Arts & Culture

The start of 2023 has been a busy one for Broker Gallery’s Founder & Director, Marc Blake. In addition to winning the supreme award at the Craigs Aspiring Art Prize, he headed up to Auckland to take part in the Aotearoa Art Fair, which ran 2-5 March, where Broker was the first ever Queenstown gallery selected to take part.

Auckland actress Cassandra Woodhouse will bring her company’s first production, Hanna, to Arrowtown and Lake Hawea from 12 March. The gripping story by Sam Potter follows a young mum who discovers that her daughter isn’t actually hers after a mix-up at the hospital. It presents an emotional look at what nature and nurture really mean.

This March Starkwhite Queenstown is opening a must-see exhibition titled SAFE which promises as many surprises as questions.

First Thursdays Queenstown is a free community event that celebrates the diversity of arts and culture in Queenstown. This Thursday 2 March join in for a fun and friendly art crawl across six exhibition spaces showing a wide range of work.

Tahuna’s Waitangi Day celebrations will this year return to Queenstown Gardens after the past couple of years of moving around to different spots. The 2023 event has a strong focus on whanau and will include live music, Kapa Haka, kai, and activities for tamariki.

First Thursdays Queenstown is a free community event that celebrates the diversity of arts and culture in Queenstown. This Thursday 2 February join in for a fun and friendly art crawl where you choose the route and the amount of time you spent at each exhibition.

From this weekend Te Atamira will host Cindy Huang’s exhibition, which is bringing to light the history of the Chinese gold miners of the Otago region. She has explored exchange, ancestry, and materiality, and created 1000 handmade porcelain lilies. The handwritten poem pictured serves as the title of the exhibition and offers some insight into the delicate process of considerations made.

For anyone who loves Mid-Century architecture, or who is now back at work but still dreaming of those summery by-the-pool vibes, head to Starkwhite to soak up Australian painter Paul Davies’ art work. Davies has three paintings in an exhibition titled Whispering Gums: Recent Australian art and will be visiting Queenstown to give an artist talk on Saturday 21st of January.

Kiwi country-pop music sensation Jackie Bristow and renowned jazz entertainers Nairobi Trio are among a stellar line-up of entertainment confirmed for this month’s inaugural Roam the Valley Wine & Food Festival.

Over the hill in Wanaka the annual Craigs Aspiring Art Prize will take place this weekend. The annual event attracts artists from throughout New Zealand and offers a top prize of $20,000. It’s the main fundraiser for Holy Family Catholic School.

This January Te Atamira is hosting Squiggla, a series of workshops that are a gymnasium for creative thinking. Aimed at adults, the programme encourages creative thinking through free-flow mark-making. It’s all about visual exploration and creative discovery without the pressure of copying anything or ‘making art’.

Contemporary art gallery, Broker, is showcasing a group exhibition, The Insiders, from now and through to the start of 2023. It will feature six artists from Australia and New Zealand and spans across photography, video, painting and drawing. It examines each of the artist’s contemplation of the internalisation of emotional and phycological states within the external, physical spaces of our existence.

The Arrowtown Creative Arts Society is launching the first “Art Before Dark” Arrowtown open gallery event on 14 December from 5:30pm to 7pm. With a similar format to the popular First Thursday events in Queenstown, this will be a family-friendly opportunity for art enthusiasts to visit seven galleries in Arrowtown, all within a short walking distance of each other.

Curious is a new programme of talks and events in Queenstown instigated by Kelly Carmichael. Kelly is the director of Starkwhite in Earl Street and has built up a solid curatorial background working in the contemporary art world across Europe, the Middle East and the US before returning home to Aotearoa–New Zealand. She’s launching the first Curious event on 3 December at Starkwhite Queenstown.

The Central Otago Regional Choir will perform Magical Music from Mozart to Madden in Arrowtown, Wanaka and Alexandra at the start of December. The performance will showcase the choir performing a variety of music including several songs by the highly-regarded New Zealand composer Richard Madden QSM, who will also be conducting them.

International award-winning British photographer Mandy Barker will bring her SHELF-LIFE exhibition to Te Atamira over December and January. The exhibition will highlight the impact of the global reliance on plastic and the damage it causes to marine life, and has been brought here in partnership with the British Council and the British High Commission.

Queenstown Airport is doubling as an art gallery for the next few months. Natalya Doudell’s artwork titled ‘Unitiy’, will hang in the baggage claim area and is currently for sale through Wanaka Fine Art Gallery. If it’s sold while on display in the airport, a portion of the price will be donated to a local charity.

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Hinerangi me Ngaati Raukawa, Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato, Ngaati Waewae, Ngaati Wairangi, Waitaha, Kaati Mamoe) is an artist, writer, and researcher. Their practice that explores overlaps and tensions between Indigenous and European knowledge systems, threading both together to weave new meanings and ways of sharing. Hana works across a variety of media including textiles, raranga (weaving), ceramics, painting, performance, film, and sculpture.

Abbas Nazari, a former Afghan refugee who fled the Taliban in 2001, will do a small tour of Queenstown and Wanaka in early November to tell his story and talk about his book, After the Tampa. The book is an autobiographical memoir about Abbas’ family’s journey from Afghanistan to New Zealand and was written during the 2020 lockdown.

Wesley John Fourie is an emerging artist whose work explores the sensual and the tactile. Their questioning of sexuality, nature, love, and loss, often manifests as large-scale soft sculptures. Textiles have long been a vehicle for storytelling but have recently had something of a renaissance in contemporary art. These thread-based ways of making offer powerful political and emotional associations, in Fourie’s practice they also offer direct relation to land forms through scale and to their creator through an intensity of making.