Contributors

Editors

• Balamohan Shingade

  Balamohan Shingade is a curator and writer. He is a Masters graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts where he was also employed as a Professional Teaching Fellow in the Critical Studies programme (2012–15). Most recently, during the redevelopment of Uxbridge Arts and Culture, he has been the inaugural Manager/Curator of Malcolm Smith Gallery, a public gallery for Owairoa or the eastern suburbs Auckland (2015–16). He also holds a Diploma in Indian Classical Music and regularly coordinates music concerts in Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Chloe Geoghegan

  Chloe Geoghegan is a curator currently living in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she has been director at Blue Oyster Art Project Space for three years (January 2014–January 2017). Prior to this she co-founded Dog Park, an artist-run space in operation for nearly three years in post-earthquake Christchurch between 2012 and 2014. Recent curatorial projects at Blue Oyster include: The False Demographic (2015, curated with Ted Whitaker), A Tragic Delusion (2015) and The Optimists (2014). Other recent curatorial projects include: Zero to Hero at TCB Art Inc., Melbourne (2016) and Wingman with Dog Park at Alaska, Sydney (2014). She has contributed to publications such as Hue & Cry, Das Superpaper, un Magazine and the Journal of Curatorial Studies. Chloe holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design with Honors in Art History from the University of Canterbury (2008/2015) and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Art Curatorship, which included an independent course of study at Oxford University (2011).

• Rebecca Boswell

  Rebecca Boswell is a writer and curator living in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is interested in practices that explore affect, language and materiality, and the relationship of these to politics of labour and economy. As a curator, some of her projects include: They say this island changes shape by Eleanor Cooper (2016) and Hardboiled city with Christopher L. G. Hill & Francesco Pedraglio (2015) undertaken while she was programmes manager at The Physics Room; and Carpet burn (2014) co-curated with Anya Henis at Papakura Art Gallery. Last year she also commissioned natural sympathies & weird weather, an online project published through The Physics Room. Rebecca has a Conjoint Degree of Fine Arts (Postgraduate) and Sociology from the University of Auckland and between 2012 and 14 she was on the Window curatorial team.

Writers

• Alex Davidson

  Alex Davidson lives in London and works at Stuart Shave/Modern Art as the coordinator. Before that she worked as the assistant curator of Simon Denny’s Secret Power at the 2015 Venice Biennale, after a year working as a freelance curator, editor and writer in Vilnius, Lithuania.

• Andrea Bell

  Andrea Bell is a writer and curator based in Dunedin where she is the 2016 Creative New Zealand Curatorial Intern in Contemporary Art at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Her writing has been published in frieze, Art Monthly Australasia and Art Asia Pacific among other publications. She is a former editorial board member of un Magazine, and the current art editor of Hue & Cry journal. She holds a Master’s Degree in Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.

• Bridget Riggir-Cuddy

  Bridget Riggir-Cuddy is a curator and writer living in Tāmaki Makaurau, and is currently a co-director at RM gallery. She studied Art History and Media Studies at the University of Auckland and in 2016 completed an MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts. Her thesis, ‘Imagining Impossible Subjectivities’, explored the revisionary potentials of imaging and imagining difference, assigning to critical culture the propensity to construct new worlds and new ways of being in the world. Invested in this function of art, poetry, philosophy, community and the curatorial, Bridget’s practice is currently driven by the political capacities of the speculative and affective, and the image’s role within discourses of Posthumanism.

• Chloe Reith

  Chloe Reith is a curator and writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Currently curator of exhibitions at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, exhibitions curated for the gallery include Nicolas Party: Boys and Pastel (2015), Raoul De Keyser: Paintings 1967–2011 (2015) and Tony Conrad: Invented Acoustical Tools 1967–2014 (2014). She has delivered exhibitions including British Art Show 8 and I Still Believe in Miracles: 30 Years of Inverleith House (both 2016) and solo presentations by Isa Genzken, Corin Sworn and Alex Dordoy. As an independent curator she has presented Objects from the Temperate Palm House, group exhibition, Bargain Spot Project Space, Edinburgh, 2016, and Reality and Constructed Factual, group exhibition, Art Sheffield festival of contemporary art, 2013. She has held posts at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Portfolio Contemporary Photography Magazine/Jerwood Photography Awards. She has written for publications including Art News, Kaleidoscope, Corridor8, thisistomorrow and Line. The group exhibition Sinkholes and broken telephones will be presented in early 2017.

• Danny Butt

  Danny Butt lectures in the Centre for Cultural Partnerships, Victorian College of the Arts and is a Research Associate in the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne. His book Artistic Research in the Future Academy will be published by Intellect in 2017. He is a member of the art collective Local Time, whose work engages the dynamics of visitor and host in the context of mana whenua and discourses of indigenous self-determination.

• Ioana Gordon-Smith

  Ioana Gordon-Smith is curator at Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery. Ioana also contributes regularly to magazines and journals, is the New Zealand-based project manager for the inaugural Honolulu Biennial and is a trustee for the community-focused art collective Whau The People.

• Laura Preston

  Laura Preston is currently associate editor for documenta 14. She was curator-at-large for the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington from 2013 to 2015, and in 2012, guest curator at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main.

• Louisa Afoa

  Louisa Afoa is an Auckland-based artist. Through explorations that often reflect her surroundings she delves into ideas of diaspora creating socially conscious narratives that offer a peephole into marginalised communities. Louisa is also a frequent contributor to and communications coordinator for #500 and a co-director of RM gallery.

• Robyn Maree Pickens

  Robyn Maree Pickens holds a Masters in Art History and has worked in galleries and project spaces including Artspace, Auckland (2009–2010). Her writing has appeared in Art New Zealand, Art News, The Physics Room Annual, Enjoy Gallery’s Occasional Journal, North Projects, The Press and in exhibition catalogues. Currently she is an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times and the 2015–16 Blue Oyster summer writer-in-residence on Quarantine Island Kamau Taurua. Robyn will commence a practice-based PhD in the field of eco-poetics in the English Department at the University of Otago in 2017.

• Taarati Taiaroa

  Taarati Taiaroa (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Apa) is an Auckland-based artist, curator and writer who has a research-­based practice that often utilises archives to investigate small narratives, site, print and environmental histories. A graduate of the University of Auckland, Taiaroa holds Masters degrees in both Fine Arts and Museums and Cultural Heritage. From 2012 to February 2016, she was a co-director of RM: an artist-run space, project office and archive situated in central Auckland. She is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Creative Arts, Manukau Institute of Technology.

• Tendai John Mutambu

  Tendai John Mutambu is an emerging curator and writer of Zimbabwean ancestry with a background in Art History and Law. He is presently living and working in Tāmaki Makaurau, where he is the 2016 Artspace curatorial assistant. In the coming year, Tendai looks forward to pursuing further study, locating his research around curating’s relationship to critical theory, writing and the politics of the postcolony.

• Tim Gentles

  Tim Gentles is a writer and curator based in New York. He has an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and his writing has appeared in Frieze, Art-Agenda, Art in America and other publications.

• Vera Mey

  Vera Mey is an independent curator who has been awarded a studentship to attend SOAS, University of London as a doctoral candidate. She was part of the founding team at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore as curator, residencies from 2014 to 2016 and prior to that was assistant director at ST PAUL St Gallery, AUT University, Auckland. She is currently on the curatorial team of SEA Project, an exhibition due to open in July 2017 at the Mori Art Museum, Japan and National Art Centre, Tokyo.

Published by

• Blue Oyster Art Project Space

• The Physics Room