BTM 눈물 Roimata, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

This exhibition will be held at a temporary gallery space for Studio One Toi Tū at 238 Karangahape Road.

Presented in collaboration with Tate, UK · Artwork: John Brett, The British Channel Seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs, 1871. Oil paint on canvas. Presented by Mrs Brett 1902. Photo: Tate.

This is a ticketed exhibition. For details on how to book, visit aaf.co.nz/light-from-tate

Featuring works by artists including J OSEF ALBERS, OLAFUR ELIASSON, DAN FLAVIN, VILHELM HAMMERSHØI, WASSILY KANDINSKY, YAYOI KUSAMA, LILIANE LIJN, CLAUDE MONET, BRIDGET RILEY, J.M.W TURNER, JAMES TURRELL, PAE WHITE

Gus Fisher Gallery

10 February–6 May FREE

The sentiment of flowers

The sentiment of flowers brings together artworks by leading Aotearoa and international artists that broadly resonate with the theme of queer ecologies.

The exhibition embraces a non-binary approach to thinking about nature by encouraging us to abandon ideas of human exceptionalism in order to understand how queerness is an integral part of life for all living organisms.

The sentiment of flowers features newly produced work by arapeta and Laura Duffy, and presents Alicia Frankovich’s Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies (2019–22) for the first time in Tāmaki Makaurau.

The Realists

The Realists asks what the art historical themes of Realism might look like in 2023, in a culture of radical transparency and photo apps with names like ‘BeReal’.

If Gustave Courbet and Edward Hopper were born in the millennium, what kind of daily realities might they have chosen to represent?

Four emerging artists counter the hyperperformative times we’re living in with honest and reflective perspectives in this exhibition.

Artwork: Alicia Frankovich, Atlas of Anti-Taxonomies, 2019–22. Courtesy of the artist.

Artwork: Brunelle Dias, Familiar Angels, 2022. Oil on canvas, 900 x 1500mm.

Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki / Auckland Arts Festival (AAF) champions change-making, the environment, ambitious ideas, powerful voices and unique experiences that open our eyes, our hearts and our minds.

The Festival takes place each March in New Zealand’s largest city, and reflects its contemporary, multicultural nature.

AAF challenges its community to be courageous, to be bold, and to explore new ways of reflecting the world around us.

Through the incredible work of artists here in Aotearoa and across the globe, we aim to unify, uplift and inspire our audiences – the people of Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa and all who visit.

Board of Trustees /

Te Poari Kaitiaki

John Judge (Chair)

Angela Clatworthy

Evan Davies

Eleshea D’Souza

Sarah Judkins

Graham Tipene

Fred Ward

Angela Watson

Chief Executive /

Kaiwhakahaere Matua

Robbie Macrae

Artistic Director / Kaitohu Toi

Shona McCullagh mNzm

Kaihautū Māori

Ataahua Papa

CORPORATE PATRONS

MAJOR FUNDERS

PATRONS

PLATINUM

Janet Clarke & John Judge

Kent Gardner & Ngaere Duff

Sir Roderick and Gillian, Lady Deane

Andrew & Jenny Smith

Christine & Richard Didsbury

SILVER

Julie & Brian Cadzow

Jeremy Collins Family

FUNDING PARTNERS

John & Jo Gow

Sir Chris & Lady Dayle Mace

Rochelle McLaren

BRONZE

John Barnett

Frances Bell

John Billington QC

Anonymous

Graham Cleary

Sally Woodfield & David Inns

Dame Jenny Gibbs

Andrew Gelonese & Michael Moore

Sonbol & Farzbod Taefi

Lady Philippa Tait

Fred & Nicky Ward

JADE

Jenny Anderson

Mark & Angela Clatworthy

Amber Coulter & Andrew Lewis

Tracey Haszard & Phil Sargent

Vanessa Morgan

Kate Plaw

Geoff & Fran Ricketts

Christopher Simcock & Camilla Hope-Simcock

Anthony & Sandra Grant