UNNERVED

THE NEW ZEALAND PROJECT

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Since the advent of the Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT) in 1993, the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) has developed a real taste for New Zealand art, assembling what must be the largest institutional collection of contemporary New Zealand art outside New Zealand. They have bought a lot, and they have bought thoughtfully and ambitiously. QAG’s New Zealand art show ‘Unnerved: The New Zealand Project’ was almost entirely sourced from its collection.

Unnerved was a big show, filling the Gallery of Modern Art’s (GoMA’s) ground-floor. To tell the truth, it was too big and tried to tick too many boxes. It wasn’t clear whether it was intended as a broad survey of recent New Zealand art (implied by the subtitle ‘The New Zealand Project’), as a more specific exploration of a particular ‘unnerved’ vein within it, or simply as a progress report on the state of QAG’s New Zealand collection. Indeed, it was something of a tug-of-war between all three.

Unnerved was heavily informed by the APT. It dealt essentially with art and art-ideas from the 1990s on, and reflected the APT’s penchant for cultural-identity art. It was heavily skewed towards Māori and Pacific Island work. The ethno-pop of APT alumni Lisa Reihana and Michael Parekowhai was well represented. John Pule’s tapa-inspired paintings and Julian Hooper riffing on his mixed Hungarian/Tongan heritage seemed tailor made.

Unnerved was also cued to what has been called ‘New Zealand Gothic’. Most of its key curatorial links and conceptual sight-lines were based on tropes of darkness, death, and the uncanny—an unhealthy obsession with the past. Photographs by Lawrence Aberhart, Mark Adams, and Gavin Hipkins lingered on the New Zealand landscape as haunted—a place of unfinished business where... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Michael Stevenson, The gift (from ‘Argonauts of the Timor Sea’), 2004–06. Aluminium, wood, rope, bamboo, synthetic polymer paint, World War II parachute and National Geographic magazines, 400 x 600 x 300cm (installed). Purchased 2007. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund. Collection Queensland Art Gallery.

Florian Habicht, Woodenhead, 2003. Production still. DVD transferred from Betacam SP; black and white, sound; 90 minutes, 4:3. Director, Producer, Writer, Editor, Camera Operator Florian Habicht, Director of Photography Christopher Pryor, Art Director Teresa Peters, Music Marc Chesterman. Print source New Zealand Film Commission. Rights Florian Habicht, © Pictures for Anna. Photograph Frank Habicht