Come along to the second in our winter kōrero ‘On Further Thought: an art history lecture series’:
Tethered Elsewhere – Balamohan Shingade
6.00pm, Wednesday 16 July 2025
Aho Ruruku, Ngā Mokopuna, entry from Kelburn Parade
Free, all welcome, no booking required.
Balamohan Shingade writes, ‘What is the intimacy we must develop to create a community? What is the distance we must maintain to retain our solitude? These questions formed a part of my curatorial invitation to artists and other participants in ‘How to Live Together’, an exhibition at St Paul St Gallery in 2019 (now called Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery). In this experiment in exhibition-making, not everything was visible across the stages of the show, because not everything was defined or decided beforehand. With artwork coming and going, and other moving parts within the whole, the project unfolded progressively.
This lecture revisits some of the exhibition’s central propositions. ‘How to Live Together’ was structured as an opportunity for de-linking artistic practices from exhibition-making, for reconciling the speeds and slownesses of individual projects with the collective whole of an exhibition, and for creating an intimacy with the very real ways in which people’s lives actually go in another part of the world. I elaborate particularly on this last question, which has sustained my recent efforts as a writer. That is, for a person of a diaspora, what kinds of connection and disconnection, intimacy and distance to one’s country of origin are desirable? What to make of the desire for continuity, the desire to be tethered to one’s own across geography and genealogy? What kind of engagement is necessary with a country that is elsewhere in order to grapple with the art histories of a diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand?’
‘On Further Thought’ is a series of talks which address significant moments — published texts, exhibitions, art works — in local art history from the 1990s and early 2000s. The emphasis is on the act of re-reading, and on reflection itself as a productive form of research that helps us to navigate the present and energises our future art histories. We are particularly interested in research that acknowledges a changing of one’s mind, addresses misconceptions, and attends to the archive as a site of lively reclamation or transformation.
Follow link for more information:
https://www.adamartgallery.nz/events/upcoming/on-further-thought-an-art-history-lecture-series-balamohan-shingade
[Image captions:
01_ Photo courtesy Balamohan Shingade]
Also check out other Arts events in Wellington, Exhibitions in Wellington, Literary Art events in Wellington.
