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Ken Friedman: 92 Events

Ken Friedman

8 Dec 2023 - 28 Mar 2023

Gallery One

92 Events

Installation view: Ken Friedman: 92 Events, 08 Dec 2023 - 28 Mar 2024. Photo: Stephen Cleland


92 Events presents works spanning six decades by American born Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, who since 2014 has lived and worked in Kalmar, Sweden. Friedman produces conceptual, action-oriented, language-based works that attach themselves to daily life and challenge the idea of an artwork as a unique object.

Presented as a commanding suite of paradoxically humble A4 prints, Friedman’s texts navigate a fine line between sculptural proposition, absurdist action, and concrete poetry. His works are deliberately playful—absurd even—and describe a series of actions that break with traditional notions of art, leaving their actual realisation in the hands or minds of the viewer. In this sense Friedman’s scores are live documents. By operating in language as instructions, descriptions, and documents, they slip between past, present, and future, operating in a suspended state of possibility with endless potential for variation and interpretation.

Throughout the run of the exhibition Wai Ngutu Kākā is inviting a range of practitioners to respond to Friedman’s texts. Continue to visit our website and subscribe to our social channels for the most up to date information on upcoming events and new additions to the show.

This exhibition has been realised in partnership with Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery.

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Ken Friedman (1949, New London Connecticut) joined Fluxus in 1966 and was the youngest member of the group. He subsequently worked closely with artists and composers associated with Fluxus such as Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, John Cage and others. He was instrumental in establishing Fluxus West which was designed as a gathering point for Fluxus-related activities in the western states of America, but also extended its reach to Germany and the UK in the late 1960s and 1970s. In 1971 he participated in New Zealand post-object artist and composer Philip Dadson’s Earthworks a ‘composition’ for film and audiotape realised simultaneously at fifteen locations across the globe. In the 1990s, Friedman’s work as a management consultant and designer led him to an academic career, first as Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, then as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Friedman is currently a University Distinguished Professor at Swinburne and Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies at Tongji University.


Ken Friedman: 92 Events Exhibition Guide


Matt Ellwood: Prototypes for blind contour drawing apparatus

Matt Ellwood

21 Feb 2024 - 6 Apr 2024

Gallery Three

Matt Ellwood

Installation view: Matt Ellwood: Prototypes for blind contour drawing apparatus, 21 Feb 2024 - 06 Apr 2024. Photo: Stephen Cleland


Matt Ellwood’s exhibition brings together two contrasting approaches to drawing. His ongoing series of realist charcoal works replicate and juxtapose imagery gleaned from the advertising sections in high-profile international art magazines, and these are brought into conversation with a series of new sculptures designed to aid the production of blind contour drawings. Seen together, the installation explores contrasting constraints on the act of drawing while implicating the larger mechanisms that shape the art world. On the night of the opening, a drawing performance enacting the sculptures will begin at 5.30pm.


Matt Davis: Object-Sketch

Matt Davis

21 Feb 2024 - 6 Apr 2024

Gallery Two

Object-Sketch

Installation view: Matt Davis: Object-Sketch, 21 February – 6 April 2024. Photo: Stephen Cleland


Industrial designer Matt Davis’s research explores the interplay of digital and analogue interfaces. This complex yet playful installation features a kinetic wall drawing, which, when interacted with, triggers a sequence of actions, eventually cycling the participants’ movements into the production of fluid ceramic forms. A 3D printer will operate live at the opening and periodically throughout the run of the exhibition.


Marcus Coates: The Directors

Ken Friedman

24 Feb 2024 - 28 Mar 2023

Gallery One

The Directors

Image:  Still from The Directors, Marcus Coates, 2022. Courtesy of Artangel.


Te Wai Ngutu Kākā is pleased to participate in staging UK artist Marcus Coates’ ambitious film, The Directors (2022). Presented by Te Tuhi in association with the Auckland Arts Festival, The Directors consists of five unique films, each presented at a single inner city location and focusing on five individuals’ lived experiences of psychosis.

Mark Banham, Lucy Dempster, Anthony Donohoe, Marcus Gordon, and Stephen Groves each choose a place of significance where they direct Coates to play themselves as they voice instructions off camera. Commissioned by Artangel in London, UK and originally screened in five locations in and around Churchill Gardens Estate in the London borough of Pimlico, Te Tuhi's collaboration with Artangel mirrors the same format and presents the project in five central Auckland locations.

Screening hours: Thursday and Friday, 1pm–6pm
Saturday and Sunday, 11am–4pm