Kunst kopfüber

The Goethe-Institut New Zealand and Contemporary HUM present a series of portraits about New Zealand artists who have found a new physical - and artistic - home in Germany. Kunst Kopfüber / Art Upside Down invites six international writers and curators to look at the practice of six contemporary artists from Aotearoa working across a variety of mediums, from video art to photography and painting; large-scale installation to poetry.

Launched in 2016, Contemporary HUM is a forum generating critical discussion of Aotearoa New Zealand visual arts presented overseas. HUM is the only platform dedicated to the international activity of creative practitioners from New Zealand who are working or living abroad.

Out There on the Slippery Seas, 2017, Detail

Sam Rountree Williams

Sam Rountree Williams has been living away from Aotearoa for a good part of 10 years, studying in Düsseldorf and London, before finally settling in Berlin.

Hinemoana Baker

I meet Hinemoana Baker on a dark and cold Berlin evening in January 2020. Two months before the pandemic arrives in Germany, we agree to have a drink at Z-Bar, close to her home in Schokoladen, one of Berlin’s well-known housing projects.

Documentation photographs of the installation of the publication ‘Archive of the Arcane’ , a self published edition comprising 10 volumes. As exhibited in ‘Toward the Blue Peninsula’, Berlin, Germany. All work and documentation - Freya Copeland, 2017

Freya Copeland

Freya Copeland’s engagement with photography began very early – when she was just 11 years old. Her first camera – an analogue reflex camera, which she still works with today – was a loan from her mother.

Michael Stevenson

While Stevenson started off working in painting, drawing and photography, he has since developed a multifaceted practice and produces complex, extensively researched large-scale sculptural installations, as well as working in other media including film, sculpture, printmaking and book publishing.

Juliet Carpenter

Filmmaker Juliet Carpenter has continued to develop her distinct cinematic language throughout her time in Germany, one that is acutely aware of the mechanics of its production and the contexts in which it emerges from.

Ruth Buchanan

Ruth Buchanan’s preferred artistic form has become the exhibition format, with its ability to provide a spatial experience of both content associations and histories.

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