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.

Emerging in response to local writer, arts programmer and curator Emma Ng’s prompt towards the formation of “an art history that can take us somewhere new” (Rattling the Shelves, Satellites Archive, 2024), the intention of this series is to deepen and expand our understanding of local and regional art histories, with a focus on those that may be insufficiently represented art history curricula and dominant exhibition-making practices. A further point of reference is Moana Jackson’s 2020 essay ‘Where to next?’: “[We] developed an intellectual tradition in which the world around us was as ordinary and as extraordinary as tapu....In this intellectual tradition we learned that memory and hope might seem fanciful but they can sometimes lead to new realities.”

July through September, six speakers will present a talk which revisits an art historical moment that they have some personal connection with, and critically reappraises this from where they stand now. These speakers don't all identify as art historians. Rather, the propositions come from a range of practitioners whose work has brought them into contact with the discipline and the wider contemporary arts sector. As a whole the series is intended as a contribution to the future of our multiple art histories in Aotearoa.

Each presentation will be introduced, and followed by a brief critical response from Te Pātaka Toi director Abby Cunnane. In the interests of maintaining an open space for frank and spontaneous kōrero, the talks will not be recorded live but will be published as papers subsequently.

Tethered Elsewhere: Balamohan Shingade

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? - Balamohan Shingade

Balamohan Shingade is a current PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Auckland. His doctoral research takes theories of peoplehood as its focus. He runs Spoor Books with Erena Shingade and is an occasional singer of Hindustani music. Previously, Shingade worked as a curator at St Paul St Gallery, AUT, and a researcher with the Center for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), Massey University. As a writer, Shingade has contributed to art-agenda at e-flux, Art News New Zealand, Art + Australia Online, Artlink Australia, Christchurch Art Gallery’s Bulletin, University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Pantograph Punch, and more. As a curator, he has contributed to Field Recordings (2018) and Alex Monteith: Coastal Flows/Coastal Incursions (2017) at ST PAUL St Gallery; Isobel Thom: ILK (2016) and Soft Architecture (2016) at Malcolm Smith Gallery; Joyce Campbell: Te Taniwha and the Thread (2015) at Uxbridge Arts and Culture; and Thirty-six Views of Mount Taranaki (2013) for the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s Open Window.