Culture 101

It’s the 10th season of Loading Docs - an initiative to showcase Aotearoa’s documentary  filmmakers. For a decade, it’s helped mentor emerging talent who’ve gone on to pursue successful careers in the screen industry. 

It’s rare for an Aotearoa New Zealand writer to appear at book festivals about a novel, months out from its release. But then the sequel to a book as beloved and devastating as 2019’s Auē by Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu) is no small event.   As Auckland Writers Festival has aptly put it, Westport based Becky Manawatu’s debut novel took both the public and literary world by storm. The winner of the Ja...

Arts news for Sunday 21 April 2024

Pōneke based poet and journalist Abdul Samad Haidari became a refugee at the age of 10. For Haidari poetry has been a way to cope with the trauma and to turn it into empowerment. His second book of poetry The Unsent Condolences was launched recently at Unity Books in Pōneke Wellington. 

Intimacy coordination is a relatively new concept both in Aotearoa and across the world. Borne from the #MeToo movement, it’s a way to keep actors and crew safe on film and television sets and in theatre productions. 

It’s known as ‘mural town’, it's Aotearoa New Zealand’s avocado capital and this week it’s the focus of Culture 101’s regional wrap. 

The Aotearoa Art Fair is the apex of the art market food chain. This weekend on the Tāmaki Makaurau waterfront, the public, 32 dealers and many curators from around Aotearoa come happily together at the fair for both the market and a champagne-charged party. 

Oscar-nominated US filmmaker Ava Duvernay’s new thought-provoking film Origin is based on the New York Times bestselling book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.

Aotearoa New Zealand has won one of the world’s most prestigious art prizes.  Mataaho collective have been awarded the Golden Lion by a jury at the 60th Venice Biennale for their large scale work in the main curated exhibition.  Held every two years, the Biennale is dubbed the Olympics of the art world and Mataaho collective’s achievement, as Creative New Zealand’s Amanda Hereaka describes, is “th...

This year marks 20 years of Whakaata Māori - Māori Television. Something to celebrate particularly in this climate of broadcasting cuts and redundancies. A founding member of Māori TV, veteran broadcaster and television executive Julian Wilcox, was there at the very beginning: presenting the very first broadcast in 2004. 

Arts news for Sunday 14 April from RNZ

A "lack of joined-up thinking" in Wellington's gallery sector has led to two major art spaces closing at the same time, an art historian and former gallery director says.

Say the name Anurag Kashyap in South Asian circles and you’ll likely find some star struck fans.  The prominent Indian filmmaker will be in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland this week for an intimate conversation about his work, his tenacious storytelling and the moments which have shaped his career.

Baylys Beach is a settlement of a few hundred on a wild section on the west coast of Northland, just outside Takiwira Dargaville.  It’s home to painter Sean McDonnell who works and sells his art in the settlement when he’s not working as a tour guide up and down the motu.

If you’ve ever opened a magazine in Aotearoa New Zealand, chances are, you’ve almost certainly seen Jae Frew’s work. 

Today we are all publishers, sharing fresh content online to please our followers. So when does taking a photograph of an interesting artwork constitute a breach of copyright? And what about the harvesting of those images by AI? 

Two playwrights have won this year’s Adam NZ Play Award: Dan Bain from Christchurch for The Odyssey and Sam Brooks from Tāmaki Makaurau for This Is My Story of Us.

When a comedian approaches Comedy Festival season, you expect the trial of a new show, and all the challenges  that represents. But this year beloved Aotearoa comedian and journalist Te Radar isn't just preparing to perform his latest -  'Cookbookery!', a delve into vintage Kiwi cookbooks - he’ll be reimagining four other “docu-comedies” he’s created over 30 years in the business. 

Arts and culture news for Sunday 7 April. 

What does it take to be an effective cultural translator? Yang Fan will tell you that the language is just the beginning. 

If you think of your favourite film, chances are there’s a pivotal scene driven by music or a killer soundtrack. Either way, you can thank the work of a music supervisor. 

A $3.9 million dollar multi-purpose arts and cultural space, Te Atamira, opened in the burgeoning commercial district of Frankton near Queenstown in May 2022. It’s a hub for creative work from the communities that surround the three lakes of the wider Queenstown-Lake District: Whākatipu, Hāwea and Wānaka.   Te Atamira director, Olivia Egerton, says the strength of that community cultural life has...

“If opera doesn’t tell stories about right now or about who we are now, then eventually it’s just going to die out,” British composer Jonathan Dove tells Culture 101’s Mark Amery.  Jonathan Dove should know. With 32 operas to his name he’s one of the most performed living opera composers of our time.

Slavic culture crosses from Eastern Europe and the Balkans through to Asia. It encapsulates a real diversity of countries but which share  strong cultural roots in Slavic languages.  Their commonalities are apparent in Aotearoa New Zealand today through gloriously rich musical traditions often heard on festival stages. Celebrating the cultures of Slavic peoples who have settled here, festival Slav...

Food is perhaps one of the easiest ways to bring people together. But what about when it's painted? In the case of young Pōneke Wellington-based artist Alice Toomer’s hyperrealistic paintings, it can be striking, evoke emotion and even appeal to all the senses.