At this year's Venice Biennale, Mataaho Collective, a group of four Aotearoa-based Māori artists, took the Golden Lion award for a show-stopping installation of woven straps. Some 18,000 kilometres away, at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, a brand-new triennial offers an invigorating cross-section of the diverse, vibrant artistic milieu from which the collective emerged. Curated by Natasha Conland and Cameron Ah Loo-Matamua, the inaugural edition of Aotearoa Contemporary assembles media-spanning work by 27 mostly local artists, many of whom could be characterized as emerging or underrecognized.
The show begin quietly with lens-based artist Meg Porteous's single-channel video Carrier (2024), which explores processes of narrative filmmaking. An accompanying photographic suite, A Shade (33 frames) Rhea, Rebecca, Marianne, Fergus, Grant (2024), includes rehearsal documentation, framing tests, extreme close-ups and location shots.…