Mar 12, 2025 Metro Arts
Hello again!
Yesterday I went to the Auckland Art Gallery for a coffee, a chocolate-dipped croissant, and to hear all about the line-up for the Auckland Writers Festival 2025. The forthcoming festival (13-18 May, mostly at the Aotea Centre but with a few other bits and pieces down in Britomart and around town) is the second under the leadership of artistic director Lyndsey Fineran and managing director Catriona Gerguson, and if my time at last year’s festival, struggling to get from one side of the Aotea Centre to the other, is anything to go by, they’re onto a good thing.
While hearing from Lyndsey and Catriona, and the guest curators, I was wondering about the festival’s increasing success (among the many numbers quoted, I was particularly astonished that 11,000 books were sold in one weekend last year) in a time when other cultural festivals seem to be struggling with both money and audience.
My main thought was that the proliferation of podcasts over the last few years has re-established (post-radio) people just talking to each other as a desirable form of entertainment. We’re so used to listening to two or three people sitting around talking about themselves, their work, and their opinions, that, well, we may as well go see it live. And yet, there must be some factor that makes us want to experience this live, to not just rely on our podcast app or YouTube (there are thousands of great videos of authors talking to each other on YouTube, by the way, if you’ve never gone down that rabbit hole). Maybe it has something to do with that mysterious aura of actually seeing someone whose work you’ve read, like the revival of the aura that was meant to be lost in art ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction.’ It’s like it’s somehow reassuring that in a time when seemingly everything is digitally available to us at all times.
One of the people that really did that for me at the announcement was Colm Tóibín, an extremely successful novelist (one in every 150 people in Ireland bought his latest book) whose novels I’ve never read. See, I’ve only known Tóibín as a critic and essayist in the New York Review of Books, and, perhaps as importantly in this context, as a talking head, especially in Martin Scorsese’s documentary on the magazine, The 50 Year Argument (which I highly recommend if you like such publications and can actually find it). It is this kind of aura, this ‘shit, there they are in person, that’s their actual voice I’m hearing’ feeling that makes the Writers Festival so special. Of course, the ideas being transmitted don’t change based on your physical proximity to the talker, but maybe your openness to receive them does.
There are many other writers and thinkers at this year’s festival that might have this same power for you, and there are probably many that would, but you wouldn’t even know it yet. Take a look at the programme and find out.
— Henry
What’s On
Life Is For Living
The Basement
THURSDAY 24TH – SATURDAY 26TH APRIL
Dominic Hoey: “I’ve been working with my mate Joeli Thacker to create Life Is For Living, a show with the residents of the Te Mātāwai building. Te Mātāwai provides state housing for people with experience of rough sleeping, addiction or mental health struggles. The show is a mix of poetry and stories, it’s going to be hilarious and heartbreaking.”
Guitar Wolf (JPN)
with The D4, Transistors, Nothing At All! Tribute, Crying Ivy
Whammy Bar
SUNDAY 16TH MARCH
We’re well past any reports of guitar music’s demise being even halfway credible. So why not accept the reality that 1/4″ cables and drumsticks aren’t going anywhere and embrace another blessed appearance of one of Japan’s loudest exports. In the word’s of Auckland’s longest (and tallest) standing rock connoisseur Mr. Slackjaw, “It’s a sonic rendezvous designed to cave in heads & destroy frequencies, while yr dancing yr ass off on that road to oblivion.”
No Other Land
dir. Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal & Rachel Szor
Beachside Cinemas, Takapuna
THURSDAY 13TH MARCH – WEDNESDAY 19TH MARCH
Time is running out to catch this deeply affecting documentary on a cinema screen in Tāmaki Makaurau. The film documents the destruction of the Masafer Yatta, a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets in the West Bank. But hope springs eternal as an unlikely friendship blossoms between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. It’s a timely reminder that a polity can only be truly defined by the people who exist within it, not by the assertions of those that are attempting to impose their will upon it, through coercion, propaganda or outright catastrophic violence.
On Display
Katherine Throne: Deep Roots, Tall Poppies
Sanderson Contemporary
ON NOW – SUNDAY 30TH MARCH
Katherine Throne, Best in (today’s) show, 2024, courtesy of Sanderson Contemporary.
Sanderson is pleased to present the exhibition Deep Roots, Tall Poppies – a new exhibition of works by Katherine Throne. Bringing a fresh and unique perspective to her floral paintings, Katherine Throne chooses to depict flowers growing in her Wanaka garden, and those she finds nearby. Each and every bloom she depicts has gone through the exigencies of the Central Otago climate with its cycles of deep and bitter frost in winter; through the parching drought and unrelenting heat of the summer: a kind of metaphor for the human journey.
Elijah Broughton: Leavers
Grace
ON NOW – SATURDAY 5TH APRIL
Give yourself some relief from the eternal roadworks at the top of Pitt Street and wander into Grace to see Elijah Broughton’s Leavers. A series of darkroom prints that capture “subjects on the verge of disappearance”. A fitting exploration of the-moment-just-before-the-moment, given the ambient accompaniment of the CRL-adjacent construction that seems to be more permanent than passing.
Elsewhere
The End of Seriousness
Lauren Michele Jackson wonders why laughing doesn’t feel as good as it used to. Irony’s great till it poisons you!
*
The most debated artefact of all time
Stefan Milosavljevich’s YouTube channel is a delight. Even if you’re not into archaeology necessarily, he possesses the very specific charm that only British-edutainers (see: Tony Robinson) seem capable of. Even when he’s just making educated guesses.
*
The Communist Folk Singers Who Shaped Bob Dylan
Taylor Dorrell assesses the effects Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie had on a young Bob Dylan. He may have even held a scrutable belief at one point.
