Prompts will show the early work of leading practitioner Michael Parekōwhai and Turner Prize-winning UK artist Lubaina Himid. Each year, Artspace Aotearoa sets one question that our programme explores; in 2025 we ask, “is language large enough?” Prompts will bring the work of these two senior practitioners in contact for the first time to address language’s role in shaping identity and agency and to reflect on the significance of Artspace Aotearoa in art history.
This exhibition is presented in association with Auckland Arts Festival Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Makaurau and Te Papa Tongarewa.
Thanks to the British Council New Zealand and the Pacific and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki for supporting this kaupapa.
Lubaina Himid CBE RA was born in Zanzibar in 1954 and lives and works in Preston UK. For more than four decades, Himid has created paintings, drawings and installations that uncover marginalised and silenced histories, figures and cultural moments. She first studied Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Art and went on to receive an MA in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art. One of the pioneers of the British Black Arts Movement, Himid is deeply engaged with the problem of the lack of representation of Black and Asian women in the art world, and she has been committed to showing the work of underrepresented contemporaries since the 1980s. She is the winner of the 2017 Turner Prize, the 2023 Maria Lassnig Award, and the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth | Flag Art Foundation Prize. Himid has exhibited extensively, recent significant solo exhibitions include UCCA, Beijing (forthcoming); The Contemporary Austin, Texas; Greene Naftali, New York;The Flag Art Foundation, New York, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, and Tate Modern, London.
Michael Parekōwhai is an artist of Ngāriki Rotoawe, Ngāti Whakarongo, and an Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. For more than 30 years, he has continued his whānau passion for and commitment to education. Working across the disciplines of sculpture, installation, and photography, Parekōwhai’s career spans more than three decades and multiple continents. Parekōwhai’s work plays with scale, space, and time, skewering the intersections between national and personal narratives, colonial histories and popular culture. Parekōwhai was awarded the Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate award in 2001 and appointed a Te Apārangi Fellow by the Royal Society in 2017. In 2011 he was the sole presenter for New Zealand at the 54th Venice Biennale and was awarded the Premier of Queensland’s Sculpture Commission. He has presented work at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Te Papa Tongarewa, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Art Gallery, and most recently the 16th Sharjah Biennale.
