The same week the exhibition ‘Infrastructure: power, politics and imagination’ opened at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, select committee submissions closed for the National Government’s Fast-track Approvals Bill. This controversial Bill, which aims to speed up approvals for infrastructure and development projects, has been identified as having implications for iwi and environmental protection.

In this political context and sitting amongst artist Matthew Galloway’s immersive project titled ‘The Power That Flows Through Us’, Galloway sat down with Professor of Politics and Māori Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Maria Bargh, to explore contemporary perspectives on the politics of resource use, with an eye on the past, present and future.

This episode is an edited recording of the lunchtime talk titled ‘Finding Ways Forward’ that took place on Wednesday 5th June 2024, in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Infrastructure: power, politics and imagination’, 20 April - 30 June 2024.

In the project The Power That Flows Through Us artist Matthew Galloway revisits cartoons from the 1970s/80s by Robert Brockie, Sid Scales, Gordon Minhinnik and Daryl Crimp.

This historical era of cartooning is the starting point for this podcast episode, which is a recording of a panel discussion that took place on 14 May 2024 in conjunction with the exhibition Infrastructure: power, politics and imagination ,

Sitting amongst Galloway's project - and in particular, next to historical cartoons enlarged as life-sized sculptures - are the panelists: Sharon Murdoch, the first woman political cartoonist in the Aotearoa mainstream media; Sam Orchard, Assistant Curator for the Cartoon and Comics Archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library; and, cartoonist and researcher, Dylan Horrocks.

In this wide-ranging conversation, the panel explore such themes as: the importance of cartoons to the political imaginary; cartoons’ influence on public opinion; the politics of the 70s/80s generation of cartoonists; what political cartooning looks like now; and what it might be in the future.

A forest consists of many timescales. Through a constant process of renewal and decay, the ecosystem becomes a record of time passing. Similarly, human memory folds together new and old. Every moment that something is remembered material traces are reshaped and reconstructed.

This episode is a recording from a panel discussion featuring artists Taarn Scott and Raewyn Martyn in conversation with exhibition co-curator Su Ballard, which took place on 23 March 2024 as part of the closing weekend event for 'Folded Memory' titled 'Ki te Ngāhere: Conversations about time material and memory',

Tracing an ongoing thread begun in a previous exhibition — Listening Stones Jumping Rocks (2021) — this conversation considers the way narratives and materials are interchangeable containers of ecological memory. In Invasive Weeds Taarn Scott has rendered Hana Pera Aoake’s poetry material. In Greywacke love poems: returns Raewyn Martyn explored how mutable material can dislodge skewed histories. In this conversation with exhibition curator Su Ballard, Scott and Martyn brought their practices together to reflect on the transformational potential of material as stories and stories as material. Together we imagined new old ways to create survivable futures.