Aotearoa Art Books at the 18th Biennale of Lyon
To accompany the significant presence of artists from Aotearoa New Zealand in the 18th Lyon Biennale, OCAA has brought together a collection of books and publications that offer further insight into their practices, ideas and wider contexts.
The collection provides audiences, curators, writers and other arts professionals with an opportunity to encounter the artists’ work beyond the exhibition itself, and to explore the histories, conversations and artistic practices that inform it. Many of these publications are not normally available in Europe and, for the duration of the Biennale, will be available through the Biennale bookshop in Lyon. The books can also be purchased in Aotearoa New Zealand, with details provided below.
Toi Te Mana: An Indigenous History of Māori Art
A landmark account in words and pictures of Māori art, by Māori art historians – from Polynesian voyaging waka to contemporary Māori artists.
He toi whakairo, he mana tangata.
Through artistic excellence, there is human dignity.
Toi Te Mana is a landmark account of Māori art from the time of the tūpuna (ancestors) to the present day.
In 600 pages and over 500 extraordinary images, this volume invites readers to climb on to the waka for a remarkable voyage – from ancestral weavers to contemporary artists at the Venice Biennale, from whare whakairo to film, and from Te Puea Hērangi to Michael Parekōwhai.
The authors explore a wide field of art practice: raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattoo), whakairo (carving), rākai (jewellery), kākahu (textiles), whare (architecture), toi whenua (rock art), painting, photography, sculpture, ceramics, installation art, digital media and film. And they do so over a long time period – from the arrival of Pacific voyagers 800 years ago to contemporary artists in Aotearoa and around the world today. Through wide-ranging chapters alongside focused breakout boxes on individual artists, movements and events, Toi Te Mana is a waka eke noa – an essential book for anyone interested in te ao Māori.
Toi Te Mana is a Māori art history, written by Māori, given to the world.
Toitū te whenua, toitū te tikanga, ka ora ngā toi.
When we hold fast to our land and values, our art flourishes.
Read more and purchase here.
Authors: Deidre Brown and Ngarino Ellis, with Jonathan Mane-Wheoki
Published by Auckland University Press and Chicago University Press, 2024
616 pages, hardback
ISBN: 9781869409197
Price: NZ$99.99
Te Hei Tiki:An Enduring Treasure in a Cultural Continuum
Of all Māori personal adornments, the human figure pendants known as hei tiki are the most famous, highly prized and culturally iconic. This book celebrates the long history of hei tiki and the enduring cultural potency of these taonga. Te Hei Tiki showcases stunning photographs of a large selection of hei tiki, most from the taonga Māori collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and provides fascinating details of the history and culture behind them.
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Author: Dougal Austin
Published by Te Papa Press, 2019
228 pages, hardback
ISBN: 978-0-9951031-4-6
Price: NZ$65
He Ara Uru Ora: Ngahina Hohaia in conversation with Anna-Marie White
NGAHINA HOHAIA (Taranaki iwi, Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Moeahu, Ngāti Haupoto - Parihaka) and ANNA-MARIE WHITE (Manukorihi hapū, Te Ātiawa - Waitara) are whanaunga. Their ancestors actively resisted colonial land sales in Taranaki - which led to the outbreak of the New Zealand Land Wars with Crown forces at Waitara in 1860, and the wholesale confiscation of Taranaki Māori land in 1865 - and were part of the Parihaka movement, which resisted confiscation and advocated the restoration of land to ensure Māori survival. The Parihaka community was invaded and dismantled by colonial troops in 1881, though Parihakatanga was maintained by whānau at the Parihaka papa kāinga and throughout Taranaki, including Owae marae at Waitara.
Ngahina spoke with Anna-Marie about He Ara Uru Ora (2023), commissioned by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery for the exhibition Te Hau Whakatonu | A Series of Never-Ending Beginnings (5 August 2023–11 February 2024). First published in partnership with Art News Aotearoa, this interview is republished as the first issue of tātā riporipo with additional contextual imagery and documentation of Ngahina’s numerous poi installations (2006 – 2025).
tātā riporipo is a publication series from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, dedicated to ngā toi Māori, profiling artists, practices and ideas beyond the temporality of exhibition programming. The concept of each issue is simple: one issue, one practice, one edited conversation or one essay. The title of the series, given by Te Ingo Ngaia, evokes the image of rippling rings of growth in a tree’s trunk and speaks to the ambition of the series: to assist the growth and circulation of critical discussions by toi Māori practitioners.
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Contributors: Anna-Marie White, Ngahina Hohaia, Taarati Taiaroa
Published by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2025
44 pages, softcover
ISSN: 3021-5099
Price: NZ$15
Out of the Blue Essays on Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand 1985-2021
In a collection spanning her career, highly regarded art historian and curator Christina Barton reminds readers of the art writer’s essential quandary: how to put the visual, material, sensory and temporal into words. ‘The project of art writing is at once argumentative and invested,’ she writes, ‘self-doubting and ambitious, flawed yet with its own beauty (at its best). ’Published in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery,Out of the Blue gathers 37 essays devoted to artists from Aotearoa New Zealand. These are artists whom Barton – entering the art-writing fray in the1980s, a time of widespread intellectual upheaval – has thought about, worked with and written for, from her first piece on artist and filmmaker Claudia Pond Eyley, published in 1985, to a foreword written in 2021 about sculptor Paul Cullen. They form a small but telling subset of her work, and provide readings that not only anatomise the nature of each artist’s work but also demonstrate the ideas that have been in play as art has unfolded in Aotearoa.
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Author: Christina Barton
Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery
400 pages, softback
ISBN: 9781776922956
Price: NZ$50
Fiona Clark Living with AIDS 1988
The suite of threebooks are a facsimile of seminal photo albums produced by Fiona Clark in 1988.They were first exhibited at the Dowse Art Museum and are now in the collectionof Te Papa Tongarewa. The publication includes an essay by David Herkt (“Plague Years”), and a conversation between the artist and Ron Brownson.
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Published by Michael Lett, 2018
with assistance from Creative New Zealand
Edition of 500
Hardcover: three books + one slipcase
ISBN: 978-0-9582647-2-3
Price: NZ$85
Whenua
The relationship between tākata and whenua—people and land—is a long thread that weaves through the art history of Aotearoa New Zealand. This major new book explores themes of identity and belonging, colonisation, land use and migration through more than 170 paintings, sculptures, weaving, carving, ceramics, photography and moving image artworks. Wide-ranging and engaging texts, artist interviews and perspectives provide insight into the many ways that whenua is fundamental to the visual language and identity of the arts.
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Editors: Chloe Cull, Felicity Milburn, MelanieOliver
Published by Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
392 pages, hardback
ISBN: 9781877375842
Price NZ$70
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Hīkoi: Forty Years of Māori Protest
What have Māori been protesting about? What has been achieved? This book provides an overview of the contemporary Māori protest movement, a summary of the rationale behind the actions, and a wonderful collection of photographs of the action – the protests, the marches and the work behind the scenes. And it provides a glimpse of the fruits of that protest – the Waitangi Tribunal and the opportunity to prepare, present and negotiate Treaty settlements; Māori language made an official language; Māori-medium education; Māori health providers; iwi radio and, in 2004, Māori television.
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Author: Aroha Harris
Published by Huia Press, 2004
164 pages, softback
ISBN: 9781869691011
Price NZ$45
Michael Lett: Documents 2021-2023
Documents is a collection of texts that accompanied the exhibition program at Michael Lett from 2021-2023. The impetus behind the texts, commissioned by the gallery, was to create a broader discourse around artworks and exhibitions at the gallery and beyond. The texts are varied and often playful, and feature a wide range of authors and artists. Documents includes texts about the work of Sriwhana Spong and Michael Stevenson
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Published by Michael Lett Publishing, 2023
352 pages, softback
ISBN 978-1-99-117273-0
Price: NZ$60
New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Second Edition)
The new edition of a New Zealand photography classic.
Expertly curated, and showcasing images taken between 1850 and 2025, this book is an essential reference that honours artistic legacies and explores Aotearoa New Zealand's identity as a nation.Together these photographs tell stories about life in this country from almost the earliest days of European colonisation and about how the practice of photography has evolved here.
When it was first published in 2015, New Zealand Photography Collected was a landmark book, captivating audiences. In this fully revised and enriched edition, of the more than 400 images, almost half are new, reflecting the dynamic and increasingly diverse nature of the collection, allowing for previously unseen treasures, and enabling familiar works to be recontextualised with fresh insights.
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Author: Athol McCredie
Published byTe Papa Press, 2025
392 pages, hardback
ISBN: 978-1-99-107207-8
Price: NZ$90
Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau | Women and Photography Māreikura Whakaahua
The companion catalogue to the major photography exhibition at Te Papa
“Researching, collecting and writing about photography, I have often wondered where the women were.”—Lissa Mitchell
Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau showcases the diverse range of photography by women and non-binary artists from Aotearoa New Zealand, spanning the 1960s to today. This major survey exhibition from Te Papa’s collections sparks a conversation between past and present – exploring themes of identity, whānau, place, and time through a feminist lens. Highlighting over 150 works by 50 artists, this accompanying catalogue by curator Lissa Mitchell illustrates how ways of seeing can be passed down, reimagined, and slowly reignited.
Featured artists include Anne Noble, Fiona Pardington, Natalie Robertson, Fiona Clark and Lisa Reihana. The curator’s essay provides further historical context to the exhibition, and biographies of the photographers make this a valuable research resource.
Slow Burn builds on ten years of deeply considered research, inclusive collection decisions, and the 2023 publication of Lissa’s acclaimed book Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960. The exhibition and catalogue bring work by photographers from the last 65 years out of the storeroom and into conversation with each other – a celebration of photography’s ever-evolving nature in Aotearoa.
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Author: Lissa Mitchell
Published by Te Papa Press, 2026
232 pages, limpbound
ISBN: 978-1-99-107219-1
Price: NZ$35
Sriwhana Spong HA HA HA
Working across film, sculpture, performance and writing, Sriwhana Song’s practice explores how knowledge is approached, framed and made perceptible. Beginning from contingent encounters - a text, image, living organism or historical trace - her work unfolds through experiential and research-based processes that reframe understanding of time and the entanglement of human and non-human life.
The publication brings together newly commissioned texts by Vera Mey, May Adadol Ingawanij, Tessa Laird and Ariana Reines, alongside a personal contribution by the artist. These texts extend the exhibition’s critical and research framework, offering new perspective on Spong’s engagement with memory, history and embodied knowledge.
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Edited by MUMA curators Pip Wallis and Stephanie Berlangieri
Designed by Narelle Brewer for Perimeter Bureau.
Printed by Gutenberg Beuys, Germany
Published by Perimeter Editions in partnership with Monash University 2026
208 pages, paperback
ISBN: 9781922545657
Price: NZ$80.00
Disproof Does Not Equal Disbelief
From his refuge in upstate New York - the studio/ living complex where he enacted a late pivot back to figuration - the American painter Philip Guston once offered the following outburst to the question of how such a turn could happen.
“What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into frustrated fury about everything and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?”
Over time, this sparse utterance takes on an architectural form in the imagination, a model that proposes a tantalizing proposition when fleshed out. The painter’s words situate us in two distinct yet adjacent rooms. The first: a lounge with a TV, its live feed constantly a flicker. The second, a space that’s more sequestered, which we can simply understand as a place of production: “the studio.” Between these spaces, the painter, often working through the night, is also the viewer or reader, shuffling back and forth as he navigates these two rooms. At a certain point, night becomes day, and we shuffle back and forth together, the presence of one room arriving in the other.
Described as an “anthropologist of the avant-garde”, Michael Stevenson (born in 1964 in Inglewood, New Zealand, lives and works in Berlin) investigates the mythology that surrounds renowned and controversial events which have been significant in the spheres of both art and politics.
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Author: Michael Stevenson
Published by Sternberg Press, co-published with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2021
Design: Will Holder
ISBN: 978-3-95679-615-9
Price NZ$100
Animal Spirits: Fables in Parlance of Our Times
Jan Verwoert and Michael Stevenson
In March 2008 the artist Michael Stevenson self-published a slender document entitled Fables to accompany his project Lender of Last Resort at the Kröller-Müller Museum in theNetherlands. It was a series of some nine texts in fable form, and each suggested further allegorical readings on a tableau the artist assembled in the museum. All were co-written by Stevenson and the art critic Jan Verwoert. The project itself was developed around the notion of the bilateral loan contract, both in the financial sense, but also regarding the museological. A loan is perhaps best defined as an inter-temporal transfer of value through time. It is probably the oldest financial instrument, dating at least from the birth of writing. Some of the first ever written documents describe loans, bad loans in fact (default being the real reason the record has remained). The tableau itself was constructed from objects related to the founding of the museum, a process that unfolded in and among the banking crisis of 1924. The publication was only available in the space itself and has long since been out of print.
Animal Spirits: Fables in the Parlance of Our Times is an artist’s book by Michael Stevenson and Jan Verwoert which expands upon the themes of this earlier document and re-examines them more specifically in the light of our current times. It is based on a collaborative process, a process that resembles a game. Stevenson and Verwoert developed a working method in which plot structure remained open, a kind of partial exquisite corpse, i.e. text fragments passed back and forth without prior discussion as to any through line. These stories were co-illustrated in a similar way by the artist and Margaret Stevenson, his mother—the moral guide; the results were then made into a publication by Christoph Keller. A page at the end of the book announces the contributors thus: artist, mother, critic and spirit maker.
The stories themselves take classic fable form and so most are concerned with arrangements between two parties or what could be called informal bilateral contracts. Galvanized and translated within parallel realities they produce a world in which the Beginning of the World has a voice and dares to question the might of the Bull. A world where the Shareholder sips wine at the dinner table with the Jackal, and the Lion, in a crisis, calls on his Hairdresser for council in matters of sovereign security. “Haircuts … Severe haircuts!”
The publication is part of the series of artists’ projects edited by Christoph Keller and has been supported by Creative New Zealand.
Read more and purchase here
Text by Michael Stevenson and Jan Verwoert
Illustrations by Michael Stevenson and Margaret Stevenson
Published by Clouds and Editions Christoph Keller, 2013
144 pages, hardcover
Edition of 1200
ISBN 9780958298162
Price NZ$50
Whatu Kākahu | Māori Cloaks
A celebration of the science and art of Māori weaving, focused on the largest collection of Māori cloaks in the world.
This award-winningbook unlocks the doors of Te Whare Pora o Hine-te-iwaiwa, the Te Papastoreroom, to reveal one of the largest collection of kākahu in the world.
Informative essays byexpert contributors outline the intricate techniques employed in kākahuconstruction and also explain the tradition and spiritual significance ofweaving. A major section examines forty kākahu from the Te Papa collection indetail, revealing their often remarkable provenance.
In this revisededition, a new chapter celebrates stunning contemporary kākahu that have comeinto the Te Papa collection since 2011. It also discusses the care andcontinuity of Māori cloak weaving from the viewpoint of weaving practitioners,researchers and museum custodians.
Illustrated throughoutwith stunning photographs showing the immense beauty of these taonga, WhatuKākahu | Māori Cloaks is an unparalleled celebrationof the mātauranga, science, and art of Māori weaving.
Read more and purchase here
Editor: Awhina Tamarapa
Published by Te Papa Press, 2019
224 pages, hardback
ISBN: 978-0-9951136-3-3
Price NZ$75
Issue 02 Current art magazine
Contemporary art from Aotearoa, in print.
Issue 02 features Luke Willis Thompson, Ammon Ngakuru, Mike Hewson, Christine Webster, Selina Ershadi, Madison Kelly, Andrea du Chatenier, Rangi White, and more.
Current is where the conversations shaping contemporary art in Aotearoa and the wider Pacific are happening first. Published independently, the magazine brings you inside artists' studios and the ideas driving practice forward.
Read more and purchase here.
148 pages. For collectors, artists, and the art-curious.
Price NZ$18
This initiative has been made possible with the support of the New Zealand Cultural Diplomacy International Programme, and through the generous assistance of Te Papa Press, Huia Publishers, Christchurch Art Gallery, Lett Thomas, Te Herenga Waka University Press, Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, Perimeter Editions, Monash University and others.