PRESENTED BY GALLERY SALLY DAN-CUTHBERT

Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015–17

This panoramic video reimagines an 1804 French scenic wallpaper depicting Pacific peoples, challenging its imperial gaze with a speculative twist. Moving through eighty live-action vignettes, the work builds toward the death of Captain Cook in 1779. Reihana worked with indigenous actors through “agreed representation” to reclaim their own narratives. Representing Aotearoa New Zealand at the 2017 Venice Biennale, this is the completed work shown for the first time in Auckland.

PRESENTED BY MARS GALLERY

Atong Atem, A Facet For Every Turn, 2023.

This photographic self-portrait installation reflects on documentation and archiving as cultural practice. Printed across six silk panels standing five metres tall, the work weaves together family photographs, hair cuttings, and self-portraiture to interrogate identity, migration, and colonial history. The lightweight panels flow and layer over one another, inviting audiences to move around them rather than simply gaze, refusing simplicity at every turn.

PRESENTED BY CHALK HORSE

Kauri Hawkins, From the bush to Bunnings

At the heart of this work is the puhoro, a form from Toi Māori representing movement and flow. Here it becomes a visual pathway ascending through whakapapa, acknowledging the artists and ancestors who paved the way for those who follow. Hawkins reminds us we do not move alone: every step upward is supported by those before, and carries responsibility for those yet to come.

PRESENTED BY SEASON

Maungarongo Te Kawa, Hine-Waiapu, 2025

A mihi to the powerful female taniwha of the Waiapu awa, this dazzling waka honours a river now in crisis from deforestation and climate-induced erosion. Te Kawa’s joyful portrayal presents Hine-Waiapu aboard a bedazzled waka taua, accompanied by otherworldly attendants, arriving to protect the Waiapu awa from further human-induced harm and to restore life to a treasured Ngāti Porou waterway.

PRESENTED BY MCLEAVEY GALLERY

W.D Hammond, Untitled [Wainui work 1] and Untitled [Wainui work 2]

These two paintings were made not for a gallery but for the walls of Hammond’s personal bach at Wainui, where they hung unseen for over two decades. Rescued after his death in 2021, they reveal his signature bird-people motifs, deep emerald and gold washes, and profound reverence for nature, a virtuosic artist entirely at home in his own world.

PRESENTED BY MILFORD GALLERY

Yuki Kihara, Dresstories, 2026

Emerging from Kihara’s encounter with colonial nude photographs of Sāmoan women, Dresstories transforms these images into life-size Victorian mourning dresses. The work interrogates the colonial gaze, its dual nature of desire and discipline, visibility and erasure. By re-staging photographs as garments, Kihara shifts looking from passive consumption into a contested space of memory, agency, and refusal, mourning colonial violence while restoring visual sovereignty.

PRESENTED BY TWO ROOMS

Gretchen Albrecht, Night Falling, 2023

Not previously exhibited in New Zealand, Night Falling showcases Albrecht’s expanded colour palette, built through stained and painted layers of varying opacity on linen. A forerunner of the women’s art movement, Albrecht’s work is both intellectual and expressionist — inward and outreaching simultaneously. This painting reflects her ongoing meditation on threatened environments and landscapes, a universal concern felt with quiet urgency.

PRESENTED BY GOW LANGSFORD

Gregor Kregar, Bench 1 & Bench 2, 2025

These functional sculptures extend Kregar’s exploration of geometric refraction into everyday design. Angular stainless-steel planes frame tactile timber seating, balancing hard-edged geometry with the warmth of natural materials. Occupying the space between sculpture and utility, the benches transform an ordinary object into a perceptually dynamic encounter, grounded yet visually alive, precision and play held in careful equilibrium.

PRESENTED BY KURUTAI COLLECTIVE

Dorothy Waetford and Graham Tipene, Puna Waihanga, 2026

Shaped from earth and fire, this water vessel is imbued with the enduring symbol of tiki, a guardian representing life and ancestral connection. Positioned at the entrance to the Fair, it invites audiences to pause and acknowledge the interconnectedness of the waters we all come from, the creative wellspring within, and mauri, the life force that animates all things.

Mary-Louise Browne, GRAND, 2022

This neon work invites us to sit with a single word and feel its meanings shift. GRAND , simultaneously impressive and mundane, monumental and merely fine, plays with the gap between scale and significance. Rendered large and luminous, Browne draws on her ongoing practice of using language as a primary medium, creating ambiguous encounters that ask what words really mean in the world.

PRESENTED BY CITY GALLERY WELLINGTON

Cornelia Parker, A Few Shots (and their Shadows), 2026

PRESENTED BY CBD GALLERY

Sophie Lampert, Moon and Butterflies, 2026

Lampert’s sculptures are abstract portraits celebrating women whose contributions to history were overlooked, ignored, or claimed by others. Upholstered in black velvet and adorned with bead embroidery, they draw on craft traditions embedded in female experience. The exhibition title nods to the ellipsis — those trailing dots where women’s achievements were erased. Lampert refocuses the spotlight, revealing contributions that were never peripheral, but foundational.

PRESENTED BY KURUTAI COLLECTIVE

Kurutai Collective Activation – Te rūma Kāinga, 2025

This activation slows the Fair’s pace, inviting visitors to sit, weave, and inscribe words into a shared strand. Participants contribute their own mauri — their life force — to a collective weave, seeding understanding of mātauranga tuku iho, knowledge handed down through generations. A space for presence and participation, it asks us to understand art as all-encompassing, woven into the fabric of the world.