To Eduardo Abaroa drawing is an activity that can be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of their profession, skill, or cultural background. His workshops are structured around a series of exercises, designed to open up the idea that drawing can be a catalyst for sensations and thoughts.

Abaroa’s work has engaged a myriad of artistic processes and topics that correspond to the ever-changing context of his home country. In Fields and Notions Abaroa excavates his personal archive of video works, dating back to the early nineties when he was an art student. Abaroa brings these works into dialogue with new videos, drawings and objects he has collected and made during his time in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Ruins and Reproduction is an introductory lecture on the practice of new Te Whare Hēra artist in residence Eduardo Abaroa.

Abaroa creates detailed fictions that stimulate reflection on the complex cultural clashes that are constituted through modern society. Working in installation, sculpture and video, Abaroa, who hails from Mexico, investigates anthropology, ethnography and biology, creating reconstructed narratives that highlight existing ideologies, particularly those defining art institutions, the everyday and the nature-culture divide.

Le Sceau de Salomon is an installation with videos and different media collected during Quenum’s 6 month residency in Aotearoa New Zealand. The French exhibition title “Le Sceau de Salomon” has two meanings: it is both the name of a forest flower, and a legend related to King Solomon.

What sort of tattoo do you have?

Ink and pigments placed within skin can represent a rite of passage, social status or the special devotion of their carrier. Memorial, humorous or purely decorative, these imprints always have a story worth sharing.

When a fable is retold, it becomes an adaptation: every storyteller shapes the narrative with their personal way of telling. These acts of transmission and interpretation add layers to narratives documented in both folklore and literature.

Our given and inherited names invoke biographical, anthropological and whimsical narratives that transcend generations. They connect geography, history and symbolism influencing and giving the past a presence in our rich and manifold contemporary realities.

Wellington City Council, Te Whare Hēra Wellington International Artist Residency and the Goethe-Institut New Zealand invite you to attend the fourth annual artist residency forum, International Connections.

Chloé Quenum has a particular interest in transmission media, such as textiles. To her, the textile is a living object and a testimony of cultural overlays and invasions, political and economic ambitions. “For example dye and tools can relate to the exchange of graphic systems and techniques caused by the displacement of civilizations.”

Creating an expansive multimedia project including wearable sculptures, performance, film, and jewellery works, WITH volunteer participants, ALL in three months AND on the other side of the world from home?!

As current Te Whare Hēra international artist in residence Berlin-based artist Yuka Oyama has developed Helpers- Changing Homes specifically for upcoming exhibition The Language of Things: Meaning and Value in Contemporary Jewellery at The Dowse Art Museum.

Helpers: Changing Homes is an expansive multimedia project developed through sculpture, performance, film, and jewellery works. During a three month residency at Te Whare Hēra artist Yuka Oyama has sought out project participants whose lives have been shaped by living in multiple countries, interviewing them about the objects they own which maintain a sense of ‘home’. Realising that as a person matures the person becomes their home, Oyama then recreated these objects as large-scale sculptures constructed from cardboard supplied by Allied Pickford Movers.