Public Relations: A Performance Series

Louie Zalk-Neale
Layne Waerea and Chris Braddock
Fayen d’Evie and Benjamin Hancock

Three new performance-based projects will unfold at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and in public sites around Ngāmotu between August and November 2022.

Each project interrogates how we arrive at and relate to public spaces - the park, the gallery, the archive, the beach. The sites and institutions we inhabit are made up of multiple, at times conflicting, histories, values and ways of knowing and navigating.

Deploying humour, ritual and movement, each artist in this series intervenes in everyday rhythms of life, posing alternative possibilities for being, relating, and making together - if only for a moment.

Alongside the performances, an exhibition in the gallery acts as an unfolding archive of these projects. Opening with a selection of documentation from previous performance works, drawings and preparatory studies, and objects that will be deployed during the course of the projects, the exhibition will evolve over the course of its season, as new documentation and physical traces of performative actions are presented.

Public Relations launches on Saturday 27 August with Louie Zalk-Neale’s project 'Ngā Manuhiri Taura (The Visiting Ropes)'.