Published papers from the 2017 Curatorial Symposium.

Knowledge is often associated with order: with structure, taxonomy, a system for what is able to be known. In this it aligns with a will to affirm the status quo, to translate difference, to make meaning tidy. This symposium looks for possibilities in resistance to this model. We ask: What does it mean to recognise that knowing can also be something physical, a state of being, collectively held rather than a solely intellectual or individual experience? What does it mean to acknowledge the unknowable? Mystery and ‘being’—how can they exist, even flourish, within institutional contexts where hegemonic knowledge is given pre-eminence?

We ask these questions specifically in relation to contemporary practices here in Aotearoa, and alongside curators, artists and researchers who work from within fundamentally distinct cultural concepts of knowledge, while seeking to manaaki difference, and remain accountable to each other from within that difference. In this respect, the question around who produces and transmits knowledge is underpinned by another: How do ‘we’, as non-indigenous, Māori and Pākehā, as tangata whenua and tauiwi, navigate our respective positions in relation to each other, and with the recognition that the effects of colonisation are ongoing? As curator Emma Ng has written, “Our questions of cultural belonging are relational ones.”

Knowing is also, and always, about how we come to know each other.

The authors would like to thank:
Brendan Corbett, Rebecca Ann Hobbs, Makarita Howard, Qiane Matata-Sipu, Pania Newton, Desna Whaanga-Schollum, Tracey Sanday, Valance Smith, Maiti Tamaariki, Save Our Unique Landscape members, and our excellent volunteers.