In Conversation: Dale Harding and Megan Tamati-Quennell

Join us on opening weekend for a conversation between artist and curator to lend greater insight into Dale Harding's exhibition, 'There is no before'. Coming to us from Queensland Australia, Harding’s first ever solo exhibition in Aotearoa features a new body of minimalist paintings and sculptures.

Combining contemporary art, cultural practices and working with materials redolent of the land itself, Dale Harding, who is of Bidjara, Gungalu and Garingbal, Indigenous Australian descent, presents an exhibition that is evocative of place – the landscapes within Queensland’s central highlands that he belongs to.

'There is no before' features a new body of minimalist paintings and sculptures created by Harding that add to the canon of his family’s cultural production. It also includes eighteen nulla nulla, a rarely exhibited collection of taonga (cultural treasures) selected by him and loaned from Te Papa, that he has family connection with.

The exhibition, as the title presupposes, is about art of the now. 'There is no before' collapses time and highlights that Harding’s work is located both within the frame of contemporary and conceptual art, but also within the slipstream of his families’ cultural practice, that pre-dates modernist interest in intentional gesture, reduced and distilled minimal form, by thousands of years.