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Podcast: Crossing Currents: Episode 2
Year: 2024
Publication: Contemporary HUM

"In April 2024, Contemporary HUM spoke to Brett Graham (Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Tainui) about his work Wastelands (2024), which is featured in the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, titled Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere and curated by Adriano Pedrosa. In the exhibition, Graham joins three other artists and one collective from Aotearoa New Zealand, who together make up the largest number of artists from Aotearoa to ever be featured in the Biennale at once, despite there being no New Zealand Pavilion in this edition. Throughout the conversation, Graham discusses Wastelands as a palimpsest of historical conditions, comprising the turbulence of early colonial Aotearoa and the extractive attitudes to land that underpin the climate crisis, and as an appeal to revert to Indigenous knowledge systems. He also discusses the logistics of exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and what it's like to be included alongside an intergenerational selection of Māori artists, including his father, Fred Graham."

Read the transcript and/or listen (30 minutes) to the interview Crossing Currents: Episode 2