Auckland Artfair 2021 Talk 1: Parallel Worlds, new imagination of internationality

If we think about international links, what is the imagination of Aotearoa in the rest of the world, and what is now expected from a diverse range of practices and knowledge coming out of Aotearoa? What are the demands put on Indigenous work, both by public organisations, as well as by individual collectors? What is needed to provide more manaakitanga for these works in frameworks that are seemingly not designed to house them?

The panel will be led by Ioana Gordon-Smith with Tim Melville, Kimberley Moulton, Ema Tavola and Brook Andrew.

Ioana Gordon-Smith

Ioana Gordon-Smith is an arts writer and Curator Māori Pacific at Pātaka Art + Museum. Prior to this role, she was the inaugural Curator at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery. Ioana has also worked as Curator at Objectspace, a gallery dedicated to craft, design and applied arts, and as the inaugural Education Intern for Artspace, New Zealand, a role which came about through a partnership between Tautai Contemporary Arts Trust and Artspace to increase the accessibility of Artspace to its nearby Pacific audiences.

In addition to her curatorial work, Ioana also contributes regularly to a number of catalogues as well as magazines and journals, such as Art New Zealand, Art News New Zealand and un Magazine. She was the New Zealand-based project manager for the inaugural Honolulu Biennial 2017 and has been a regular Pasifika correspondent for Radio New Zealand.

She plays an important role in community arts as a trustee for the community-focused art collective Whau The People. Though her areas of interest span a broad range of disciplines, what is consistent throughout is a curatorial process that prioritises a close working relationship with artists and arts communities.

Ioana is the Assistant Curator of Yuki Kihara, Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022.

Ema Tavola

Ema Tavola is an independent artist-curator based in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Tavola’s curatorial concerns are grounded in the opportunities for contemporary art to engage grassroots audiences, shift representational politics and archive the Pacific diaspora experience. Tavola has worked in galleries and museums throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and is committed to curating as a mechanism for social inclusion, centralising Pacific ways of seeing and exhibition making as a mode of decolonisation. She opened her independent gallery, Vunilagi Vou in 2019, which relocated from a commercial premises to her converted garage as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Tim Melville

Tim Melville (Te Arawa, Te Atiawa) returned to Aotearoa in 2005 after 20 years in London. While there he completed a career-changing Art History degree and opened his Auckland gallery in 2007.

He is best known, perhaps, for his representation of emerging New Zealand artists, but his project has also introduced artists from Australian Aboriginal communities to New Zealand collectors and curators. He sees resonance in shared attitudes toward country in Australia and whenua in Aotearoa and he is interested in exploring their meeting points.

As one of the few Maori gallerists in the commercial art world Tim feels a particular responsibility to translate the values imbued within indigenous artwork for his gallery’s predominantly European audience of friends and supporters. This kaupapa is supported by a business model whose integral values include aroha and manaakitanga.

Tim Melville’s stand at the 2021 Auckland Art Fair presents work by Joe Sheehan (NZ) and Alberto Garcia-Alvarez (Spain / NZ) alongside Aboriginal artists George Ward Tjungurrayi and Nola Campbell (Warakurna Artists, WA), Rammey & Kathy Ramsay (Warmun Art, WA) and Nonggirrnga Marawili (Buku-Larnggay Mulka, NT).

Brook Andrew

Brook Andrew was Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020)which he renamed NIRIN, a ground-breaking First Nations and artist-led exhibition. In 2018, Brook Andrew completed a year-long Australia Council International Residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin where he reflected on the complexity of memory sites in Germany. In the following year, he concluded an ambitious, four-year-long Australian Research Council grant, “Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial”. Based at Monash University, this project was designed to respond to the repeated high-level calls for a national memorial to Aboriginal loss and the Frontier Wars. In 2017, Brook Andrew was the recipient of the prestigious Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and in 2015, was appointed Photography Residencies Laureate at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

Brook Andrew is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Monash University; Enterprise Professor in Interdisciplinary Practice, University of Melbourne; and a DPhil candidate in the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. He is an Associate Researcher, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Honorary Senior Fellow, Indigenous Studies Unit and the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne; and Associate Research in the Wominjeka Djeembana research lab at MADA, Monash University.

Kimberley Moulton

Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta Yorta curator, writer and Senior Curator, South-Eastern Aboriginal Collections at Museums Victoria and Artistic Associate for RISING Festival Melbourne. Kimberley works with knowledge, histories and futures at the intersection of First Peoples historical and contemporary art and making and her practice includes anti-colonial curatorial methodologies, working to extend the paradigm of what exhibitions and research in and out of institutions can be for and with First Peoples communities. Kimberley has held curatorial and community arts development roles at Melbourne Museum for over ten years and was an assistant curator for the permanent First Peoples Exhibition at Melbourne Museum. In 2018 she was Museums Victoria lead curator for Mandela: My Life, an exhibition on Nelson Mandela at Melbourne Museum in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Foundation Johannesburg and IEC exhibitions. Kimberley has led research in collections across museums and galleries in cultural heritage and First Nations contemporary art including the British Museum, Oxford University Pitt-Rivers Museum, Cambridge
University, The Met NYC, and the Smithsonian Institutes Washington D.C Independently Kimberley has written extensively for publications worldwide and held curatorial and writing research fellowships across Europe, UK, U.S.A, South Asia and North America. In 2019 Kimberley won the Power Institute Indigenous Art Writing Award and in 2020 was the co-editor for Artlink Indigenous 40.2 Kin Constellations: Languages Waters Futures. She is Alumni of the Wesfarmers Indigenous Leadership Program National Gallery of Australia and Director on the board Barpirdhila Foundation, Deputy Chair of the Shepparton Art Museum board, member of Australian Museums and Art Galleries Indigenous Road Map Advisory and member of the board for the International Art Critics Association- Australia.