Art Loves You 

Art that Needs You: 24 Feb – 3 June

Light Touch: 31 March – 17 June

Whose Water Are You: 14 April – 15 July

After the success of Paradox Street Art Festival in 2017, the next big thing for Tauranga Art Gallery (TAG) is a major interactive art experience which presents artists, software developers, designers, and scientists from New Zealand and around the world.
 
TAG’s 2018 Art Loves You programme will showcase immersive digital and interactive experiences across 3 exhibitions and 14 individual projects.
 
It will feature light installations, virtual reality, sensory experiences, and augmented reality. 
 
The entire gallery will be dedicated to art that people can touch, feel, instagram, play, listen to, smell, and even take home. 
Brian Knep, Healing Pools. Photo: Dianna Thomson Photography.

Art that Needs You features works by Super Nature Design (China), Tiffany Singh (NZ), Hannah Beehre (NZ), Tane Ma (NZ), Suzanne Tamaki (NZ), Scott Brown (NZ), Kereama Taepa (NZ), CEKS (NZ/Singapore), Ace Firers (NZ) and collective Nā ‘Anae Mahiki (Hawaii).

Super Nature’s Weaving Forest invites audiences to string wool around large reindeer. A virtual world created by local artist Kereama Taepa takes you on a journey where he combines ideas of whakairo (carving) and traditions of innovation within toi Maori with popular imagery from his childhood including Sonic the hedgehog and Star Wars.

CEKS is a Waikato based designers and artist with a passion for algorithms. In is work, you get to see your own impact on the global twitter network in real-time.

Tiffany Singh has two major commissions about to open at Te Papa, and Tauranga Art Gallery has commissioned a new work called Language of Light – an immersive sensory experience that explores how light, sound and smell relate to feelings of wellbeing.

Whose Water Are You? – Jeanette Schäring. Photo: Skövde Art Museum Sweden. Photo: Johan Fransson.

Light Touch features Submergence by UK based collective Squidsoup, which is a large, immersive, walkthrough experience that uses individual points of suspended light to create feelings of presence and movement within physical space. 

Healing Pools by US based artist Brian Knep uses custom algorithms to create a glowing pool of organic patterns on the floor. Left alone, the patterns slowly pulsate and shift over the course of each day. When a person walks across the piece the patterns tear apart and rebuild themselves, but never exactly as before. 

In April, Tauranga based Swedish environmental artist Jeanette Schäring presents Whose Water Are You?. It’s a project that investigates the role of water in our lives. She will be running collection workshops for people of the Bay to provide water samples from their immediate environment – the beach, a puddle, your tap or a stream.

Principal Exhibiton Partner