AGENCY brings together Clémentine Deliss, Kimberley Moulton, and Megan Tamati-Quenell for a three-day intensive exploring curatorial practice through three questions: How do I learn? How do I act? How do I imagine?

Presented alongside the Hōtoke season of exhibitions at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery (4 July – 11 October) and as part of CRIT: Art learning since 1987, Artspace Aotearoa (17 July – 26 September), the symposium responds to the limited formal frameworks for curatorial learning, exchange and imagining in Aotearoa, by foregrounding the vital role that rigorous and imaginative curatorial practice plays within contemporary art ecologies.

Cultivating reflection, resource sharing, peer-to-peer learning and the imagining of alternative futures for curatorial practice, the programme is structured in two parts: lectures articulating current positions in curatorial thinking and practice; and, conversational workshops deepening and testing these ideas collectively.

The lecture programme is free and open to registration on a first-come-first-served basis until maximum capacity is reached. Follow the event links in the right hand column for more details and to register for each lecture.

The workshop component of the intensive is free, places are limited to 25 participants, and attendance is by application. To apply, for the workshop component, please email your CV and a statement of interest (max 300 words)—including one question you would ask one of three speakers—to bridget@artspace.org.nz by 5pm Friday 19 June. We welcome applications as a one page pdf, or under 3-minute video or audio format. Workshop participants are required to attend all lectures and both workshops.

We strongly encourage attendees from outside of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington to apply for the National Services Te Paerangi Travel Subsidy Grant to assist with travel and accommodation costs associated with participation Information on the grant can be found here.

AGENCY: A curatorial intensive in three questions—How do I learn? How do I act? How do I imagine? is presented by Artspace Aotearoa and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery and supported by Chartwell Trust, Goethe Institut, National Services, and Toi o Aotearoa Creative New Zealand Te Manu Ka Tau International Delegates Programme.

This symposium will be held in Ngā Mokopuna, Kelburn Parade, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, and publishing. She lives in Berlin and has joint German and British nationality. She studied art practice in Vienna, and later social anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London, and received her Ph.D. from the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. As an artist-curator, her practice is characterized by an early concern for international artist-led dialogues, team constellations in curating, and new approaches to museology. Deliss is currently Curator at Large at KANAL-Centre Pompidou. Since 2024, she has been KANAL-Guest Professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and since 2021, Global Humanities Professor in History of Art, at the University of Cambridge. Between 2010–2015, she was Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt/Main, where she instituted a new trans-disciplinary lab to remediate collections within a post-ethnological paradigm, working with a wide range of artists, lawyers, and writers. Her publications include The Metabolic Museum (2020) published by Hatje Cantz which was translated into Russian in 2021 (Garage Museum), and into Spanish in 2023 (Caniche Editorial, Madrid); and, Skin in the Game: Conversations on Risk and Contention published in 2023 by Hatje Cantz/ KW Institute for Contemporary Art to accompany the exhibition at KW, Berlin. Since 1996, she has produced the independent artists’ and writer’s organ Metronome, and twice officially invited to documenta, first in 1997 (dx) and then in 2007 (d12).

Dr Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta Yorta woman from Australia and a curator and writer. Moulton is a respected international curator working across modern and contemporary art and historical collections. Leading research and curatorial practice in the field of connecting knowledge, histories and futures at the intersection of historical collections and contemporary art, her work centres regenerative re-worlding of art histories and ecological, cultural and relational Indigenous and Global Majority creative practices. Working with artists to amplify underrepresented art histories, Moulton’s practice foregrounds connecting communities to collections, through rematriation and re-spiriting collections and place beyond the colonial past. This work has positioned Moulton at the forefront of local and international curatorial and writing praxis which supports contemporary art across multidiscipline areas to re-frame a new dialogue between object, place and community. Her research interests include Indigenous rematriation, Ancestral belongings and restitution, Indigenous space-time cosmologies and embodied knowledge in contemporary art practice. Along with her curatorial work Moulton is currently Deputy Chair of the Board for Australia’s leading regional art gallery, Shepparton Art Museum and Director of the board for the Adam Briggs Foundation.

Megan Tamati-Quennell is a leading curator and writer. She has a 36-year curatorial career specialising in modern and contemporary Māori and Indigenous art. Tamati-Quennell is the longest serving curator in this field receiving a CNZM in 2024, for her contribution to Māori and First nations art. She is of Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngai Tahu, Kāti Māmoe and Waitaha descent. Tamati-Quennell has held curatorial positions at the National Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and has worked as an independent curator at the Sharjah Art Foundation and in Busan, South Korea. She currently holds the position of Curator, Modern and Contemporary Māori and Indigenous Art at Te Papa. Recent career highlights include co-curating Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry (2025) and Emily Karaka: Ka Awatea, A New Dawn, the first major survey exhibition of senior Māori painter Emily Karaka, (2024). Tamati-Quennell is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts, in an Indigenous-led programme at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.