BTS with Ruth Buchanan, Kaitohu Director of Artspace Aotearoa

Buchanan shares seven navigation points leading toward Artspace Aotearoa’s current exhibition, Prompts, featuring work by Michael Parekōwhai and Lubaina Himid, 1 February – 17 April 2025.

Michael Parekōwhai, The Indefinite Article (1990), measurements of elements provided by lender, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and Chartwell Trust (purchased with generous assistance from Jim Barr and Mary Barr, 1990)

Consider the weight of this work, first shown in 1990 at Artspace in the exhibition Choice!, curated by George Hubbard, and now returning 35 years after the fact. Calculate the literal weight, the wood x paint x screws x hours that it took to produce this work as an art student at Elam; and press this calculation through the ways in which art history does things to works that change their weight, that change the scale in ways that can’t necessarily be divided or split by 8.6 inches.

Scanned pages from “George Hubbard: The hand that rocks the cradle” by Anna-Marie White and Robert Leonard in Reading Room: A journal of Art and Culture, Politics in Denial, issue 09/2018

Complexity of exhibition making (as a live form that acts as a container for questions, hopes, challenges). This article explores the work of Hubbard from this time, opening up to the fragile nature of working things out in public as exhibitions ideally do.

Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern, 2022

Bringing together Parekōwhai and Himid is an exercise in exhibition making toward horizon expansion. Both of the artists work chart multiple points in a timeline 1807-1840-1990-2007-2017-2025 as the artists and the artworks stay alive to the power of language as made concrete in the law, as actually experienced in life, as encountered now in 2025 in Prompts. This orange open curve, (spiral?) is almost a diagram for how I’d like the works and relative contexts to act in the exhibition, opening forward and returning, in parallel.

Artspace Aotearoa annual question graphic design sketch, HIT, 2024/2025

Is language large enough? He nui anō te reo? Like the open curve, like the thought of weight being both formal and historical, this question invites consideration as a live, contingent point of departure for a programme that begins with big and little language, that you can read, walk through, and penetrate.

Sketches for Prompts, Ruth Buchanan, 2024–2025

Months in one A3, exhibition, and archive. (The plan for the positioning of The Indefinite Article is not how it appears in the exhibition thanks to the engagement from the artist who invites us to do more to get to it; the generous act of opening and rotating.)

Scanned page from Lubaina Himid, Water Has a Perfect Memory (Hollybush Gardens, London: 2022)

See the notes on time, weight, scale, doing more, being generous.

“Regret Nothing”: poem by January Gill O’Neil

I read this a week or two before Prompts opened, the tenacity captured in this activating poem captures so much of what is shared between the work of these two artists.

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